Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 29, 2025
Among many tribes of the North American Indians this metronymic or maternal system was peculiarly well-developed. Children took their mother's name, not their father's name; belonged to their mother's clan, not their father's clan; and the chief transmitted his authority, if hereditary, not to his own son, but to his eldest sister's son.
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.
It is fairly well established that, in the transition from metronymic to patronymic forms, authority did not pass from women to men, but from the brothers and maternal uncles of the women of the group to the husbands and sons.
Ethnologists and sociologists have practically concluded, from the amount of evidence now collected, that this maternal or metronymic system was the primitive system of tracing relationships, and that it was succeeded among the European peoples by the paternal system so long ago that the transition from the one to the other has been forgotten, except as some trace of it has been preserved in customs, legends, and the like.
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.
The prophetic powers of woman were universally recognized. The oracles at Delphi, Argos, Epirus, Thrace and Arcadia were feminine. As we have said before, it is now fairly well established that in the transition from metronymic to patronymic forms, authority did not pass from women to men but from the brothers and maternal uncles of the women of the group to husbands and sons.
Strictly speaking, therefore, there has never been a matriarchal stage of social evolution, but rather a maternal or metronymic stage. We have already said that this stage was probably the primitive one. How are we to explain, then, that primitive man reckoned kinship through mothers only?
The man supplanted the woman as the important member of the household, reduced the others to submission, added to his wives and servants by capture or purchase, and established the patriarchal system. Descent henceforth was reckoned in the paternal line, and society had become patronymic instead of metronymic. It must not be supposed that this change occurred very suddenly.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking