Page:Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines.djvu/154

 husband and not the wife who left the house. But this influence of the woman did not reach outward to the affairs of the gens, phratry, or tribe, but seems to have commenced and ended with the household. This view is quite consistent with the life of patient drudgery and of general subordination to the husband which the Iroquois wife cheerfully accepted as the portion of her sex. Among the Grecian tribes descent had been changed to the male line at the commencement of the historical period. It thus reversed the position of the wife and mother in the household; she was of a different gens from her children, as well as her husband; and under monogamy was now isolated from her gentile kindred, living in the separate and exclusive house of her husband. Her new condition tended to subvert and destroy that power and influence which descent in the female line and the joint-tenement houses had created. It is, therefore, the more surprising that so many traces of this anterior condition should have remained in the Grecian and other tribes, which Professor Bachofen has pointed out, since gyneocracy and mother-right, as discussed by him, must have originated among these tribes when under the gentile organization, and with descent in the female line.

The "Joint Undivided Family" of the Hindus at the present time, "joint in food, worship, and estate," brought to our notice by Sir Henry Maine, is a similar but probably more numerous household than that of the Iroquois. As soon as special investigation is made, joint-tenement houses and communism in living are found to be persistent features of barbarous life in the Old World as well as the New, but limited to the household. Strabo informs us that the Gauls lived in great houses, constructed of planks and wicker, with dome roofs covered with heavy thatch. Wherever such houses existed there is at least a presumption that they were occupied by several families, who formed a single household and practiced communism.

The Iroquois long-houses disappeared before the commencement of the present century. Very little is now remembered by the Indians themselves of their form and mechanism, or of the plan of life within them. Some knowledge of these houses remains among that class of Indians who