revision that no one of the examples
given can be omitted. Facts are of so much more importance than
opinions if we are to come to the truth.

Without attempting to trace exhaustively the history or even to
enumerate the peoples living, or who have lived, under mother-right
customs, we have examined many and varied cases of the actual working
of this system, with special reference to the position held by women.
The examples have been chosen from all parts of the world, so as to
prove (what is sometimes denied) that mother-right has not been
confined to any one race, that it is not a local custom under special
conditions, but that it has been a necessary stage of growth of human
societies. My aim has been to illustrate the stages through which
society passed from mother-right to father-right. It has not been
possible to arrange the evidence in any exact progressive sequence,
but I hope the cases given will make clear what I believe to have
been the general trend of growth: at first the power in the hands of
the women, but this giving way to the slow but steady usurping of the
mother's authority by the ever-assertive male.

I shall now conclude this study of the mother-age by attempting to
formulate the general truths, which, it seems to me, may be drawn from
the examples we have examined.

I. The first effort of primitive society was to establish some form of
order, and in that order the women of the group were the more stable
and predominant partners in the family relationship.

II. Impelled by the conditions of motherhood to a more settled life
than the men of the tribe, women were the first agriculturists,
weavers, dyers and dressers of skins, potters, the domesticators of
animals, the first architects, and sometimes the primitive doctors--in
a word, the inventors and organisers of the peaceful art of life.[197]
Primitive women were strong in body[198] and capable in work. The
power they enjoyed as well as their manifold activities were a result
of their position as mothers, this function being to them a source of
strength and not a plea of weakness.

III. Moral ideas, as we understand them, hardly existed. The oldest
form of marriage was what is known as "group marriage," which was the
union of two tribal groups or clans, the men of one _totem_ group
marrying the women of another, and _vice versa_, but no man or woman
having one particular wife or husband.

IV. The individual relationship between the sexes beg