the Matriarchal Family in Australia, India,
and other countries_

It is only fair to state that the question of the position of women
during the mother-age is a disputed one. Bachofen[135] was the first
to build up in his classical works of Matriarchy, the gynaecocratic
theory which places the chief social power under the system of
mother-descent in the hands of women. This view has been disputed,
especially in recent years, and many writers who acknowledge the
widespread existence of maternal descent deny that it carries with it,
except in exceptional cases, mother-rights of special advantage to
women; even when these seem to be present they believe such rights to
be more apparent than real.[136]

One suspects prejudice here. To approach this question with any
fairness it is absolutely essential to clear the mind from our current
theories regarding the family. The order is not sacred in the sense
that it has always had the same form. It is this belief in the
immutability of our form of the sexual relationship which accounts for
the prejudice with which this question is so often approached. I fully
admit the dark side of the mother-age among many peoples; its sexual
licence, often brutal in practice, its cruelties and sacrifice of
life. But these are evils common to barbarism, and are found existing
under father-right quite as frequently as under mother-right. I
concede, too, that mother-descent was not necessarily or universally a
period of mother-rule. It was not. But that it did in many cases--and
these no exceptional ones--carry with it power for women, as the
transmitters of inheritance and property I am certain that the known
facts prove.[137] Nor do I forget that cruel treatment of women was
not uncommon in matriarchal societies. I have shown how in many tribes
the power rested in the woman's brother or male relations, and in all
such cases mother-descent was really combined with a patriarchal
system, the earlier authority of the mother persisting only as a
habit. But to argue from the cases of male cruelty that mother-descent
did not confer special advantages upon women is, I think, as absurd as
it would be to state that under the fully developed patriarchal rule
(as also in our society to-day) the authority was not in the hands of
men, because cases are not infrequent in which women ill-treat their
husbands. And, indeed, when we consider the position of the husband
and father under this early system, without