kinds of food of which the husband partook, but that she should not eat in the same place and prepare her food at the same fire. This restriction applied not only to the wife with regard to her husband, but to all the individuals of the female sex from their birth to the day of their death. In sickness or pain, or whatever other circumstances the mother, the wife, the sister or the daughter might be brought into, it was never relaxed. . . . The fires at which the men's food was cooked were also sacred, and were forbidden to be used by the females. The baskets in which their provision was kept, and the house in which the men ate, were also sacred and prohibited to the females under a cruel penalty." Yet another example: "At S. Cruz (Melanesia) the separation of the sexes in daily life is carried far, the men and the women never work together promiscuously or assemble in one group. ... In Nutilile the separation is complete, men and women are never out together "[1] Even the mother is separated from her son, the sisters from their brothers. In the N. Hebrides, " the boy puts on his malo dress, when his parents think him big enough. Before this he had lived at home, but now he eats and sleeps in the gamali club-house, and now begins his strange and strict reserve of intercourse with his sisters and mother. He must not use as a common noun the word which is the name or makes part of the name of his sisters. . . . He may go to his father's house to ask for food, but if his sister is within, he has to go away before he eats. If by chance brother and sister meet in the path she runs away or hides. . . . The reserve between son and mother increases as the boy grows up. If they talk together she sits at a little distance and turns away, for she is shy of her grown-up son."[2] These examples are sufficient to illustrate the separation of the sexes in the primitive life of Polynesians. The men are organized into club-houses, where they eat, lodge, sleep, etc. We find the elements of such separation also in other countries, the only difference being in the intensity of the custom: the woman is forbidden to do men's work, to touch their weapons, to enter in their councilrooms, etc.
The pictured separation begins when the first signs of the
- ↑ Codrington Melanesians, 233.
- ↑ Codrington, l. c.
