Such were the probable conditions in the primordial human family. The important thing to note is that in each family group there would be only one adult polygamous male, with several women of different ages, and the children of both sexes, all in more or less complete subjection to his rule.[65] These customs of brute-male-ownership are still in great measure preserved among the least-developed races. This may be called the pre-matriarchal stage of the family, and its existence explains how there are many rude peoples that exhibit no trace at all of mother-descent. In the lowest nomad bands of savages of the deserts and forests we still find these rough paternal groups, who know no social bonds, but are ruled alone by brute strength and jealous ownership. With them development has been very slow; they have not yet advanced to the social organisation of the maternal family clan. From these first solitary families, grouped submissively around one tyrant-ruler, we reach a second stage, out of which order and organisation sprang. In this second stage the family expanded into the larger group of the communal clan. The change had to come. With the fierce struggle for existence, the solitary family-group became impossible, association was the only way to prevent extermination. How did the change come? Now, it is part of my conviction that the earliest movements towards peace and expansion of the family came through the influence of women. I must state briefly my reasons for this view. In the first place it certainly would be in the women’s interests to consolidate the home and the family, and, by means of union, to establish their own power. What we desire and fix our attention upon, as a rule, is what we do. In the early groups the mothers with their adult daughters and the young of both sexes would live on terms of association as friendly hearthmates. Such is the marked difference in the position of the two sexes—the solitary jealous unsocial male and the united women. The strongest factor in this association would arise from the dependence of the children upon their mothers, a dependence that was of much longer duration than among the animals on account of the pre-eminent helplessness of the human child, which entailed a more prolonged infancy. The women and the children would form the family-group, to which the male was attached by his sexual needs, but he remained always apart—a kind of jealous fighting specialist. The temporary hearth-home would be the shelter of the women. It was under this shelter that children were born and the group accumulated its members. Whether cave, or hollow tree, or frail branch shelter, the home must have belonged to the women.