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Updated: May 8, 2025
With Bachofen, he argued that this matriarchal period must have been characterized by promiscuous relations of the sexes. In 1877 Mr. Lewis H. Morgan, an American ethnologist and sociologist, put forth again, independently, practically the same theory, basing it upon an extensive study of the North American Indian tribes.
In a former work the fact has been mentioned that the first clue obtained by Herr Bachofen, author of Das Mutterrecht, to a former condition of society under which gynaecocracy, or the social and political pre-eminence of women, prevailed, was the importance attached to the female principle in the Deity in all ancient mythologies.
The woman owned the household goods and utensils, the value of which for the preservation and preparation of food was very great. Bachofen has shown how women were strong factors in the demand for monogamy through this and the earlier periods. Man learned to till the soil and to domesticate animals; he captured enemies from neighboring tribes and learned to make slaves instead of food of them.
One foundation that of promiscuity, on which Bachofen and McLennan, the two upholders of matriarchy, base their hypothesis has been overthrown. It thus becomes necessary to approach the question from an altogether different position. Mother-right must be explained without any reference to unregulated sexual conduct.
Now, Bachofen claimed not only that in this stage was kinship reckoned through mothers only, but that women were dominant socially and politically; that there existed a true matriarchy, or rule of the mothers. Do the facts support Bachofen's theory? Let us see. The Iroquois Indians, among whom Morgan lived, were a typical maternal or metronymic people.
When Bachofen first drew attention to the maternal family, in his epoch-making work, and Morgan described the clan-organization, both concurring to the almost general extension of these forms and maintaining that the marriage laws lie at the very basis of the consecutive steps of human evolution, they were accused of exaggeration.
Victorious fatherhood thus becomes as distinctly connected with the heavenly light as prolific motherhood is with the teeming earth.” Das Mutterrecht, Intro., p. xxvii. Here, Bachofen, as is his custom, turns to point an analogy with the process of nature.
To Bachofen we owe the notion of the maternal family and the maternal succession; to Morgan the system of kinship, Malayan and Turanian, and a highly gifted sketch of the main phases of human evolution; to MacLennan the law of exogeny; and to Fison and Howitt the cuadro, or scheme, of the conjugal societies in Australia.
Probably the explanation is to be found in this: they have been interested mainly in one side of the family the male side; I am interested in the other side in the women members of the group. The position of women has seemed of primary importance to very few. Bachofen is almost alone in placing this question first, and his mystical far-fetched hypothesis has failed to find acceptance.
Fifty-three years ago in his great work, Das Mutterrecht, the Swiss writer, Bachofen, drew the attention of the world to the fact that a system of kinship through mothers only prevailed among many primitive peoples, while survivals of the custom could be widely, if but faintly, traced among civilised races.
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