Matriliny

Discussion

Chris Knight and Camilla Power:

"The Discovery of Matriliny: Bachofen, Morgan, and Mother-Right

Matrilineal exogamy was first accurately described in print by an early English adventurer, John Lederer, who published an account of his travels in eastern North America in 1672 (Lederer 1672, 4-5). Fifty-two years later, Father Lafitau (1724, 1: 71-72) described in glowing terms the honored status of women among the matrilineally organized Iroquois. Scottish historian Adam Ferguson (1819 [1767], 126) remarked of “savage nations” in general that the “children are considered as pertaining to the mother, with little regard to descent on the father’s side.”

The Swiss jurist and historian Johann Jakob Bachofen drew on ancient Greek sources to argue that “mother right is not confined to any particular people but marks a cultural stage” (1973 [1861], 71). The legal historian J. F. McLennan read Bachofen’s book in 1866, after publishing his Primitive Marriage, which independently proposed “kinship through females” as the “more archaic system” (1865, 123). Most prominent in supporting Bachofen, however, was American business lawyer Lewis Henry Morgan, who researched matriliny among the Iroquois and other Native Americans. Describing an Iroquois longhouse, Morgan wrote of the common stores and “the matron in each household, who made a division of the food from the kettle to each family according to their needs.” Here, he commented, “was communism in living carried out in practical life.” In such households, he concluded, “was laid the foundation for that ‘mother-power’ which was even more conspicuous in the tribes of the Old World, and which Professor Bachofen was the first to discuss under the name of gyneocracy and mother- right” (1881, 126-28).

Engels elaborated Morgan’s findings in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1972 [1884]). “The rediscovery of the original mother-right gens,” he wrote, “....has the same significance for the history of primitive society as the theory of evolution has for biology, and Marx’s theory of surplus value for political economy.” He continues, “The mother right gens has become the pivot around which this entire science turns” (1972 [1884], 36). This was no hasty judgment. From their earliest days in revolutionary struggle, Marx and Engels had been wrestling with questions about sex as well as class. In 1844, Marx wrote that the “immediate, natural and necessary relationship of human being to human being is the relationship of man to woman,” adding that “from this relationship the whole cultural level of man can be judged” (2000 [1844], 96). Marx took Morgan’s work on the matrilineal clan as confirmation that primitive communism preceded propertybased class society and that its secret had been sexual equality.

In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels contrasted this with the subsequent dominance of “property, the nucleus, the first form, of which lies in the family, where wife and children are the slaves of the husband” (2000 [1846], 185).

Morgan recognized that the transition to patriliny rested on the isolation of women from one another in the husband’s home, reversing “the position of the wife and mother in the household” (1881, 128). Engels added political impact to this idea: “The overthrow of mother right was the World historic defeat of the female sex. The man seized the reins in the house also, the woman was degraded, enthralled, the slave of the man’s lust, a mere instrument for breeding children” (1972 [1884], 68; emphasis in original). He continued, “The first class antagonism which appears in history coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monogamian marriage, and the first class oppression with that of the female sex by the male” (1972 [1884], 75)."

(http://radicalanthropologygroup.org/wp-content/uploads/class_text_051.pdf)

Source

• Knight, C. and C. Power, 2005. ‘Grandmothers, Politics, and Getting Back to Science’. In E. Voland, A.

Chasiotis and W. Schiefenhövel (eds), Grandmotherhood. The evolutionary significance of the second half of female life. New Brunswick, New Jersey & London: Rutgers University Press, pp. 81-98.