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Atkinson’s Primal Law, as well as with other writers, all of whom have shown that promiscuity cannot be accepted as a stage in the early life of the human family. I have now to show how far this rejection of promiscuity affects our position with regard to mother-descent and mother-right. It is clearly of vital importance to any theory that its foundations are secure.
The limited compass of this little book will prevent my substantiating my own views as I should wish, with a full and systematic survey of all authentic accounts of the peoples among whom mother-descent may be studied.
It will interest my readers to know that mother-descent must once have prevailed in Britain. Among the Picts of Scotland kingship was transmitted through women. Bede tells us that down to his own time the early part of the eighth century whenever a doubt arose as to the succession, the Picts chose their king from the female rather than from the male line.
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.
Much new ground had to be covered in this attempt to picture the position of women at a period so remote that the difficulties are very great. I hope at least to have cleared away the old errors, which connected mother-descent with uncertainty of paternity and an early period of promiscuity.
But here again is an error; we are not entitled to regard mother-descent as necessarily the primitive custom. I believe and have tried to show, from the examples of the Australian tribes and elsewhere, that in many cases the stage of the maternal clan has not been reached. If I am right here, we have the way cleared from much confusion.
No two ways could well be further apart than those by which these two men arrived at the same conclusion. Both accept an early period of promiscuous sexual relationships. But Bachofen found the explanation of mother-descent in the supremacy of women, and believed a matriarchate to have been established by them in a moral revolt against such hetaïrism. Mr.
Nothing would be easier than from the mass of material available to pile up facts in furnishing a picture of the high status of women among many tribes under the favourable influence of mother-descent, that would unnerve any upholders of the patriarchal view of the subordination of women.
A decisive and better known example of the favorable influence of mother-descent on the status of woman is afforded by the beena marriage of early Arabia.
These passages occur in his well-known Criticism of the Hypothesis of Promiscuity, and his whole argument is based on the assumption that mother-right arose through the tie between the father and the child being unrecognised. But mother-descent has no connection at all with uncertainty of paternity. I venture to think Dr.
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