Women and economic evolution: or, The effects of industrial changes upon the status of women

by Theresa Schmid McMahon

Morgan accounts for the practice of reckoning descent in the female line to the fact that paternity was uncertain. The women and the children formed a nucleus around which gathered a social organization composed of the female descendants. Women, especially old women, had a voice in the affairs of the gens, but when a leader was chosen the choice invariably fell upon some man.

Gentes, tracing the descent in the female line, illustrate the early position of women, and their rights in the beginning of a social organization. But seldom, if ever, do we find women holding so prominent a place as a sex, in the political affairs of the community as men, when political relations were emphasized. This fact is often attributed to the tyranny of man over woman but is it not more reasonable to assume that women found it more convenient, and perhaps more desirable, to leave to the men of their family, whose interests were identical with their own, the exercise of governmental authority?

The transition from the matriarchate to a patriarchate grew out of an appreciation of property. Under the matriarchate property belonged to the gens and was transmitted through the female line. But under the patriarchate property belonged to the family, or to the individual members of the family. “When property began to be created in masses, and the desire for its transmission to children had changed descent from the female line to the male, real foundation for patriarchal power was for the first time established.”[100]

This change resulted from an appreciation of the necessity to keep the property of the family within the tribe, or the community, of which it was a part.

Granting women the same privilege of property as men, under a patriarchal system of government, it would be only a question of time when the property interests of the tribe would lose their unity and compactness, and be scattered broadcast over the land. Such a division of property might have been allowed if individual interests alone were considered and these interests did not interfere with the larger interests of the state.

Daughters marrying into other tribes than their own would carry their property interests with them to the tribe of their husbands and so weaken the economic strength of the former, while increasing that of the latter. To prevent women marrying outside the tribe would have been more difficult than to regulate the transmission of property.

For the preservation of the state, when the state was a small community the members of which were bound together by mutual interests of defense or offense, it was necessary to restrict the property rights of women. The state that did not do so and allowed the intermarriage of members of its tribe with members of other tribes was destined to extermination. “For my part I find it difficult to believe,” says Vinegradoff, “that the exclusion of women from inheriting and holding land can be the product not of primitive conditions and of an undeveloped state of landholding, but of a gradual restriction of women’s rights. The supposed later restrictions would appear in a very archaic guise, and with too remarkable a concordance among nations which could not have any direct influence on each other.”[101]

The early Germans are often quoted as representing a people among whom women enjoyed a position of near equality with that of men. And yet Ross tells us, “Among the Angli and Werini, the right of inheritance was conceded to daughters only when there were no males left in the clan. The clan consisted of the male descendants of five successive generations. When no male was left within this limit, the clan was, properly speaking, extinct. The clan land might then go to the women, if there were any, and then into the clans wherein they were received as wives.”[102]

While the origin of the distinctions between the property rights of men and the property rights of women may have their roots in the preservation of the large interests of the clan, tribe or state, the custom thus established would tend to be followed in later times irrespective of the applicability to existing conditions. As with many other practices, the fact that it had its roots in the distant past would seem sufficient to justify it.

The political power of women has been a negligible factor in the history of political rights. It is true, as we have seen, that political rights were synonymous with property rights, and that very few men exercised political rights since they were propertyless, but nevertheless where property was a family possession the “spear and spindle distinction” was apparent. “Compare the remarkable customs in regard to the division of property in the ancient Germanic laws. The proper inheritance of the woman is her gerade (gerath), the household furniture. Norse law puts women back in regard to land inheritance, and points to ‘loose money,’ losa ore, as a natural outfit for them.”[103]