The Caribs had a different reason for making it unlawful to eat women.  “Those who were captured,” says P. Martyr, “were kept for breeding, as we keep fowl, etc,” Sir Samuel Baker relates (A.N., 240), that among the Latookas it was considered a disgrace to kill a woman—­not, however, because of any respect felt for the sex, but because of the scarcity and money value of women.

HOMAGES TO PRIESTESSES

Equally deceptive are all other apparent exceptions to the customary contempt for women.  While the women of Fiji, Tonga, and other islands of the Pacific were excluded from all religious worship, and Papuan females were not even allowed to approach a temple, it is not uncommon among the inferior races for women to be priestesses.  Bosnian relates (363) that on the African Slave Coast the women who served as priestesses enjoyed absolute sway over their husbands, who were in the habit of serving them on their knees.  This, however, was contrary to the general rule, wherefore it is obvious that the homage was not to the woman as such, but to the priestess.  The feeling inspired in such cases is, moreover, fear rather than respect; the priestess among savages is a sorceress, usually an old woman whose charms have faded, and who has no other way of asserting herself than by assuming a pretence to supernatural powers and making herself feared as a sorceress.  Hysterical persons are believed by savages to be possessed of spirits, and as women are specially liable to hysteria and to hallucinations, it was natural that they should be held eligible for priestly duties.  Consequently, if there was any respect involved here at all, it was for an infirmity, not for a virtue—­a result of superstition, not of appreciation or admiration of special feminine qualities.[28]

KINSHIP THROUGH FEMALES ONLY

Dire confusion regarding woman’s status has been created in many minds by three distinct ethnologic phenomena, which are, moreover, often confounded:  (1) kinship and heredity through females; (2) matriarchy, or woman’s rule in the family (domestic); (3) gynaicocracy, or woman’s rule in the tribe (political).

(1) It is a remarkable fact that among many tribes, especially in Australia, America, and Africa, children are named after their mother, while rank and property, too, are often inherited in the female line of descent.  Lafitau observed this custom among American Indians more than a century ago, and in 1861 a Swiss jurist, Bachofen, published a book in which he tried to prove, with reference to this “kinship through mothers only,” that it indicated that there was a time when women everywhere ruled over men.  A study of ethnologic data shows, however, that this inference is absolutely unwarranted by the facts.  In Australia, for instance, where children are most commonly named after their mother’s clan, there is no trace of woman’s rule over man, either in the present or the past.  The man treats the woman as a master treats his slaves, and is complete master of her children.  Cunow, an authority on Australian relationships, remarks (136):