Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/433

 WOMEN IN EARL Y CIVILIZA TION 4 1 7

the idea that our estimation of the female sex is very low indeed, and that our men are very greedy.

To sum up: Among the uncivilized races the position of women varies. Among some it is undoubtedly very bad ; among others it is extremely good; and, generally speaking, it is much better than it is commonly supposed to be. We now come to a very important problem, but one extremely difficult to solve: Why are women treated so differently in different societies ?

It has been suggested that the social status of women is connected with the system of tracing descent. As is well known, among many of the lower races kinship is reckoned exclusively through the mother. This means that a person is considered a member of his mother's clan, not of his father's, and that property and rank succeed in the female line; for instance, that a man's nearest heir is not his own, but his sister's son. In a few excep- tional cases the system of maternal descent even implies that a man's children are largely in the power of their maternal uncle. But this system does not imply that the mother is the head of the family; and, however it may have originated, no sociologist nowadays believes in Bachofen's theory that the system of tracing descent through the mother is a consequence of the supremacy of women. But Dr. Steinmetz, the well-known Dutch sociologist, has tried to show that the husband's authority over his wife is, broadly speaking, greater among those peoples which reckon kin- ship through the father than among those that reckon kinship through the mother only. The cases examined by Dr. Steinmetz, however, are too few to allow of any general conclusions, and the statements concerning the husband's rights are commonly so indefinite and so incomplete that I think the evidence would be difficult to produce, even if the investigation were based on a larger number of facts. When I compare with each other peoples of the same race, at the same stage of culture, living in the same neighborhood, under similar conditions of life, but differing from one another in their method of reckoning kinship, I do not find that the prevalence of the one or the other line of descent mate- rially affects the husband's authority. Nothing of the kind is noticeable in Australia, nor, so far as I know, in India, where the