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Updated: June 15, 2025
My aim throughout has been to establish mother-right, not mother-rule. I believe it is only by an extraordinary power of illusion that we can recognise, in the favourable position of women under mother-descent Bachofen’s view of an Amazonian gynæcocracy. But this does not weaken at all my position.
To bring these facts home, we must now consider some further examples of mother-right, in order to show how closely these customs are connected with the conditions of the maternal familiar clan. The Yaos of Africa have what may be regarded as a matriarchal organisation. Kinship is reckoned and property is inherited through the mother.
I do not say an earlier "promiscuity," for the theory of a primitive sexual promiscuity is now widely discredited, though there can be no reasonable doubt that the early prevalence of mother-right was more favorable to the sexual freedom of women than the later patriarchal system.
Andromache, when she relates to Hector how her father’s house has been destroyed, with all who are in it, turns to him and says: “But now, Hector, thou art my father and gracious mother, thou art my brother, nay, thou art my valiant husband.” It is easy, I think, to see in this speech how the early idea of the relationships under mother-right had been transferred to the husband, as the protector of the woman conditioned by father-right.
We have read these “fairy stories” to our children, unknowing what they signified a prophetic succession of witnesses, pointing us back to the ripening of that phase of the communal family, before the establishment of the individual patriarchal rule, when the law was mother-right, and all inheritance was through women.
How far I shall succeed, or fail, to make clear to others a period of mother-right that is certain to me, I do not know. I offer my little book with all humility, and yet without any apology. We may read and learn and gather knowledge from many sources; but the opinions of others we cannot take on credit; we must re-think them out for ourselves, and make them our own.
This is really very remarkable; I think it is a fact that demands more attention than as yet it has received. See pp. 129-131, also The Truth about Woman, pp. 199-201. At one time there would seem to have been in prehistoric Greece a period of fully established mother-right. Ancient Attic traditions are filled with recollections of female supremacy.
2 Sam. xiii, 13-16 and 37. Exod. vi, 20. Gen. xi. 26-29. It is by considering these survivals of mother-right in connection with similar customs to be found among existing maternal peoples that we see their true significance.
One foundation that of promiscuity, on which Bachofen and McLennan, the two upholders of matriarchy, base their hypothesis has been overthrown. It thus becomes necessary to approach the question from an altogether different position. Mother-right must be explained without any reference to unregulated sexual conduct.
But my stacks of unused notes, collected for my own pleasure during many years of work, are witness to how much I had to leave out. I know that many objections that have been raised to the theory of mother-right were left unanswered. I dismissed much too lightly the patriarchal theory of the origin of the family, which during late years has gained such advocacy.
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