At the epoch during which the Seneca-Iroquois still lived in their “long houses,” it seems that the influence of the women in the community was very great. The missionary, Arthur Wright, wrote in 1873:—“It was the custom for the women to govern the house. The provisions were in common; but woe to the unfortunate husband or lover too idle or clumsy to bring home from the chase a sufficient booty. Whatever the number of his children or the value of the goods he possessed in the house, he might be ordered at any moment to take up his blanket and pack off.” After that, unless he obtained the intercession of some aunt or grandmother, he was forced to obey, return to his own clan, or contract an alliance elsewhere. “The women were the chief power in the clans, and they did not hesitate, when necessary, to depose a chief, and make him re-enter the ranks of simple warriors. The election of the chiefs always depended on them.”[913]
Among the Wyandots there is in every clan a council composed of four women elected by the female chiefs of the family. These four women choose a chief of the clan from among the men; then the totem of the clan is painted on the face of this chief. The council of the tribe is formed by an assemblage of the clan councils; four-fifths of it, therefore, consist of women. The sachem, or chief of the tribe, is chosen by the chiefs of the clans.[914]
Charlevoix relates that in 1721 the Natchez Indians were governed by a very despotic chief, the Sun, who was succeeded by the son of his nearest of kin. This was the female chief, and she had, like the Sun, the power of life and death over the people. At the death of the female chief in 1721, her husband, not belonging to the family of the Sun, was strangled by her son, according to custom, and that without prejudice to other human sacrifices.[915] The ancient Spanish chroniclers also speak of the submission of the husbands to their wives in Nicaragua; they seem to have been treated as servants (Herrera, Audogoya).
Lastly, among the Redskins the matrons had the right to baptise the children—that is to say, to make them enter either the maternal or the paternal clan.[916]
These facts are curious. They prove, indeed, that with the Redskins the women enjoyed a notable influence, especially in ancient times. With the Seneca-Iroquois they could expel the incapable hunter; but this was evidently by their title of housekeepers of the clan. Among the Wyandots, they figured numerously in the council; but nevertheless, the supreme chief was a man. As for the woman-chief of the Natchez Indians, we find an equivalent of it in certain little despotic monarchies of black Africa. Among the Ashantees, and in Darfour, etc., the princesses dominate their husbands or their lovers by the prestige of royalty. Nothing is more natural than that a plebeian husband should be strangled on the tomb of his wife with other human victims, when we consider the prevailing ideas of future life and the absolute servility of the subject in primitive monarchical states. In fact, the power of women among the Redskins was more apparent than real. Charlevoix himself declares that their domination is fictitious,[917] “that they are, in domestic life, the slaves of their husband,” that the men hold them in profound contempt, and that, amongst themselves, the epithet of “woman” is a cutting insult.
Important affairs were kept secret from them;[918] polygamy was habitually permitted to the men, but polyandry was nearly always prohibited to the women. In fact, among the Redskins the woman is the slave of her husband, and the latter thinks so slightly of her, that frequently the men live conjugally for years without communicating with their wives otherwise than by signs, as owing to exogamous marriage they speak different languages.[919] The authority that the husbands concede to their wives in certain tribes is entirely domestic; it is a household royalty.
Thus, with the Selisches, the cabins containing the provisions are confided to the women, and the husband himself can take nothing without their permission.[920] The husband or the son commands in the woods and on the prairie; but in the interior of the wigwam it is the most aged woman or the mother who governs and assigns to each one his place.[921]
These customs and the marriages by servitude have led several observers to attribute to the women a considerable authority which they do not really possess. In fact, they are nearly always purchased, and are very submissive. The maternal family and the matriarchate are very different things. The first is common; the second is very rare, if indeed it has ever existed. The Australians, who have the maternal family, none the less treat their wives as we should not dare to treat our domestic animals. And again, in order that filiation by the female side should give women a notable social influence, it is necessary that society should be very civilised, that there should be exchangeable values, and that women should become rich by inheritance. Then they are in a position to exercise the power that fortune gives in every country. But among the Redskins private property as yet hardly existed; the clans preserved the prior claim; personal property had not a great value; there were no domestic animals; it was difficult for any individual, man or woman, to become rich. Lastly, the chief occupations, those which were reputed noble, those also on which the existence of the tribes depended, were the chase and war; now the women took no part in these. They have not therefore been able to exercise a dominant influence, even in the tribes where they were treated with relative mildness. Among the Redskins in general, all the painful labours fall to the women, except the fabrication of arms. It is she who takes care of the home, who cooks, prepares the skins and the furs, gathers the wild rice, digs, sows and reaps the maize and the vegetables, dries the meat and the roots for the winter-provision, makes the clothes and the necklaces, etc. She even works at the construction of bark canoes, but in this, man comes to her aid. With that exception, he confines himself to hunting and fighting, smoking, eating, drinking, and sleeping. In his eyes work is a disgrace.[922] Such are the customs of living Redskins. Were they different last century? Not at all, if we may believe the authorities even who are invoked by the modern theorists of the American matriarchate. Charlevoix tells us that the Huron husbands prostituted their daughters and their wives for money,[923] that the Sioux cut off the noses of their unfaithful wives and scalped them,[924] and that all the hard work was left to the women, the men glorying in their idleness.[925] Lafitau enumerates, with still greater detail, the many and painful occupations of the women,[926] and he narrates the story of a husband who burnt his adulterous wife at a slow fire.[927] It is not then amongst the Redskins that we can find the matriarchate. Their familial system is none the less very curious, especially if we compare it with that of the Australians.
The familial clan of the Australians and of the Redskins enables us to retrace the origin of the ideas of kinship. Nothing similar seems to exist among the animals. In the best endowed species, the parents, especially the females, have an instinctive love of their young, but only as long as they are young. After that period they no longer recognise them, and often even drive them away.
Man, who has certainly begun his existence in the same way as the animals, has early attained, not to ideas of precise filiation, but to a vague idea of consanguinity between all the members of his horde. In these little primitive groups, no distinction has at first been made between real and fictitious kinship. All the men of the same clan have been brothers, all the women have been sisters, and by the help of an inveterate habit of exogamy, a gross morality has been formed, which condemned social incest. But as the life of the clan was, before all things, communal, while marriages within the clan were prohibited, it was decided that the clans of the same name—that is, those who had sprung one from the other—should be united by a sort of social marriage, all the women of the one being common to all the men of the other. Then, in the course of time, the instinct of individual appropriation having undermined the primitive community, the women were distributed amongst the men; they formed families which were often singular ones, and of which I shall have to speak again. There was no longer promiscuity from clan to clan, but the wife was to be taken from an allied clan. The first filiation which was established was surely maternal filiation: primitive conjugal confusion would not permit of any other. But at length, when the family became more or less instituted, the relations could be classified, and the degrees of consanguinity distinguished.