what all this strife suggests--the unstable and
adventitious relation of the man to the social hearth-group. Such
conditions of antagonism of each male against every other male must
favour the assumption that no advance in peace--on which alone all
future progress depended--could have come from the patriarchs.
Jealousy forced them into unsocial conduct.

But advance by peace to progress was by some means to be made. I
believe that the way was opened up by women.

I hasten to add, however, in case I am mistaken here, that I am very
far from wishing to set up any claim of superiority for savage woman
over savage man. The momentous change was not, indeed, the result of
any higher spiritual quality in the female, nor was it a religious
movement, as is the beautiful dream of Bachofen. I do not think we can
credit "a movement" as having taken place at all, rather the change
arose gradually, inevitably, and quite simply. To postulate a
conscious movement towards progress organised by women is surely
absurd. Human nature does not start on any new line of conduct
voluntarily, rather it is forced into it in connection with the
conditions of life. Just as savage man was driven into unsocial
conduct, so, as I shall try to show, savage woman was led by the same
conditions acting in an opposite direction, into social conduct.

My own thought was drawn first to this conclusion by noting the
behaviour of a band of female turkeys with their young. It was a year
ago. I was staying in a Sussex village, and near by my home was the
meadow of a farm in which families of young turkeys were being reared.
Here I often sat; and one day it chanced that I was reading _Social
Origins and Primal Law_. I had reached the chapter on "Man in the
Brutal Stage," in which Mr. Atkinson gives the supposed facts of brute
man, and the action of his jealousy in the family group. I was very
much impressed; my reason told me that what the author stated so well
was probably right. Such sexually jealous conduct on the part of
savage man was likely to be true; it was much easier to accept this
than the state of promiscuous intercourse, with its friendly
communism in women, in which I had hitherto believed. I really was
very much disturbed. For I was still unshaken in my belief in
mother-right. How were the two theories to be reconciled?

Often it is a small thing that points to the way for which one is
seeking. All at once my little boy, who had been playing in