through their women." Why is
this true? For the reason that the savage is in the stage of
social order through which all civilized nations have passed at
some period--the stage of the mother-rule more or less modified
by partial masculine domination. It is a well-known fact of human
history and prehistoric record that the Matriarchate, or the
mother-rule, preceded the Patriarchate, or the father-rule. "All
the social fabrics of the world are built around women. The first
stable society was a mother and her child." The reason why the
primitive descent of name and property, and the first fixed stake
of home life, was the expression of this maternal relationship is
obvious. Motherhood was demonstrated by nature before fatherhood
was definitely known. Inheritance of name by the female line was
alone possible; and that, as well as the female holding and
transmitting of property, was a family or tribal or clan
relationship, women always retaining rule and wealth not so much
as individuals as custodians of communal life and possessions.
Not only was the mother with the child the first founder of human
society, but the woman in savage life was the first inventor and
originator of all life-sustaining industries....

When man also began to "settle down"--whether from personal
choice or from social pressure--when he, too, began to learn and
practice the industrial arts heretofore solely in the hands of
women, he began to press his more personal and individualistic
claims of recognition and of property-owning against the family
wealth of which the woman was the custodian.

As man more and more assumed the burden of the world's industries
outside the home (which before had been woman's care alone), and
as woman became more and more absorbed in purely domestic
concerns, man's individualism assumed greater and greater power
within the family life, and he gradually acquired the despotic
family headship which marked the ancient patriarchal order of
Rome. This was not a social descent, but an immense social
uplift, in the age in which it was natural. Professor Mason says,
and with profound truth, "Matrimony in all ages is an effort to
secure to the child the authenticity of the father." It was
necessary for social growth that offspring should have two
pa