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Updated: June 5, 2025
Here we may compare Karl Pearson's remark, when dealing with matriarchal customs, that "according to the evidence of Roman historians, not only the seers but the sacrificers among the early Teutons were women." In the Khyrim State there is a goddess of each raj, or division, of the state, to whom sacrifices are offered on such occasions.
The father has no kinship with his children, who belong to their mother’s clan; what he earns goes to his own matriarchal stock, and at his death his bones are deposited in the cromlech of his mother’s kin.” Such testimony cannot be put aside. I wish it were possible for me to give a detailed account of this people, there is so much that is of interest to us in their mother-right customs.
It has been disputed, if, under the matriarchal system of polygamy, the moral condition of the people was higher than under the patriarchal system, and probably no satisfactory conclusion can be reached upon this point, save and except that any condition, however primitive, which permitted to the female freedom of choice, must be better than that in which she is the object of coercion.
For some years past certain progressive women have shown signs of a reversion to the matriarchal state or shall we say a disposition to revive it? In spite of human progress we travel more or less in circles, a truth of which the present war and its reversions is the most uncompromising example.
Such a claim on the part of the father proves the subordinate position held by the husband in the wife’s family, who retained control over her and the children of the marriage, and even over the personal property of the man, as was usual under the later matriarchal custom.
Through a long period they have most strictly preserved the custom of matriarchal heredity, which has led to an unusual concentration of the family group, and it is probable that here is the best explanation of the conjugal liberty of the Naïr girls. However singular their system may appear to us, it is the most logical and complete of any polyandric system.
It is probable that in Egypt property was originally entirely in the hands of women, as is usual under the matriarchal system. Later, a tradition in favour of the old privileges would seem to have persisted after descent was changed from the maternal to the paternal line. The marriage-contracts may thus be regarded as enforcing by agreement what would occur naturally under the maternal customs.
Pleyte, pure matriarchal customs to be found amongst the Minangkabe Malays inhabiting the Padang uplands and adjacent countries, in Sumatra, in Agam, the fifty Kotas, and Tanah Datar, more or less mixed with patriarchal institutions; they are equally followed by the tribes inhabiting parts of Korinchi and other places.
Westermarck, in criticising the matriarchal theory, has said: “The inference that ‘kinship through females only’ has everywhere preceded the rise of ‘kinship through males,’ would be warranted only on condition that the cause, or the causes, to which the maternal system is owing, could be proved to have operated universally in the past life of mankind.” Now, this is what I believe I am able to do.
At such a moment the most timid, man-fearing woman becomes august. Her nature undergoes a swift change. She is no longer herself, she belongs once more to the matriarchal age when she carried man like a sack on her back and dumped him where she pleased, when she pleased. The most tyrannical husband immediately abrogates his authority when he sees the symptoms of this frenzy developing in her.
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