The Position of Woman in Primitive Society: A Study of the Matriarchy

by C. Gasquoine Hartley

In the earlier days the clan spirit was too strong, now men had shaken off, to a degree sufficient for their purpose, the female yoke, which bound the clan together. We have seen the husband and father moving towards the position of a fully acknowledged legal parent by a system of buying off his wife and her children from their clan-group. The movement arose in the first instance through a property value being connected with women themselves. As soon as the women’s kindred found in their women the possibility of gaining worldly goods for themselves, they began to claim service and presents from their lovers. It was in this way for economic reasons, and for no moral considerations that the maternal marriage fell into disfavour. The payment of a bride-price was claimed, and an act of purchase was accounted essential. As we have seen, it was regarded as a condition, not so much of the marriage itself, but of the transference of the wife to the home of the husband and of the children to his kindred. The change was, of course, effected slowly; and often we find the two forms of marriage—the maternal and the purchase-marriage—occurring side by side. What, however, is certain is that the purchase-marriage in the struggle was the one that prevailed.

This reversal in the form of the marriage brought about a corresponding reversal in the status of women. This is so plain. The women of the family do not now inherit property, but are themselves property, passing from the hands of their father to that of a husband. As purchased wives they are compelled to reside in the husband’s house and among his kin, who have no rights or duties in regard to them, and where they are strangers. In a word, the wife occupies the same position of disadvantage as the man had done in the maternal marriage. And her children kept her bound to this alien home in a much closer way than the husband could ever have been bound to her home. The protection of her own kindred was the source of the woman’s power and strength. This was now lost. The change was not brought about without a struggle, and for long the old customs contended with the new. But as the patriarchate developed, and men began to gain individual possession of their children by the purchase of their mothers, the father became the dominant power in the family. Little by little individual interests prevailed. Moral limits were set up. Women’s freedom was threatened on every side as the jealous ownership, which always arises wherever women are regarded as property, asserted itself. Mother-right passed away, remaining only as a tradition, or preserved in isolated cases among primitive peoples. The patriarchal age, which still endures, succeeded.

Yet in this connection it is very necessary to remember that the reassertion of the patriarchate was as necessary a stage in human development as the maternal stage. Whatever may have been the advantages arising to women from the clan organisation (and that the advantages were great I claim to have proved) such conditions could not remain fixed for ever. For society is not stable; it cannot be, as the need for adjustment is always arising, and at certain stages of development different tendencies are active. No one cause can be isolated, and, therefore, it is necessary in estimating any change to take a synthetic view of many facts that are contemporaneous and interacting. Yet, it would seem that the social and domestic habits of a people are decided largely by the degree of dominance held either by women or men; and almost everything else depends on the accurate adjustment of the rights of the two sexes.

The social clan organised around the mothers carried mankind a long way—a way the length of which we are only beginning to realise. But it could not carry mankind to that family organisation from which so much was afterwards to develop. It was no more possible for society to be built up on mother-right alone than it is possible for it to remain permanently based on father-right.

But there is another aspect of this question that I must briefly touch upon. The opinion that the reversal in the position of authority of the mother and the father arose from male mastery, or was due to any unfair domination on the part of the husband must be set aside. To me the history of the mother-age does not teach this. I believe that the change to the individual family must have been regarded favourably by the women themselves, for such a change could not have arisen, at all events it would not have persisted, if women, with the power they then enjoyed, had not desired it. Nor need this bring any surprise. An arrangement that would give a closer relationship in marriage and the protection of a husband for herself and her children may well have come to be preferred by the wife. Nor do I think it unlikely that she, quite as strongly as the man, may have desired to live apart from her mother and her kindred in her husband’s home. Individual interests are not confined to men.

With all the evils father-right has brought to women, we have got to remember that the woman owes the individual relation of the man to herself and her children to the patriarchal system. The father’s right in his children (which, unlike the right of the mother, was not founded upon kinship, but rested on the quite different and insecure basis of property) had to be re-established. Without this being done, the family in its complete development was impossible. The survival value of the patriarchal age consists in the additional gain to the children of the father’s to the mother’s care. I do not think this gain will ever be lost. We women need to remember this lest bitterness stains our sense of justice. It may be that progress could not have been accomplished otherwise; that the cost of love’s development has been the enslavement of women. If so, then women will not, in the long account of Nature, have lost in the payment of the price. They may be (when they come again to understand their power) better fitted for their refound freedom.

Such is the history of the past, what is the promise of the future?

We have traced three stages in the past evolution of the family—two individual and patriarchal, one communal and maternal. Is the patriarchal stage, then, the final stage? Has the upward growth, ever yet continuous, been arrested here? The social ideal of the mother-age was a transition and a dream—but as a moment of peace in the records of struggle, following the bloody opening drama in man’s history, and then passing into a forgetfulness so complete that its existence by many has been denied. Yet the feet of the race were in the way, though men and women let it pass, blindly unknowing.

Our age is working for scarcely yet formulated changes in the ownership of property and in the status of women. The patriarchal view of woman’s subjection to man is being questioned in every direction. What do these movements indicate? If, as seems probable, the individual evolution, already for so long continued, is perishing, what is to take its place? What form will the family take in the future? These are questions to which it is not possible for me here even to attempt to find the answer.[248]

Let us look for a moment in this new direction, the direction of the future, because it is there that the past becomes so important. In our contemporary society there is a deep-lying dissatisfaction with existing conditions, a yearning and restless need for change. We stand in the first rush of a great movement. It is the day of experiments, when again the old customs are in struggle with the new. We are questioning where before we have accepted, and are seeking out new ways in which mankind will go—will go because it must.