her-descent did not
constitute or make necessary rule by women, under this system they
enjoyed considerable power as the result (1) of their position as
property-holders, (2) of their freedom in marriage and the social
habits arising from it. This conclusion will be strengthened if we
return to our examination of mother-right customs, as we shall find
them in all parts of the world. I must select a few examples from as
various countries as is possible, and describe them very briefly; not
because these cases offer less interest than the matrilineal tribes of
America, but because of the length to which this part of my inquiry is
rapidly growing.

Let us begin with Australia, where the aboriginal population is in a
more primitive condition than any other race whose institutions have
been investigated. In certain tribes the family has hardly begun to be
distinguished from kin in general. The group is divided into male and
female classes, in addition to the division into clans.[142] This is
so among the tribes of Mount Gambier, of Darling River, and of
Queensland. Marriage within the clan is strictly forbidden, and the
male and female classes of each clan are regarded as brothers and
sisters. But as every man is brother to all the sisters of his clan,
he is husband to all the women of the other clans of his tribe.
Marriage is not an individual act, it is a social condition. The
custom is not always carried out in practice, but any man of one clan
has the right, if he wishes to exercise it, to call any woman
belonging to another clan of his tribe his wife, and to treat her as
such.[143] The children of each group belong naturally to the clan of
the mother, and there is no legal parenthood between them and their
father. In the case of war the son must join the maternal tribe. But
this is not the universal rule, and in many tribes the children now
belong to the paternal clan. The paternal family is beginning to be
established in Australia, and varied artifices are used to escape from
the tribal marriage and to form unions on an individual basis.

Mother-right is still in force in parts of India, though owing to the
influence of Brahmanism on the aboriginal tribes the examples are
fewer than might be expected. This change has brought descent through
the fathers, and has involved, besides, the more or less complete
subjugation of women, with insistence on female chastity, abolition of
divorce, infant marriage, and perpetuation