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This is clearly a departure from the maternal marriage, a step in the direction of father-right. Among the Syntengs, the people who have most closely preserved the customs of the matriarchate, the husband does not even go to live with his wife, he only visits her in her mother’s home. In Jowáy this rule is so strict that the husband comes only after dark.
But it could not carry mankind to that family organisation from which so much was afterwards to develop. It was no more possible for society to be built up on mother-right alone than it is possible for it to remain permanently based on father-right. But there is another aspect of this question that I must briefly touch upon.
I give it here, because its importance seems to me to be very great. This brings me to summarise the point we have reached. Father-right was dependent on purchase-possession and had nothing to do with actual fatherhood. The payment of a bride-price, the giving of a sister in exchange, as also marriage with a slave, gained for the husband the control over his wife and ownership of the children.
I failed to carry my inquiry far enough back. I accepted with too little caution an early period of promiscuous sexual relationships. I did not make clear the stages in the advance of the family to the clan and the tribe; nor examine with sufficient care the later transition period in which mother-right gave place to father-right. I have been sent back to examine again my own position.
In Africa, among the Bavili the mother has the right to pawn her child, but she must first consult the father, so that he may have a chance of giving her goods to save the pledging. This is very plainly a step towards father-right. There is no distinction between legitimate and illegitimate children.
So shall no inheritance of the children of Israel remove from tribe to tribe.” We have here an indication of the close relation between father-right and property. Gen. xxx, 18-30; xxxi, 14, 41. Gen. xxxi, 43. Gen. xxiv, 5, 53. Judges xv, 1. Numb., xxxii, 8-11. See Letourneau, Evolution of Marriage, p. 326. Gen. xxiii, 13. Numb. xxxvi, 4-8.
This is the early form of purchase marriage, such bridal-gifts being the forerunners of the payment of a fixed bride-price. We still find purchase marriage practised side by side with beenah marriage in the countries where the transitional stage has been reached and mother-right contends with father-right. But there is stronger evidence even than these two cases.
Thus the Formosans set no store on sons, but aspire to have daughters, who procure them sons-in-law to become the support of their old age.” It will be noted that here the house is spoken of as the father’s, and not as belonging to the mother. The bridegroom is the suitor, and we see the creeping in of property considerations always associated with the rise of father-right.
Yet so tenaciously did the Marquesans cling to the father-right in the child, that even this fact could not break it down. One husband was legally the father of all her children, ostensibly at least the owner of the household and of such small personal property as belonged to it under communism. The man remained, though in name only, the head of the polyandrous family.
So far has custom advanced in favour of father-right that the children of a wife not paid for are regarded as bastards and held in contempt. Macdonald, Africana, Vol I, p. 136. Livingstone, Travels, p. 622. Riedel, p. 205; cited by McLennan, Patriarchal Theory, p. 326. Journal Asiatic Society of Bengal, Vol. IX, p. 603. Bancroft, Vol. I, p. 549.
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