Note (return) — SEX AND PRIMITIVE SOCIAL CONTROL

All ethnologists admit that descent through females has been very widespread, but some deny that this system has been universally prevalent at any stage of culture. Those who have diminished its importance, however, have done so chiefly in reinforcement of their denials of the theory of promiscuity. It has been very generally assumed that maternal descent is due solely to uncertainty of paternity, and that an admission that the maternal system has been universal is practically an admission of promiscuity. Opponents of this theory have consequently felt called upon to minimize the importance of maternal descent.120 But descent through females is not, in fact, fully explained by uncertainty of parentage on the male side. It is due to the larger social fact, including this biological one, that the bond between mother and child is the closest in nature, and that the group grew up about the more stationary female; and consequently the questions of maternal descent and promiscuity are by no means so inseparable as has commonly been assumed. We may accept Sir Henry Maine's terse remark that "paternity is a matter of inference, as opposed to maternity, which is a matter of observation,"121 without concluding that society would have been first of all patriarchal in organization, even if paternity had been also a matter of observation. For the association of the woman with the child is immediate and perforce, but the immediate interest of the man is in the woman, through the power of her sexual attractiveness, and his interest in the child is secondary and mediated through her. This relation being a constant one, having its roots in the nature of sex rather than in the uncertainty of parentage, we may safely conclude that the so-called "mother-right" has everywhere preceded "father-right," and was the fund from which the latter was evolved.