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Updated: June 15, 2025
The evidence for mother-right has never yet been fully brought into notice; but much of the evidence is now available. Our knowledge of the customs of primitive peoples has increased greatly of late years, and these afford a wide field for inquiry.
Mother-right can hardly be said to exist, and the position of women is low. It is not the custom among any tribes for the husband to reside in the home of the wife; this in itself is sufficient to explain the power of the husbands. Wives are frequently obtained by capture, and fights for women are of common occurrence. Here it would seem that progress has been very slow.
It is, perhaps, curious that a very careful study of the patriarchal family as it is presented by Mr. Atkinson and Mr. Lang, has brought me to a conclusion fundamentally at variance from what might have been expected. I have gained invaluable support for my own belief in mother-right, and have found fresh proofs from the method of difference.
Many similar examples, it may be said, might be brought forward from other races, and the proof of mother-right and mother-power greatly strengthened thereby.
Further than this I must not go; the first part of my inquiry now has come to an end. It may seem to the reader that the patriarchal theory, in a book written to establish mother-right, has received more attention than was called for.
It is our individual ideas and patriarchal customs that make these things seem so strange. I wish I had space in which to follow further these still-speaking relics of a past, whose interest offers such rich reward. Karl Pearson has fully and beautifully shown the evidence for mother-right to be found in these stories. To this essay the reader, who still is in doubt, is referred.
The point we have now reached is this: while mother-right does not constitute or make necessary rule by women, under that system they enjoy considerable power as the result of their organised position under the maternal marriage among their own clan-kindred, of their importance to the male members of the clan as the transmitters and holders of property.
I have shown that the customs connected with mother-right had no connection at all with a state of promiscuity; that they were the result of order in the sexual relationships, and not of disorder.
Pursuing our inquiry into the social organisation of mother-right, an interesting example occurs among the peoples of the Malay States, where, notwithstanding the centres of Hindu and Moslem influence, much has been retained of the maternal system, once universally prevalent.
Not all barbarous tribes are in the stage of mother-right; on the contrary many reckon descent through the father. But even where the latter is the case, vestiges of the former system are frequently to be found. There seems to be a common tendency to discredit a system of relationship, which suggests even as a bare possibility the mother, and not the father, being the head of the family.
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