The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought | Page 7

widely over the whole globe; in some places, however, only in fragmentary condition. It is found amongst nearly all the native tribes of America; the peoples of Malaysia, Melanesia, Australia, Micronesia, and Polynesia, the Dravidian tribes of India; in Africa it is found in the eastern Sahara, the Soudan, the east and west coast, and in the centre of the continent, but not to the exclusion, altogether, of father-right, while in the north the intrusion of Europeans and the followers of Islam has tended to suppress it. Traces of its former existence are discovered among certain of the ancient tribes of Asia Minor, the old Egyptians, Arabs, Greeks, Romans, Teutons, the Aryans of India, the Chinese, Japanese, etc.
Mother-right has been recognized by many sociologists as a system of family relationship, perhaps the most widespread, perhaps the most primitive of all. Dr. Brinton says:--
"The foundation of the gentile system, as of any other family life, is ... the mutual affection between kindred. In the primitive period this is especially between children of the same mother, not so much because of the doubt of paternity, as because physiologically and obviously, it is the mother in whom is formed, and from whom alone proceeds, the living being" (412. 47).
Professor O. T. Mason, in the course of his interesting address on "Woman's Share in Primitive Culture," remarks (112. 10):--
"Such sociologists as Morgan and McLennan affirm that the primitive society had no family organization at all. They hypothecate a condition in which utter promiscuity prevailed. I see no necessity for this. There is some organization among insects. Birds mate and rear a little family. Many animals set up a kind of patriarchal horde. On the other hand, they err greatly who look among savages for such permanent home life as we enjoy. Marriages are in groups, children are the sons and daughters of these groups; divorces are common. The fathers of the children are not known, and if they were, they would have no authority on that account. The mother never changes her name, the children are named after her, or, at least, are not named after the father. The system of gentes prevails, each gens consisting of a hypothetical female ancestress, and all her descendants through females. These primitive men and women, having no other resort, hit upon this device to hold a band of kin together. Here was the first social tie on earth; the beginning of the state. The first empire was a woman and her children, regardless of paternity. This was the beginning of all the social bonds which unite us. Among our own Indians mother-right was nearly universal. Upon the death of a chief whose office was hereditary, he was succeeded, not by his son, but by the son of a sister, or an aunt, or a niece; all his property that was not buried with him fell to the same parties, could not descend to his children, since a child and the father belonged to different gentes." McLennan has discussed at some length the subject of kinship in ancient Greece (115. 193-246), and maintains that "the system of double kinship, which prevailed in the time of Homer, was preceded by a system of kinship through females only," referring to the cases of Lycaon, Tlepolemus, Helen, Arnaeus, Glaucus, and Sarpedon, besides the evidence in the Orestes of Euripides, and the Eumenides of Aeschylus. In the last, "the jury are equally divided on the plea [that Orestes was not of kin to his mother, Clytemnestra, whom he had killed, --"Do you call me related by blood to my mother?"], and Orestes gains his cause by the casting vote of Athene." According to tradition, "in Greece, before the time of Cecrops, children always bore the name of their mothers," in marked contrast to tha state of affairs in Sparta, where, according to Philo, "the marriage tie was so loose that men lent their wives to one another, and cared little by whom children were begotten, provided they turned out strong and healthy."
We have preserved for us, by Plutarch and others, some of the opinions of Greek philosophers on the relation of the father and the mother to the child. Plato is represented as calling "mind the conception, idea, model, and _father_; and matter the mother, nurse, or seat and region capable of births." Chrysippus is said to have stated: "The foetus is nourished in the womb like a plant; but, being born, is refrigerated and hardened by the air, and its spirit being changed it becomes an animal," a view which, as McLennan points out, "constitutes the mother the mere nurse of her child, just as a field is of the seed sown in it."
The view of Apollo, which, in the council of the gods, influenced Athene to decide for Orestes, is