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A decisive and better known example of the favorable influence of mother-descent on the status of woman is afforded by the beena marriage of early Arabia.
Since the days when the Bird of Ages dwelt on the Coteau-des-Prairies the Ojibbeway and the Sioux have warred against each other; but as the Ojibbeway dwelt chiefly in the woods and the Sioux are denizens of the great plains, the actual war carried on between them has not beena unusually destructive.
But this is the hunter's garden, and Grandmother has no part in it, perhaps is not even allowed to approach it. It is the beena garden the charms for good luck in hunting.
Frazer cites an interesting example among the tribes on the north frontier of Abyssinia, partially Semitic peoples, not yet under the influence of Islam, who preserve a maternal marriage closely resembling the beena form, but have as well a purchase marriage, by which a wife is acquired by the payment of a bride-price and becomes the property of her husband. Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia.
There is a complicated system of payments, on which the husband’s rights to take the wife to his home depends. In Ceylon, again, there are two forms of marriage, called beena and deega, which cause a marked difference in the position of the wife.
Exogamy is the rule which obliges a man to marry a woman of a different clan from his own: beena marriage is the rule that he must leave the home of his birth and live with his wife's people; and female kinship or mother-kin is the system of tracing relationship and transmitting the family name through women instead of through men.
To put it in technical language, the succession to the kingship at Rome and probably in Latium generally would seem to have been determined by certain rules which have moulded early society in many parts of the world, namely exogamy, beena marriage, and female kinship or mother-kin.
In Africa where the beena maternal marriage is usual, and the husband serves for his wife and lives with her family, it is said that families are usually more or less willing for value received to give a woman to a man to take away with him, or to let him have his beena wife to transfer to his own house.
I must, however, refer briefly to the evidence brought forward by the late Prof. Robertson Smith of mother-right in ancient Arabia. We find a decisive example of its favourable influence on the position of women in the custom of beena marriage. This explains how she was able to free herself at pleasure from her husband, who was really nothing but a temporary lover.
A woman married under the beena form lives in the house or immediate neighbourhood of her parents, and if so married she has the right of inheritance along with her brothers; but if married in deega she goes to live in her husband’s house and village and loses her rights in her own family. Marsden, History of Sumatra, pp. 225-227. Forbes, Eleven Years in Ceylon, Vol. I, p. 333.
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