THE MOTHER IN THE PRIMITIVE FAMILY
(A chapter which may be omitted by the reader who has no interest in the customs of primitive peoples.)
“The clan exists on account of the struggle for existence, the family seeks for the enjoyment of that which they have obtained.”—Starcke.
And now having finished my preliminary study of the maternal instinct in the making, having given examples of its varied manifestations in the animal kingdom, and made clear certain general ideas on parenthood and the family, I may hope to go on to consider human mothers and fathers with a surer knowledge and less misunderstanding. The fitting method of inquiry, and the one I should like to employ would be to begin with the lowest forms of the human family. I myself am always greatly attracted by the customs of primitive peoples, for I was born amongst them. I hold that some knowledge of the family and the domestic and social conditions still to be found among uncivilised races, in all parts of the world, is essential to a complete understanding of our own social and sexual problems.
In an earlier work, The Age of Mother-Power,[64] I have given my views on the past history of the family. I have attempted to establish the existence of a Mother-age civilisation,[142] the so-called Matriarchate, described in detail the privileged position of the mother, and noted, with many examples, the family conditions, sex-customs and forms of marriage among primitive peoples. That book should form the historical section of this present work. It is, indeed, a necessary part of my inquiry. I am convinced that the only way to estimate the value of our present family system is to examine the history of that system in the past. We find suggestions of primitive customs in many directions; they are shadowed in certain of our marriage rites and direct many of our sex habits; they have left unmistakable traces on our literature, in our language and in our laws; indeed we may find their influence almost everywhere, if we know what to look for and how to interpret the signs. The close connection which links the present with the past cannot easily be neglected. We often say: This or that custom belongs to the present era: yet nine times out of ten the thing we believe to be new is in reality as old as the history of mankind. Often what we think is a step forward is not so at all; we are going back to a custom and practices long discarded. We are less inventive and more bound than we know. No period stands alone, and the present in every age is merely the shifting ground at which the past and the future meet.
I would therefore ask all those among my readers who care to follow in detail the history of the family through the long, early, upward stages of its growth, at this point to leave this work in order to read The Age of Mother-Power, therein to learn what I hold to have been the family conditions in the period known as the Mother-age. But as such a course may be impossible, or be disliked, by[143] the reader, I will now for our present guidance re-state very briefly the main conclusions arrived at by that investigation.
And first it should be noted that the history of human parenthood from its earliest known appearance shows an orderly progress from the start to the end. There is no difficulty even in fixing the beginning. Man, the gorilla, the orang and the chimpanzee had a common ancestor, and for this reason the parental stages of the great apes and of man have an almost startling resemblance. Professor Metchnikoff was so impressed by this likeness that he has suggested that the human race may have taken its origin from the precocious birth of an ape. We thus find no gap that has to be filled: we take up our inquiry of the family at the exact place at which we left it. There are, of course, changes to fit the parents and the young for their new stage of life; more and more instincts are modified by experiment and experience. Intelligence grows. New habits afford possibilities of advance, and suggest the directions in which the family may move. There are, however, far fewer experiments, less sharp differences in the conduct of the different parents; the family shows less flexibility, and the maternal instincts settle down, as it were, to an average character, with average limitations and an average expression.
Our most primitive ancestors, half-men, half-brutes, lived in small, solitary, and hostile family groups, composed of an adult male, his wife, or, if he were powerful, several wives and their children. In such a group the father is the chief or patriarch as long as he lives, and the family is held together by their common subjection to him. His interest in the family is confined to fighting[144] to drive off rivals, and, for this reason, he drives his sons from the home as soon as they are old enough to be dangerous to his interests: his daughters he adds to his wives, unless they are caught and carried off by some other male.
It was doubtless thus, in a family organisation similar to that of the great monkeys, that man first lived. Here was the most primitive form of jealous government of the family by the male. Such conduct, prompted by the egoistic desires of sex, mark the continuation of the degradation in fatherhood, which we noted as occurring among the mammals as soon as the father was freed from the duties of providing a home and the first feeding and tending of the young.
In the primitive families the idea of descent is feeble so that the groups are small and readily disrupted. But though originally without explicit consciousness of relationships, the members would be held together by a feeling of kin. Such feeling would become conscious first between the mothers and their children, and in this way mother-kin must have been realised at a very early period. The father’s relationship, on the other hand, would not be forced into conscious recognition. He would be a member apart from this natural kinship.
Such were the probable conditions in the primordial human family. The important thing to note is that in each family group there would be only one adult polygamous male, with several women of different ages, and the children of both sexes, all in more or less complete subjection to his rule.[65]
These customs of brute-male-ownership are still in great[145] measure preserved among the least-developed races. This may be called the pre-matriarchal stage of the family, and its existence explains how there are many rude peoples that exhibit no trace at all of mother-descent. In the lowest nomad bands of savages of the deserts and forests we still find these rough paternal groups, who know no social bonds, but are ruled alone by brute strength and jealous ownership. With them development has been very slow; they have not yet advanced to the social organisation of the maternal family clan.
From these first solitary families, grouped submissively around one tyrant-ruler, we reach a second stage, out of which order and organisation sprang. In this second stage the family expanded into the larger group of the communal clan. The change had to come. With the fierce struggle for existence, the solitary family-group became impossible, association was the only way to prevent extermination.
How did the change come?
Now, it is part of my conviction that the earliest movements towards peace and expansion of the family came through the influence of women. I must state briefly my reasons for this view.
