Page:The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.djvu/67

61 everywhere else. Occasionally they did not hesitate to dethrone a chief and degrade him to a common warrior."

The communistic household, in which most or all the women belong to one and the same gens, while the husband come £rnm different gentes, is the cause and foundation of the general and widespread supremacy of women in primeval times. The discovery of this fact is the third merit of Bachofen. By way of supplement I wish to state that the reports of travelers and missionaries concerning the overburdening of women among savages and barbarians do not in the least contradict the above statements. The division of labor between both sexes is caused by other reasons than the social condition of women. Nations, where women have to work much harder than is proper for them in our opinion, often respect women more highly than Europeans do. The lady of civilized countries, surrounded with sham homage and a stranger to all real work stands on a far lower social level than a hard-working barbarian woman, regarded as a real lady (frown-lady-mistress) and having the character of such.

Whether or not the pairing family has in our time entirely supplanted group marriage in America, can be decided only by closer investigations among those nations of northwestern and especially of southern America that are still in the higher stage of savagery. About the latter so many reports of sexual license are current that the assumption of a complete cessation of the ancient group marriage is hardly warranted. Evidently all traces of it have not yet disappeared. In at least forty North American tribes the man marrying an elder sister has the right to make all her sisters his wives as soon as they are of age, a survival of the community of men for the whole series of sisters. And Bancroft relates that the Indians of