uence is growing less.
The right to dispose of women and the property which goes with them is
now used by the male rulers of the group. The sex habits have changed;
endogamous unions, or kin marriages within the clan, have given place
to exogamy, where marriage only takes place between members of
different groups. But at first the position of the husband and father
is little changed; he marries into the wife's group and lives with
her family, where he has no property rights or control over his wife's
children, who are now under the rule of the uncle.

4. It is plain that this condition would not be permanent. The male
power had yet to advance further; the child had to gain a father. We
reach the patriarchal period, in which descent through the male line
has replaced the earlier custom. Woman's power, first passing to her
brother or other male relative, has been transferred to the husband
and father. This change of power did not, of course, take place at
once, and even under fully developed father-right systems many traces
of the old mother-rights persist.

What it is necessary to fasten deeply in our minds is this: the father
as the head of the woman and her children, the ruler of the house, was
not the natural order of the primitive human family. Civilisation
started with the woman being dominant--the home-maker, the owner of
her children, the transmitter of property. It was--as will be made
abundantly clear from the cases we shall examine--a much later
economic question which led to a reversal of this plan, and brought
the rise of father-right, with the father as the dominant partner;
while the woman sank back into an unnatural and secondary position of
economic dependence upon the man who was her owner--a position from
which she has not even yet succeeded in freeing herself.

The maternal system of descent is found in all parts of the world
where social advance stands at a certain level. This fact, added to
the widespread traces the custom has left in every civilisation,
warrants the assumption that mother-right in all cases preceded
father-right, and has been, indeed, a stage of social growth for all
branches of the human race.[102]

I shall not attempt to give the numerous traces of mother-descent that
are to be found in the early histories of existing civilised nations,
for to do this would entail the writing of the whole chapter on this
subject. For the same reason I must reluctantly pass over the abundant
e