selves, the parents turn them adrift as the animals
do.[101]

It was doubtless thus, in a way similar to the great monkeys, that man
first lived. With the chimpanzee these hordes never become large, for
the male leader of the tribe will not endure the rivalry of the young
males, and drives them away. But man, more gregarious in his habits,
would tend to form larger groups, his consciousness developing slowly,
as he learnt to control his brute appetites and jealousy of rivals by
that impulse towards companionship, which, rooted in the sexual needs,
broadens out into the social instincts.

It is evident that the change from these scattered hordes to the
organised tribal groups was dependent upon the mothers and their
children. The women would be more closely bound to the family than the
men. The bond between mother and child, with its long dependence on
her care, made woman the centre of the family. The mother and her
children, and her children's children, and so on indefinitely in the
female line, constituted the group. Relationship was counted alone
through them, and, at a later stage, inheritance of property passed
through them. And in this way, through the woman, the low tribes
passed into socially organised societies. The men, on the other hand,
not yet individualised as husbands and fathers, held no rights or
position in the group of the women and their children.

2. This leads us to the second period of mother-descent and
mother-rights. It is this phase of primitive society that we have to
investigate. Its interest to women is evident. Just as we found in our
first inquiry that, in the beginnings of sexuality the female was of
more importance than the male, so now we shall find society growing up
around woman. It is a period whose history may well give pride to all
women. Her inventive faculties, quickened by the stress of
child-bearing and child-rearing, primitive woman built up, by her own
activities and her own skill, a civilisation which owed its
institutions and mother-right customs to her constructive genius,
rather than to the destructive qualities which belonged to the
fighting male.

3. But again we find, as in the animal kingdom, that step by step the
forceful male asserts himself. We come to a third transitional period
in which the male relatives of the woman--usually the brother, the
maternal uncle--have usurped the chief power in the group. Inheritance
still passes through the mother, but her infl