In the first place it certainly would be in the women’s interests to consolidate the home and the family, and, by means of union, to establish their own power. What we desire and fix our attention upon, as a rule, is what we do. In the early groups the mothers with their adult daughters and the young of both sexes would live on terms of association as friendly hearthmates. Such is the marked difference in the position of the two sexes—the solitary jealous unsocial male and the united women.
[146]
The strongest factor in this association would arise from the dependence of the children upon their mothers, a dependence that was of much longer duration than among the animals on account of the pre-eminent helplessness of the human child, which entailed a more prolonged infancy. The women and the children would form the family-group, to which the male was attached by his sexual needs, but he remained always apart—a kind of jealous fighting specialist. The temporary hearth-home would be the shelter of the women. It was under this shelter that children were born and the group accumulated its members. Whether cave, or hollow tree, or frail branch shelter, the home must have belonged to the women.
It is clear that under these conditions the female members of the group-family must necessarily have been attached to the home much more closely than the man, whose desire lay in the opposite direction, and whose conduct by constant jealous fights tended to the disruption of the home. Moreover this home attachment would be present always and acting on the female members, as the daughters—unless captured by other males—would remain in the home as additional wives to their father; on the other hand, it could never arise in the case of the sons, whose fate was to be driven out from the hearth-home as soon as they were old enough to become rivals to their father. Such conditions must, as time went on, have profoundly modified the female outlook, bending the desire of the women to a steady settled life, conditions under which alone the family could expand and social organisation develop.
Again, the daily search for the daily food must surely have been undertaken chiefly by the women. For it is impossible that one man, however skilful a hunter, could have[147] fed all the female members and children of the group. Further than this, we may, I think, conceive that much of his attention and his time would be occupied in fighting his rivals; also his strength as sole progenitor must have been expended largely in sex. It is, therefore, probable that the male was dependent on the food activities of his women.
The mothers, their inventive faculties quickened by the stress of the needs of their children, would try to convert to their own uses the most available portion of their own environment. It would be under their attention that plants were first utilised for food, seeds planted and nuts and fruit stored, birds would also be snared, fish caught, and animals tamed for service. Primitive domestic vessels and baskets would be fashioned and clothes have to be made. All the faculties of the women, in exercises that would lead to the development of every part of their bodies and their minds, would be called into play by the work of satisfying the physical needs of the group.
In all these numerous activities the women of each group would work together. And through this co-operation must have resulted the assertion of the women’s power, as the directors and organisers of industrial occupations.
As the group slowly advanced in progress, such power, increasing, would raise the mother’s position; the women would establish themselves permanently as of essential value in the family, not only as the givers of life, but as the chief providers of the food essential to the preservation of the life of its members.
And a further result would follow in the treatment by the males of this new order. The women by obtaining and preparing food would gain an economic value. Wives would become to the husband a source of riches indispensable[148] to him, not only on account of his sex needs, but on account of the more persistent need of food. Thus the more women he possessed the greater would be his own comfort, and the physical prosperity of the group.
And again, a further result would follow. The greater the number of women in the group the stronger would become their power of combination. I attach great importance to this. Working together for the welfare of all, the maternal instinct of sacrifice would be greatly strengthened in the women so that necessarily they would come to consider the collective interests of the family. Can it be credited that such conditions could have acted upon the males, whose conduct would still be inspired by individual appetite and selfish inclination? I maintain such a view to be impossible.
Another advantage, I think, would arise for the women. From the circumstances of the family their interest in sex must have been less acute in consciousness than that of the male. They must have gained freedom from being less occupied with love, and from being less jealously interested in the male than he was in them. Doubtless each woman would be attracted by the male’s courageous action in fighting his rivals for possession of her, but when the rival was the woman’s own son such attraction would come into strong conflict with the deeper maternal instinct. Thus the unceasing sexual preoccupation of the male, with the emotional dependence it entailed on the females, must, I would suggest, have given the women an immense advantage. They would come to use their sex charms as an accessory of success. And if I am right here, the husband would be in the power of his women, much more surely than they would be in his power.
[149]
From the standpoint of physical strength the male was the master, the tyrant ruler of the family, who, doubtless, often was brutal enough. But the women with their children, leading an independent life to some extent, and with their mental ingenuity developed by the conditions of their life, would learn, I believe, to outwit their masters by passive united resistance. The mothers and daughters may even have asserted their will in rebellion. I picture, indeed, these savage women ever striving for more privilege, and step by step advancing through peaceful combination to power.
Such conditions as those I have briefly pictured could not fail to domesticate the women. They must have acted also in strengthening the bonds between the mothers and their children and in making more conscious the strong instinct of maternal sacrifice.
But mark this: I do not wish to set up any claim for, because I do not believe in, the superiority of one sex over the other sex. Character is determined by the conditions of living. If, as I conceive, progress came through the mothers, rather than through the father, it was because the conditions were really more favourable to them, and drove them on in the right path. Collective motives were more considered by women, not at all because of any higher standard of moral virtue, but because of the peculiar advantages arising to themselves and to their children—advantages of peaceful family association which could not exist in a group ruled by individual inclination.
During the development of the family, we may expect to find that the males will seek to hold their rights, and that the women of the group will exert their influence more and more in breaking these down; and this is precisely what[150] we do find. And for this reason the clan system, which developed from these solitary hostile families, must be considered as a feminine creation, which had special relation to motherhood.
The sexual egoism by which one male, through his strength and seniority, held marital rights over all the females of his group had to be struck at its roots. In other words, the solitary despot had to learn to tolerate the association of other adult males.
It is impossible for me here to follow step by step the means whereby this change was brought about. I would, however, assert my strong belief that it was the mothers, acting in the interests of their children, who tamed the jealous desires a............