Now I submit to the judgment of my readers--what do these examples of mother-right show, if not that, broadly speaking, women were the dominant force in this stage of the family. No doubt too much importance may be attached to the idea of women ruling. This is an error I have tried to guard against. My aim throughout has been to establish mother-right, not mother-rule. I believe it is only by an extraordinary power of illusion that we can recognise, in the favourable position of women under mother-descent Bachofen’s view of an Amazonian gynæcocracy. But this does not weaken at all my position. I maintain that such customs of courtship, marriage and divorce, of property inheritance and possession, and of the domestic and social rights, as those we have seen in the cases examined, afford conclusive proof of women’s power in the maternal family. If this is denied, the only conclusion that suggests itself to me is that, those who seek to diminish the power of mother-right have done so in reinforcement of a preconceived idea of the superiority of the man as the natural and unchanging order in the relationships of the sexes. One suspects prejudice here. To approach this question with any fairness, it is absolutely essential to clear the mind from the current theories regarding the family. The order is not sacred in the sense that it has always had the same form. It is this belief in the immutability of our form of marriage and the family which accounts for the prejudice with which this question is approached. The modern civilised man cannot easily accustom himself to the idea that in the maternal family the dominion of the mother was regarded as the natural, and, therefore, the right and accepted order of the family. It is very difficult for us even to believe in a relationship of the mother and the father that is so exactly opposite to that with which we are accustomed. CHAPTER VIII MOTHER-RIGHT CUSTOMS AND THE TRANSITION TO FATHER-RIGHT Endeavour has been made in the previous chapters to present the case for mother-right as clearly and concisely as possible. The point we have now reached is this: while mother-right does not constitute or make necessary rule by women, under that system they enjoy considerable power as the result (1) of their organised position under the maternal marriage among their own clan-kindred, (2) of their importance to the male members of the clan as the transmitters and holders of property. It is necessary to remember the close connection between these mother-right customs and the communal clan, which was a free association for mutual protection. This is a point of much interest. As we have seen, the undivided family of the clan could be maintained only by descent through the mothers, since its existence depended on its power to retain and protect all its members. In this way it destroyed the solitary family, by its opposition to the authority and will of the husband and father.