Note 17 — Chapter XII · Race in Folklore and Myth

Now what people could have come by the idea of a race of women only? Surely no people who considered that they themselves had fathers: it must have been some community so low in the scale of civilization as never to have had any notion whatsoever of paternity: it is their ignorance that would alone render possible the notion of a race all women. That this was a matter of belief in the past of many nations, is proved by the occurrence of widely known legends about virgin mothers17; not to mention that it has been lately established, that there are savages who to this day occupy the low place here indicated in the scale of civilization. Witness the evidence of Spencer and Gillen in their recently published work on The Native Tribes of Central Australia, and also what Frazer, author of The Golden Bough, says of a passage in point, in the former, as follows:—