recognition
of her motherhood_. Just as a child is first disciplined by
its mother, so are people by their women. It is only the
wife who can control the man's essentially unbridled
desires, and lead him into the paths of well-doing....
_While man went abroad on distant forays, the woman stayed
at home, and was undisputed mistress of the household._ She
took arms against her foe, and was gradually transformed
into an Amazon."[18]

[18] _Das Mutterrecht_, pp. 18-19.

The italics in the passage are mine, for they bear directly on what I
shall afterwards have to prove: (1) that mother-right was not the
first stage in the history of the human family; (2) that its existence
is not inconsistent with the patriarchal theory. Bachofen here
suggests a pre-matriarchal period in which the elementary family-group
was founded on and held together by a common subjection to the oldest
and strongest male. This is the primordial patriarchal family.

Then come the questions: Can we accept mother-right? Are there any
reasonable causes to explain the rise of female dominance?
Westermarck, in criticising the matriarchal theory, has said: "The
inference that 'kinship through females only' has everywhere preceded
the rise of 'kinship through males,' would be warranted only on
condition that the cause, or the causes, to which the maternal system
is owing, could be proved to have operated universally in the past
life of mankind."[19] Now, this is what I believe I am able to do.
Hence it has been necessary first to clear the way of the old errors.
Bachofen's interpretation is too fanciful to find acceptance. Will any
one hold it as true that the change came because _women willed it_?
Surely it is a pure dream of the imagination to credit women, at this
supposed early stage of society, with rising up to establish marriage,
in a revolt of purity against sexual licence, and moreover effecting
the change by force of arms! Bachofen would seem to have been touched
with the Puritan spirit. I am convinced also that he understood very
little of the nature of woman. Conventional morality has always acted
on the side of the man, not the woman. The clue is, indeed, given in
the woman's closer connection with the home, and in the idea that "she
raises herself by the recognition of her motherhood." But the facts
are capable of an entirely different interpretation. It will be my aim
to give a quite simple, and eve