the earliest groupings of population were about the females rather
than the males.

While at a disadvantage in point of force when compared with the male,
the female has enjoyed a negative superiority in the fact that her
sexual appetite was not so sharp as that of the male. Primitive man,
when he desired a mate, sought her. The female was more passive and
stationary. She exercised the right of choice, and had the power to
transfer her choice more arbitrarily than has usually been recognized;
but the need of protection and assistance in providing for offspring
inclined her to a permanent union, and doubtless natural selection
favored the groups in which parents co-operated in caring for the
offspring. But assuming a relation permanent enough to be called
marriage, the man was still, as compared with the woman, unsettled
and unsocial. He secured food by violence or cunning, and hunting and
fighting were fit expressions of his somatic habit.

The woman was the social nucleus, the point to which he returned from
his wanderings. In this primitive stage of society, however, the bond
between woman and child was altogether more immediate and constraining
than the bond between woman and man. The maternal instinct is
reinforced by necessary and constant association with the child. We
can hardly find a parallel for the intimacy of association between
mother and child during the period of lactation; and, in the absence
of domesticated animals or suitable foods, and also, apparently, from
simple neglect formally to wean the child, this connection is greatly
prolonged. The child is frequently suckled from four to five years,
and occasionally from ten to twelve.[95] In consequence we find
society literally growing up about the woman. The mother and her
children, and her children's children, and so on indefinitely in
the female line, form a group. But the men were not so completely
incorporated in this group as the women, not only because parentage
was uncertain and naming of children consequently on the female side,
but because the man was neither by necessity nor disposition so much a
home-keeper as the women and their children.

The tangential disposition of the male is expressed in the system of
exogamy so characteristic of tribal life. The movement toward exogamy
doubtless originates in the restlessness of the male, the tendency to
make new co-ordinations, the stimulus to seek more unfamiliar women,
and the emotional interes