Marriage and Family Life

84:2.1The woman’s pe­ri­odic hem­or­rhage and her fur­ther loss of blood at child­birth early sug­gested blood as the cre­ator of the child (even as the seat of the soul) and gave ori­gin to the blood-bond con­cept of hu­man re­la­tion­ships. In early times all de­scent was reck­oned in the fe­male line, that be­ing the only part of in­her­i­tance which was at all cer­tain.

84:2.2The prim­i­tive fam­ily, grow­ing out of the in­stinc­tive bi­o­logic blood bond of mother and child, was in­evitably a mother-fam­ily; and many tribes long held to this ar­range­ment. The mother-fam­ily was the only pos­si­ble tran­si­tion from the stage of group mar­riage in the horde to the later and im­proved home life of the polyg­a­mous and monog­a­mous fa­ther-fam­i­lies. The mother-fam­ily was nat­u­ral and bi­o­logic; the fa­ther-fam­ily is so­cial, eco­nomic, and po­lit­i­cal. The per­sis­tence of the mother-fam­ily among the North Amer­i­can red men is one of the chief rea­sons why the oth­er­wise pro­gres­sive Iro­quois never be­came a real state.

84:2.3Un­der the mother-fam­ily mores the wife’s mother en­joyed vir­tu­ally su­preme au­thor­ity in the home; even the wife’s broth­ers and their sons were more ac­tive in fam­ily super­vi­sion than was the hus­band. Fa­thers were of­ten re­named af­ter their own chil­dren.

84:2.4The ear­li­est races gave lit­tle credit to the fa­ther, look­ing upon the child as com­ing al­to­gether from the mother. They be­lieved that chil­dren re­sem­bled the fa­ther as a re­sult of as­so­ci­a­tion, or that they were “marked” in this man­ner be­cause the mother de­sired them to look like the fa­ther. Later on, when the switch came from the mother-fam­ily to the fa­ther-fam­ily, the fa­ther took all credit for the child, and many of the taboos on a preg­nant woman were sub­se­quently ex­tended to in­clude her hus­band. The prospec­tive fa­ther ceased work as the time of de­liv­ery ap­proached, and at child­birth he went to bed, along with the wife, re­main­ing at rest from three to eight days. The wife might arise the next day and en­gage in hard la­bor, but the hus­band re­mained in bed to re­ceive con­grat­u­la­tions; this was all a part of the early mores de­signed to es­tab­lish the fa­ther’s right to the child.

84:2.5At first, it was the cus­tom for the man to go to his wife’s peo­ple, but in later times, af­ter a man had paid or worked out the bride price, he could take his wife and chil­dren back to his own peo­ple. The tran­si­tion from the mother-fam­ily to the fa­ther-fam­ily ex­plains the oth­er­wise mean­ing­less pro­hi­bi­tions of some types of cousin mar­riages while oth­ers of equal kin­ship are ap­proved.

84:2.6With the pass­ing of the hunter mores, when herd­ing gave man con­trol of the chief food sup­ply, the mother-fam­ily came to a speedy end. It failed sim­ply be­cause it could not suc­cess­fully com­pete with the newer fa­ther-fam­ily. Power lodged with the male rel­a­tives of the mother could not com­pete with power con­cen­trated in the hus­band-fa­ther. Woman was not equal to the com­bined tasks of child­bear­ing and of ex­er­cis­ing con­tin­u­ous au­thor­ity and in­creas­ing do­mes­tic power. The on­com­ing of wife steal­ing and later wife pur­chase has­tened the pass­ing of the mother-fam­ily.

84:2.7The stu­pen­dous change from the mother-fam­ily to the fa­ther-fam­ily is one of the most rad­i­cal and com­plete right-about-face ad­just­ments ever ex­e­cuted by the hu­man race. This change led at once to greater so­cial ex­pres­sion and in­creased fam­ily ad­ven­ture.