Book Review: The Position
of Woman in Primitive Society, by C.
Gasquoine Hartley. What form did the family take in its earliest stage? Did
it start as a small group or with the clan or horde? What were the earliest
conditions of the sexual relationships? Was promiscuity at one period the rule?
Was the foundation of the family based on the authority of the father, or of
the mother? The book begins with an exposition of Bachofen’s theory of the
matriarchate, Das Mutterrecht, which drew the attention of the world to the
fact that a system of kinship through mothers only prevailed among many
primitive peoples, much before the rise of kinship through males. It then
propounds the idea that a change however is due, as far as humans go, since the
principal of motherhood is common to all the spheres of animal life, but man
goes beyond this tie in gaining pre-eminence in the process of procreation, and
thus becomes conscious of his higher vocation. In fact men and women lived originally in a state of
promiscuity, where maternal descent prevailed, but the more religious women
brought in ideas of good behavior, or moral sense, and the natural leaning to
patriarchy. Then the primeval man lived in small family
groups, composed of an adult male, and of his wife, or, if he were powerful,
several wives, whom he jealously guarded from the sexual advances of all other
males, and thus came the making of patriarchy. But women continued her pivotal
role in family. ‘Women invented and exercised in common multifarious household
occupations and industries. Curing food, tanning the hides of animals,
spinning, weaving, dyeing—all are carried on by women. The domestication of
animals is usually in women’s hands.’ Women were the main workforce.
The author mentions of our
primitive ancestors as, half-men, half-brutes, lived in small, solitary and
hostile family groups, held together by a common subjection to the strongest
male, and who was the father and the owner of all the women, and their
children. In that undisciplined lot, matriarchy arose to fill the need for some
orderliness. The author correctly mentions of an active part being taken by the
women, in all the relationships of the family, ‘quite opposed’ to the great
majority of learned opinion. Not only that, this has been attributed to the
fact that ‘the writers on these questions are men, and there is, I imagine, a
certain blindness in their view’. But the author fails to mention the
transition of women from ‘the main workforce’ to a rather relaxed life. Or the
change from ‘an equal being’, to one who is visible inferior. Had the author
investigated further, wouldn’t he have come to the conclusion, that it was due
to men volunteering for all tasks involving heavy labor with an aim to escape
from sexual performance, women happen to lead an easy life. And as a result of
following such an easy life, over generations, women happen to become, visibly
of inferior constitution.
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