indeed, I am not sure.

Yet in case I am mistaken here, let me say at once I am certain that
this return to the restricted family was a necessary and inevitable
step. The individual forces had to triumph. This may seem a
contradiction to all I have just said. What I wish to show is this:
one and all the phases in the development of society have been needful
and fruitful as successive stages in growth; yet none can
continue--none be regarded as the final stage, for each becomes
insufficient and narrow from the standpoint of the needs of a later
stage. We have reached the third stage--the patriarchal family which
still endures. And last and hardest to eradicate is that monopoly of
sexual possession, which says: "This woman and her children are mine:
I have tabooed her for life." Mankind has still to outlive this brute
instinct in its upward way to civilisation.

CHAPTER IX

WOMEN AND PRIMITIVE INDUSTRY

I have referred in an earlier chapter to a letter from Mr. H. G.
Wells, sent to me after the publication of my book, _The Truth about
Woman_. Now, there is one sentence in this letter that I wish to quote
here, because it brings home just what it is my purpose in this
chapter to show--that the mother-age was a civilisation owing its
institutions, and its early victories over nature, rather to the
genius of woman than to that of man. Mr. Wells does not, indeed, say
this. He rejects the mother-age, and in questioning my acceptance of
it as a stage in the past histories of societies, he writes: "The
primitive matriarchate never was anything more than mother at the
washing-tub and father looking miserable."

It seems to me that here, in his own inimitable way, Mr. Wells (though
I think quite unconsciously) sums up the past labour-history of woman
and man. His statement has very far-reaching considerations. It forces
us to accept the active utility of primitive woman in the community--a
utility more developed and practical than that of man. This was really
the basis of women's position of power. The constructive quality of
the female mind, at a time when the male attention and energy were
fixed chiefly on the destructive activities of warfare, was liberated
for use and invention. Women were the seekers, slowly increasing their
efficiency.

Very much the same account of the primitive sexual division in work
was given by an Australian Kurnai to Messrs. Fison and Howitt, in a
sentence that has been quoted very freq