the individual in the modern sense of the
word had to do with the origin of monogamy. The practice of all nations
of that stage still more proves this. While in the previous form of the
family the men were never embarrassed for women, but rather had more
than enough of them, women now became scarce and were sought after. With
the pairing family, therefore, the abduction and barter of women
began--widespread symptoms, and nothing but that, of a new and much more
profound change. The pedantic Scot, McLennan, however, transmuted these
symptoms, mere methods of obtaining women, into separate classes of the
family under the head of "marriage by capture" and "marriage by barter."
Moreover among American Indians and other nations in the same stage, the
marriage agreement is not the business of the parties most concerned,
who often are not even asked, but of their mothers. Frequently two
persons entirely unknown to one another are thus engaged to be married
and receive no information of the closing of the bargain, until the time
for the marriage ceremony approaches. Before the wedding, the bridegroom
brings gifts to the maternal relatives of the bride (not to her father
or his relatives) as an equivalent for ceding the girl to him. Either of
the married parties may dissolve the marriage at will. But among many
tribes, as, e. g., the Iroquois, public opinion has gradually become
averse to such separations. In case of domestic differences the gentile
relatives of both parties endeavor to bring about a reconciliation, and
not until they are unsuccessful a separation takes place. In this case
the woman keeps the children, and both parties are free to marry again.

The pairing family, being too weak and too unstable to make an
independent household necessary or even desirable, in no way dissolves
the traditional communistic way of housekeeping. But household communism
implies supremacy of women in the house as surely as exclusive
recognition of a natural mother and the consequent impossibility of
identifying the natural father signify high esteem for women, i. e.,
mothers. It is one of the most absurd notions derived from eighteenth
century enlightenment, that in the beginning of society woman was the
slave of man. Among all savages and barbarians of the lower and middle
stages, sometimes even of the higher stage, women not only have freedom,
but are held in high esteem. What they were even in the pairing family,
let Arthur Wright,