The Sexes in Science and History: An inquiry into the dogma of woman's inferiority to manGamble, Eliza Burt
Philosophy
The Sexes in Science and History: An inquiry into the dogma of woman's inferiority to man
Gamble, Eliza Burt
Sex; Women -- History; Women -- Social conditions
Mr. Morgan informs us that the “Turanian, Ganowánian, and Malayan
systems of consanguinity show conclusively that kinship through males
was recognized as constantly as kinship through females,” that a man
had brothers and sisters, grandfathers and grandmothers traced through
males as well as through females. Although under gentile institutions
descent and all rights of succession were traced through mothers,
kinship through fathers was easily ascertained.
Hence it is plain that Mr. McLennan’s assumption that women were
enslaved in order to assure paternity, that they became subject to the
dominion and control of men so that fathers might not be compelled to
support children not their own, is not supported by the evidence at
hand.
That it was through capture, the forcible carrying away of women at
first singly and later in groups to foreign tribes, in which as aliens
and dependents they were shorn of their right to the soil, that males
were first enabled to arrogate to themselves the individual right to
property is a fact which has been overlooked by Mr. McLennan.
From the facts at hand relative to the earliest social regulation
of mankind, that into classes on the basis of sex, it is evident
that it was inaugurated for no other purpose than the restriction
of the marital relation—a restriction to prevent the pairing of
near relations. Yet Mr. McLennan would have us believe that “the law
compelling marriage outside the recognized limit of near relationship
originated in no innate or primary feeling against marriage with
kinsfolk.”
The repugnance of females among the lower orders of life to pairing
with those individuals which were distasteful to them, or for which
they felt no genuine affection, has already been referred to in these
pages. At the earliest dawn of human life there probably existed within
woman a naturally acquired aversion to pairing with near relations,
yet doubtless many ages elapsed before an idea of kinship sufficiently
definite to be incorporated into an arbitrary law for the government of
the group was formulated; but in due course of time, with the further
development of the higher characters, the idea of relationship began
to take shape, whereupon was inaugurated a movement which doubtless
represents one of the most important steps ever taken toward human
advancement.
As the female among all the orders of life, when free, is unwilling
to pair with individuals for which she feels no affection, and as the
sex-instinct has ever been restricted or held in abeyance by her, and
as according to the savants, it was through the efforts of women that
from time to time during the earlier ages of human existence the range
of conjugal rights was abridged, it is reasonable to suppose that it
was woman who first objected to the pairing with near relations.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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