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Updated: June 8, 2025
It is necessary to understand this clearly. Bachofen is much nearer to what is likely to have happened in the first stage of the family than Mr. McLennan, though he also mistakenly connects the maternal system with unregulated hetaïrism.
But before this took place, Bachofen relates yet another movement, which for a time restored the early matriarchate. The women, at first opposing, presently became converts to the Dionysusian gospel, and were afterwards its warmest supporters. Motherhood became degraded. Bacchanalian excesses followed, which led to a return to the ancient hetaïrism.
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.
Letourneau, Evolution of Marriage, p. 335. Golden Bough, Part I. The Magic Art, Vol. II, pp. 270, 289, 312. Müller and Bachofen, cited by Giraud-Teulon, op. cit. pp. 283-284. The Truth About Woman, pp. 227-242. The evidence with regard to prehistoric Greece is much more complete. The Greek γένος resembled the Roman gens.
We have here what appears to be a much more reasonable explanation of mother-kin and mother-right than that of Bachofen. Yet many have argued powerfully against it. Westermarck especially, has shown that belief in an early stage of promiscuous relationship is altogether untenable. It is needless here to enter into proof of this.
Under these circumstances the gens of the mother would have some ascendancy in the ancient household. On such an established fact rests the assumption of a matriarchate, or period of Mutterrecht. The German scholar Bachofen in his monumental work "Das Mutterrecht" discussed the traces of female "authority" among the Lycians, Cretans, Athenians, Lemnians, Lesbians, and Asiatic peoples.
Just in so far as the mother and the father attain to consciousness and responsibility in their relations to the race do they reach development and power. Bachofen, as a poet, understood this; to me, at least, it is the something real that underlies all the delusion of his work. But I diverge a little in making these comments.
Over and over again Bachofen affirms this spiritual quality in women. “The woman’s religious attitude, in particular, the tendency of her mind towards the supernatural and the divine, influenced the man and robbed him of the position which nature disposed him to take in virtue of his physical superiority.
Drawing his evidence from the actual statements of old writers, but more from legends and the mythologies of antiquity, he came to the conclusion that a system of descent through women had, in all cases, preceded the rise of kinship through males. Almost at the same time Dr. J. F. McLennan, ignorant of the work of Bachofen, came to the same opinion.
Bachofen would have us believe that the mother-right of the ancient world, was due to a revolt of women against the degraded condition of promiscuity, which previously had been universal among mankind, a condition in which men had a community of wives, and openly lived together like gregarious animals. Das Mutterrecht, Intro., p. xxiv. and p. 10.
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