The Evolution of Marriage and of the Family

by Ch. Letourneau

These customs, or very analogous ones, were in force with a great number of American tribes. At the present day the Indians of the Moqui Pueblos still live in their common habitations, as at the time of the conquest, and they are divided into nine clans.[898]

In the Pueblo of Orayba the relatives of a married woman who dies take her property and her children, only leaving to the husband his horse, his clothes, and his weapons;[899] for by marrying the woman does not cease to belong to her original clan. Among the Pipiles of Salvador a genealogical tree with seven branches was painted on the wall of the common house, and save in the case of a great service rendered to the clan, a man could not intermarry with any persons related up to the degree indicated by the genealogical tree.[900] In reality, this people had got beyond familial confusion, or of purely totemic relationship, but the principle regulating conjugal unions had not yet changed. In Yucatan marriage between persons of the same name—that is to say, of the same clan—entailed the penalty of being considered as a renegade.[901] The savage Abipones were also exogamous, according to Dobritzhoffer. This rule naturally gives way in proportion as civilisation develops. The Nahuas still prohibited marriage between consanguineous relatives; but at Nicaragua the prohibition only applied to relatives of the first degree.[902]

We have previously seen, in describing the family amongst the animals, that it is habitually maternal; it is around the female that the young group themselves. As for the male, if he does not abandon the family, he exercises no other function but that of chief of the band. It must surely have been thus that the first human hordes were formed, and when man became intelligent enough to take note of filiation, it was uterine parenthood alone that he considered worthy of account. The primitive family was maternal, for in the confusion of sexual unions paternal filiation would have been difficult to determine; no importance was therefore attached to it in early times, and the father was not looked upon as the parent of his children.

We shall find the maternal family, or at least traces of it, in many countries, but it is especially among the Indians of North America that it has been the best preserved and the best studied. In the eighteenth century it was already remarked by Charlevoix, Lafitau, and Lahontan,[903] that the Redskins always bear the name of their mother, and that it is through a man’s sister that his name is transmitted to descendants. The American clan is based on uterine filiation; it comprehends all the descendants, in the female line of an ancestral mother, real or hypothetical. It is therefore exactly the contrary of the agnatic gens of the Greco-Roman world.

The Redskin clan is composed of all the families reputed to be related to each other; it is a little republic having the right to the service of all the women for the cultivation of the soil, and of all the men for the chase, war, and vendettas. It is to the woman that the wigwam or family dwelling belongs, as well as all the objects possessed by the family, and the whole is transmitted by heritage, not to the son, but to the eldest daughter or to the nearest maternal relative,[904] sometimes to the brother of the deceased woman. Nevertheless, this heritage must be understood in the sense of a simple usufruct. It was the maternal clan in reality who was the proprietor, and none of the members of the community could seriously alienate the social property. The husband alone, in most of the tribes, had no right over the goods or over the children; they all remained in the maternal clan;[905] it was maternal filiation which regulated the name, the rank, and the hereditary rights in the clan.[906] A sort of communism reigned there. All the provisions, whether they were the produce of the soil, of the chase, or of fishing, were placed in public storehouses, under the control of an aged matron; and if it ever happened that a family had exhausted its provisions, another family immediately came to its aid.[907]

But maternal filiation was, or is, in force even where the clans did not live in common houses, as we find it still among the Mohicans, the Delawares, the Narrangasetts, the Pequots, the Wyandots, the Missouris, the Minnitaris, the Crows, the Creeks, the Chickasaws, the Cherokees, etc.

With the Iroquois and the Hurons, the father, says Charlevoix, was almost a stranger to his children. “Among the Hurons,” continues the same observer, “dignity and succession are inherited through the women. It is the son of the sister who succeeds, and in default of him the next relative in the female line.”[908]

“With these peoples,” says Lafitau, “marriages are arranged in such a way that the husband and wife do not leave their own family to establish a family and a cabin independently. Each one remains at home, and the children born of these marriages belong to the families that have produced them, and are counted as members of the family and cabin of the mother, and not at all as belonging to those of the father. The possessions of the husband do not go to his wife’s cabin, to which he is himself a stranger; and in his wife’s cabin the daughters are heirs in preference to the males, who have nothing there but mere subsistence.”[909]

“Besides this,” continues Lafitau, “the wife’s cabin has rights over the product of the husband’s, hunting; all of this must be contributed during the first year, and a half only afterwards.”[910]

The mothers negotiated the marriages, and naturally did so without consulting the interested parties. When the affair was once settled, presents had to be made to the gentile relatives of the bride. It was the care of these relatives, in case of conjugal dissensions between the married pair, to attempt a reconciliation and to prevent a divorce.[911] At the present time, among the Santi-Dakotas, if a wife is ill-treated by her husband, the mother-in-law has the right to take back her daughter; the husband’s power must yield to hers.[912] Does the institution of filiation by women, or the maternal family, entail, as some have pretended, the régime of the matriarchate? North America being par excellence the country of exogamy and of the maternal family, the theorists of the primitive matriarchate have often drawn arguments from thence which it is interesting to weigh.