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Updated: June 20, 2025
And what I want to make clear is that in such negation of all father-right rested the inherent weakness in the matriarchal conditions a weakness which led eventually to the re-establishment of the paternal family. We must be very clear in our minds as to the sharp distinction between the restricted family and the communal clan.
The overplus of men made them amenable to the commands of the women, who often dominated in permanent alliances, demanding lavishment of wealth and attention from their husbands. Yet and this is a most significant fact the father-right in the child remained the basis of the social system.
These changes must be expected wherever the transition towards father-right has begun; the older forms of courtship and marriage, so favourable to the woman, are replaced by patriarchal customs. One or two curious examples of primitive courtship, in which the initiative is taken entirely by the girl may be noted here.
Andromache, when she relates to Hector how her father’s house has been destroyed, with all who are in it, turns to him and says: “But now, Hector, thou art my father and gracious mother, thou art my brother, nay, thou art my valiant husband.” It is easy, I think, to see in this speech how the early idea of the relationships under mother-right had been transferred to the husband, as the protector of the woman conditioned by father-right.
The essential fact to establish is the prevalence of mother-descent as a probable universal stage in the past history of mankind, and then to show the causes which, by undermining the dominion of the maternal clan, led to the adoption of father-right and the re-establishment of the patriarchal family.
With all the evils father-right has brought to women, we have got to remember that the woman owes the individual relation of the man to herself and her children to the patriarchal system. Without this being done, the family in its complete development was impossible. The survival value of the patriarchal age consists in the additional gain to the children of the father’s to the mother’s care.
Yet in the Marquesas, these islands cut off from all other peoples through ages of history, the father-right prevailed in spite of all the difficulties that attended its survival in polyandry. Each woman had many husbands, whom she ruled. The true paternity of her children it was impossible to ascertain.
The father-right, so familiar to our minds that it seems to-day almost the only natural or existing social system, was in fact developed very lately among all races except the Caucasian and some tribes of the Mongols.
It was in such wise way the Egyptians arranged the difficult problem of the fusing of mother-right with father-right. In the very ancient civilisation of Babylon we find women in a position of honour, with privileges similar in many ways to those they enjoyed in Egypt. There are even indications that the earliest customs may have gone beyond those of the Egyptians in exalting women.
And it is not the fact of the husband’s power, however great it might be, that is so important, but the fact that by the change in the form of marriage the wife and her children were cut off from the woman’s clan-kindred, whose duty to protect them was now withdrawn. Here, then, was the reason of the change from mother-right to father-right.
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