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The children at least the female children have their share in the common home; the father has none.” “Outside the house the husband has some property in the fields, although in earlier times he had no possessory rights and the land was held in common. Modern influences have reached the Zuñi, and mother-right seems to have begun its inevitable decay.”
Yet this Semitic patriarch has not existed from the beginning; numerous survivals of mother-right customs afford proof that the Hebrew race must have passed through a maternal stage. These survivals have a special interest, as we are all familiar with them in Bible history, but we have not understood their significance. It is possible to give a few illustrations only.
Of course, I selected my examples. But this I may say; I chose those which had brought me to accept mother-right. I was driven to this belief by my own study and reading long before the time of writing my book. What I really tried to do was to present to others the facts that had convinced me.
Many of the conclusions to which I have come are so completely opposed to those which generally have been accepted as correct, that now, I am at the end of my inquiry it will be well to sum up briefly its result. The facts I have so rapidly enumerated have a very wide bearing; they serve to destroy the accepted foundations on which the claim for mother-right has hitherto been based.
Bachofen here suggests a pre-matriarchal period in which the elementary family-group was founded on and held together by a common subjection to the oldest and strongest male. This is the primordial patriarchal family. Then come the questions: Can we accept mother-right? Are there any reasonable causes to explain the rise of female dominance?
The absence, or rather the rarity, of mother-right survivals in some civilisations cannot be counted as proof that the maternal system never existed. As I have shown in the earlier chapters of this book, the mother-age was a transitional stage, between the very early brute-conditions of the family and the second firmly established patriarchate.
Under mother-right there is naturally no prohibition against marriage with a half-sister upon the father’s side. This explains the marriage of Abraham with Sarah, his half-sister by the same father.
Then, in the second place, I am compelled to doubt certain conclusions, both of those who accept mother-right, and also of the greater number who now deny its occurrence. If I am right, and the importance of the maternal family has been unduly neglected and the true explanation of its origin overlooked, I feel that, whatever errors I may fall into, I am justified in undertaking this task.
The injunction in Gen. ii, 24: “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife,” refers without any doubt to the early form of marriage under mother-right, when the husband left his own kindred and went to live with his wife and among her people. We find Samson visiting his Philistine wife who remained with her own people.
Again the widespread prevalence of mother-right survivals among races where the patriarchal system has been for long firmly established lends support to such a view, which will be strengthened by the evidence now to be brought forward.
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