Dire confusion regarding woman's status has been created in many minds
by three distinct ethnologic phenomena, which are, moreover, often
confounded: (1) kinship and heredity through females; (2) matriarchy,
or woman's rule in the family (domestic); (3) gynaicocracy, or woman's
rule in the tribe (political).
(1) It is a remarkable fact that among many tribes, especially in
Australia, America, and Africa, children are named after their mother,
while rank and property, too, are often inherited in the female line
of descent. Lafitau observed this custom among American Indians more
than a century ago, and in 1861 a Swiss jurist, Bachofen, published a
book in which he tried to prove, with reference to this "kinship
through mothers only," that it indicated that there was a time when
women everywhere ruled over men. A study of ethnologic data shows,
however, that this inference is absolutely unwarranted by the facts.
In Australia, for instance, where children are most commonly named
after their mother's clan, there is no trace of woman's rule over man,
either in the present or the past. The man treats the woman as a
master treats his slaves, and is complete master of her children.
Cunow, an authority on Australian relationships, remarks (136):
"Nothing could be more perverse than to infer from the
custom of reasoning kinship through females, that woman
rules there, and that a father is not master of his
children. On the contrary, the father regards himself
everywhere, even in tribes with a female line of
descent, as the real procreator. He is considered to be
the one who plants the germ and the woman as merely the
soil in which it grows. And as the wife belongs to him,
so does the child that comes from her womb. Therefore
he claims also those children of his wife concerning
whom he knows or assumes that he did not beget them;
for they grew on his soil."
Similarly with the American Indians. Grosse has devoted several pages
(73-80) to show that with the tribes among which kinship through
females prevails woman's position is not in the least better than with
the others. Everywhere woman is bought, obliged to submit to polygamy,
compelled to do the hardest and least honorable work, and often
treated worse than a dog. The same is true of the African tribes among
whom kinship in the female line prevails.
If, therefore, kinship through mothers does not argue female
supremacy, how did that kinship arise? Le Jeune offered a plausible
explanation as long ago as 1632. In the _Jesuit Relations_ (VI., 255),
after describing the immorality of the Indians, he goes on to say:
"As these people are well aware of this corruption,
they prefer to take the children of their sisters as
heirs, rather than their own, or than those of their
brothers, calling in question the fidelity of their
wives, and being unable to doubt that these nephews
come from their own blood. Also among the Hurons--who
are more licentious than our Montagnais, because they
are better fed--it is not the child of a captain but
his sister's son, who succeeds the father."
The same explanation has been advanced by other writers and by the
natives of other countries where kinship through females prevails;[29]
and it doubtless holds true in many cases.
In others the custom of naming children after their mothers is
probably simply a result of the fact that a child is always more
closely associated with the mother than with the father. She brings it
into the world, suckles it, and watches over it; in the primitive
times, even if promiscuity was not prevalent, marriages were of short
duration and divorces frequent, wherefore the male parentage would be
so constantly in doubt that the only feasible thing was to name the
children after their mothers. For our purposes, fortunately, this
knotty problem of the origin of kinship through females, which has
given sociologists so much trouble,[30] does not need to be solved. We
are concerned solely with the question, "Does kinship in the female
line indicate the supremacy of women, or their respectful treatment?"
and that question, as we have seen, must be answered with a most
emphatic No. There is not a single fact to bear out the theory that
man's rule was ever preceded by a period when woman ruled. The lower
we descend, the more absolute and cruelly selfish do we find man's
rule over woman. The stronger sex everywhere reduces the weaker to
practical slavery and holds it in contempt. Primitive woman has not
yet developed these qualities in which her peculiar strength lies, and
if she had, the men would be too coarse to appreciate them.