"The men meanwhile went away on warlike expeditions against other groups, and on long hunting and fishing excursions, from which they returned with their spoils from time to time, to be welcomed by the women with dancing and feasting. Hunting and war were their only occupations, and the time between expeditions was spent in resting and in interminable palavers and dances, which we may perhaps look upon as the beginnings of parliaments and music halls.
"Whether this picture be accurate in detail or not there is at any rate a considerable body of evidence pointing to the 'Matriarchate' as a period during which women began medicine, the domestication of the smaller animals, the cultivation of vegetables, flax and corn, the use of the distaff, the spindle, the broom, the fire-rake and the pitchfork.
"In the Mother-Age the inheritance of property passed through the mother; the woman gave the children her own name; husband and father were in the background—often far from individualized; the brother and uncle were much more important; the woman was the depository of custom, lore, and religious tradition; she was, at least, the nominal head of the family, and she had a large influence in tribal affairs."
For some years past certain progressive women have shown signs of a reversion to the matriarchal state—or shall we say a disposition to revive it? In spite of human progress we travel more or less in circles, a truth of which the present war and its reversions is the most uncompromising example.
In the married state, for instance, these women have retained their own name, not even being addressed as Mrs., that after all is a polite variation of the Spanish "de," which does not by any means indicate noble birth alone, women after marriage proudly announcing themselves as legally possessed. For instance a girl whose name has been Elena Lopez writes herself after marriage Elena Lopez de Morena, the "de" in this case standing for "property of." It will be some time before the women of Spain travel far on the Northern road toward pride in sex deliverance, but with us, and in Britain, the custom is growing prevalent.
Then there is the hyphen marriage, more common still, in which the woman retains her own name, but condescends to annex the man's. Once in a way a man will prefix his wife's name to his own, and there is one on record who prefixed his own to his wife's. But any woman may have her opinion of him.
So far as I have been able to ascertain these marriages are quite as successful as the average; and if the woman has a career on hand—and she generally has—she pursues it unhampered. The grandmother or aunt takes charge of the children, if there are any, while she is at her duties without the home, and so far, the husband has been permitted the compensation of endowing the children with his name.
The reversion to the prehistoric matriarchate can hardly be complete in these days, but there are many significant straws that indicate the rising of a new wind blown by ancient instincts. To look upon them as shockingly advanced or abnormal is an evidence of conservatism that does not reach quite far enough into the past.
A still more significant sign of the times (in the sense of linking past with present) is the ever-increasing number of women doctors and their success. Men for the most part have ceased to sneer or even to be more than humanly jealous, often speaking in terms of the warmest admiration not only of their skill but of their conscientiousness and power of endurance. When I went to live in Munich (1903) a woman surgeon was just beginning to practice. This, to Germany, was an innovation with a vengeance, and the German male is the least tolerant of female encroachment within his historic preserves. The men practitioners threw every possible obstacle in her way, and with no particular finesse. But nothing could daunt her, and two or three years later she was riding round in her car—a striking red one—while the major number of her rivals were still dependent upon the ambling cab-horse, directed off and on by a fat driver who was normally asleep. Jealousy, however, for the most part had merged into admiration; for your average male, of whatever race, is not only philosophical but bows to success; she was both recognized and called in for consultation. Hang on! Hang on! should be the motto of all women determined to make their mark in what is still a man's world. Life never has denied her prizes to courage and persistence backed by ability.
A curious instance of man's inevitable recognition of the places of responsibility women more and more are taking is in the new reading of the Income Tax papers for 1917. Heretofore only married men were exempted taxation on the first $4000 but from now on, apparently, women who are also "heads of families" are likewise favored. As thousands of women are supporting their aged parents, their brothers while studying, their children and even their husbands, who for one reason or other are unequal to the family strain, this exemption should have been made coincidentally with the imposing of the tax. But men are slow to see and slower still to act where women are concerned.