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Updated: June 19, 2025
I have received a letter from the great American champion of Women’s Rights in which she states how pleased she is that I am writing this book on the Mother-age. “There are many facts,” she says, “of the early power of women which the great world does not know.”
H. G. Wells, sent to me after the publication of my book, The Truth about Woman. Now, there is one sentence in this letter that I wish to quote here, because it brings home just what it is my purpose in this chapter to show that the mother-age was a civilisation owing its institutions, and its early victories over nature, rather to the genius of woman than to that of man. Mr.
LOCKSLEY HALL, which was published in 1842, illustrates how the idea of Progress had begun to creep into the imagination of Englishmen. Though subsidiary to a love story, it is the true theme of the poem. The pulsation of eager interest in the terrestrial destinies of humanity, the large excitement of living in a "wondrous Mother-age," dreams of the future, quicken the passion of the hero's youth.
And I believe that those of my readers who will follow out an investigation for themselves in any direction either in the collecting of maternal customs among existing primitive peoples, or in noting the relics of such customs to be met with in historical records and in folk-lore, will find an ever increasing store of evidence, and that then the discredited mother-age, with its mother-right customs, will become for them what it is for me, a necessary and accepted stage in the evolution of human societies.
I cannot, then, do better than conclude the evidence for the mother-age by referring to some few of these myths and legends. In order to group the great mass of material I will take first the creation myths. One only out of many examples can be given. The Zuñi Indians, who, it will be remembered, are a maternal people, give this account of the beginning of the world.
The whole question turns upon which you start with; the man the woman, or the woman the man. Here it should be explained that this little book is an expansion of the historical section which treats of “the Mother-age civilisation” in my former book, The Truth About Woman.
The authority and magic circle kept by the broom are those of the hearth and floor in her primeval roundhut; and her distaff and pitchfork, her caldron, her cat and dog, are all in keeping with the rôle of woman in the Mother-Age.
Some portion of the matter given has appeared already in the section on the “Mother-Age Civilisation” in The Truth about Woman, which gives examples of the maternal family in America, Australia, India and other countries. Such examples formed a necessary part of the historical section of that work; they are even more necessary to this inquiry.
I must not say more upon this question, though it is one that tempts me strongly. It is not, however, my purpose in this book to offer opinions of my own on these problems of the relations of the two sexes; I prefer to leave the facts of the mother-age to speak for themselves. Those whose eyes are not blinded will not fail to see. Mrs.
The social ideal of the mother-age was a transition and a dream but as a moment of peace in the records of struggle, following the bloody opening drama in man’s history, and then passing into a forgetfulness so complete that its existence by many has been denied. Yet the feet of the race were in the way, though men and women let it pass, blindly unknowing.
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