up-daughters would willingly become the wives of their
father. I cannot conceive them without some power to
exercise that choice in love, which is the right of the
female throughout nature. There is great insistence by Mr.
Atkinson, and all who have written on the subject, on the
sexual passions of the males, while the desires of the women
are not considered at all. Apparently they are held to have
had none! This affords yet another instance of the strange
concentration on the male side of the family. It is taken
for granted, for instance, that in every case the young men,
when driven from their home, had to capture their wives from
other groups. I would suggest that often the capture was
aided by the woman herself; she may even have escaped from
the hearth-home in her desire to find a partner, preferring
the rule of a young tyrant to an old one, who moreover was
her father. I believe, too, that the wives and mothers must
frequently have asserted their will in rebellion. I picture,
indeed, these savage women ever striving for more
privileges, and step by step advancing through peaceful
combination to power.

15. I desire also to maintain that all I have here suggested
finds support from what is known of the position of women
among primitive peoples; and I may add also, from the
character of women to-day.

Now I have summarised briefly what seem to me the probable conditions
of the women's daily life in these earliest groups. I have attempted
to show how the sexual jealousy, which acted for the destruction of
the mutually hostile male members, would necessitate for the women
conditions in many ways favourable; conditions of union in which lay
the beginnings of peace and order. What we have to fix in our thoughts
is the significant fact of the sociability of the women's lives in
contrast with the solitude of the jealous sire, watchfully resenting
the intrusion of all other males. Such conditions cannot have failed
to domesticate the women, and urged them forward to the work that was
still to be done in domesticating man. During the development of the
family, we may expect that the patriarch will seek to hold his rights,
and that the women will exert their influence more and more in
breaking these down; and this is precisely what we do find, as I
presently shall show.

One point further. It may, of course