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Updated: May 18, 2025
Westermarck has not sufficiently considered this aspect of the question, and, if I mistake not, it is this confusion of mother-descent with promiscuity which explains his attitude towards the maternal system, and his failure to recognise its favourable influence on the status of women. In his opinion this system of tracing descent does not materially affect the relative power of the two sexes.
Among barbarous peoples the importance of this is not so great, but where mother-descent has, for any reason, been maintained up to a time when individual possession has been developed and property is large, we meet with a remarkable “pecuniary matriarchate,” based on the women holding the magic power of money.
The tribes that have established mother-descent have advanced further, with a more developed social organisation, which could hardly be the case if they were the more primitive.
But such descent through the mother, it has become recognized, by no means necessarily involves the power of the mother, and mother-descent may even be combined with a patriarchal system. There has even been a tendency to run to the opposite extreme from Bachofen and to deny that mother-descent conferred any special claim for consideration on women.
Was the foundation of the family based on the authority of the father, or of the mother? If on that of the father, how is mother-kin and mother-right to be explained? These are among the questions that must be answered. Not till this is done, can we establish any theory of mother-descent, or estimate its effect on the status of women. The whole subject is a very wide and complicated one.
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