not pleased with her
husband, she withdrew, and a similar attack followed. On this account
many men were not married, preferring to live with paid women.
Likewise, in the Gilbert Islands a man shows the same respect to a
woman as to a chief, by stepping aside when he meets her. If a man
strikes a woman, the other women drive him from the tribe. On Lukunor
the men used, in conversation with women, not the usual, but a
deferential form of language.[125]

The discoverers of the Friendly Islands found there a king in
authority over the people, and his wife in control of the king,
receiving homage from him, but not ruling.[126] In these and similar
cases woman's early relation to the household is formally retained in
the larger group and in the presence of an obviously masculine form of
organization.

But, in contrast with the survival in political systems of the
primitive respect shown mothers, we find the assertion of individual
male force within the very bosom of the maternal organization, in
the person of the husband, brother, or uncle of the woman. Among the
Caribs "the father or head of the household exerts unlimited authority
over his wives and children, but this authority is not founded on
legal rights, but upon his physical superiority."[127] In spite of the
maternal system in North America, the women were often roughly handled
by their husbands. Schoolcraft says of the Kenistenos: "When a young
man marries, he immediately goes to live with the father and mother
of his wife, who treat him, nevertheless, as an entire stranger till
after the birth of his first child." But

it appears that chastity is considered by them as a virtue
... and it sometimes happens that the infidelity of a wife
is punished by the husband with the loss of her hair, nose,
or perhaps life. Such severity proceeds, perhaps, less from
rigidity of virtue than from its having been practiced without
his permission; for a temporary interchange of wives is not
uncommon, and the offer of their persons is considered as a
necessary part of the hospitality due to strangers.[128]

Schoolcraft also says of the women of the Chippeways, among whom the
maternal system had given way:

They are very submissive to their husbands, who have however,
their fits of jealousy; and for very trifling causes treat
them with such cruelty as sometimes to occasion their death.
They are frequently objects of traffic, and