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Among this people are still to be found certain remnants of the matriarchal age an age in which women were the recognized heads of families and the eponymous leaders of the gentes or clans. Concerning the worship of a man and woman as god by the early Arabians, Prof.
This is the number given by Prof. Tylor. “The Matriarchal Family System,” Nineteenth Century, July 1896. In this connection I may note that Westermarck does not accept an early period when descent was traced exclusively through the mother; he gives a long list of peoples among whom the system is not practised.
Although divorce is easy, it is not frequent. “The Garos will not hastily make engagements, because, when they do make them, they intend to keep them.” Dalton, Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal, pp. 64, 142. See also Tylor, “The Matriarchal Theory,” Nineteenth Century, July 1896, p. 89.
From the simple beneficent activities of a matriarchal period we follow the same lamentable steps; nation after nation. Women are enslaved and captives are enslaved; a military despotism is developed; labor is despised and discouraged.
But the reader is doubtless aware that a still more primitive form of society than the patriarchal the matriarchal is supposed to have had its ancestor-worship. Mr. Spencer observes: "What has happened when descent in the female line obtains, is not clear.
There is nothing in Tinguian life or tradition to indicate that they have ever had a clan system or a matriarchal form of government. The few references to the procedure immediately after a death indicate that, in part, the people of to-day follow the old custom; but here again an important departure occurs.
A similar survival of the ancient matriarchal religious system is the Siem sad, or priestess, at Mawsynram, who, on the appointment of a new Siem or chief, has to assist at certain sacrifices.
But we think this latter practice, which in some quarters has been regarded as a survival from a matriarchal organisation of society, is a recently introduced custom, which has come rapidly into favour as a means by which the bridegroom and his friends avoid a part of the expense involved in the older form of marriage.
Some writers speak of it as a matriarchal period, but it does not appear that women governed; it is more proper to speak of the family as metronymic, for the children bore the mother's name and maternity outweighed paternity in social estimate.
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. It may perhaps be ascribed to the pre-eminence accorded by the Khasis to the female sex that successive censuses have shown that the women of this race considerably exceed the men in number.
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