“Nothing could be more perverse than to infer from the custom of reasoning kinship through females, that woman rules there, and that a father is not master of his children.  On the contrary, the father regards himself everywhere, even in tribes with a female line of descent, as the real procreator.  He is considered to be the one who plants the germ and the woman as merely the soil in which it grows.  And as the wife belongs to him, so does the child that comes from her womb.  Therefore he claims also those children of his wife concerning whom he knows or assumes that he did not beget them; for they grew on his soil.”

Similarly with the American Indians.  Grosse has devoted several pages (73-80) to show that with the tribes among which kinship through females prevails woman’s position is not in the least better than with the others.  Everywhere woman is bought, obliged to submit to polygamy, compelled to do the hardest and least honorable work, and often treated worse than a dog.  The same is true of the African tribes among whom kinship in the female line prevails.

If, therefore, kinship through mothers does not argue female supremacy, how did that kinship arise?  Le Jeune offered a plausible explanation as long ago as 1632.  In the Jesuit Relations (VI., 255), after describing the immorality of the Indians, he goes on to say: 

“As these people are well aware of this corruption, they prefer to take the children of their sisters as heirs, rather than their own, or than those of their brothers, calling in question the fidelity of their wives, and being unable to doubt that these nephews come from their own blood.  Also among the Hurons—­who are more licentious than our Montagnais, because they are better fed—­it is not the child of a captain but his sister’s son, who succeeds the father.”

The same explanation has been advanced by other writers and by the natives of other countries where kinship through females prevails;[29] and it doubtless holds true in many cases.

In others the custom of naming children after their mothers is probably simply a result of the fact that a child is always more closely associated with the mother than with the father.  She brings it into the world, suckles it, and watches over it; in the primitive times, even if promiscuity was not prevalent, marriages were of short duration and divorces frequent, wherefore the male parentage would be so constantly in doubt that the only feasible thing was to name the children after their mothers.  For our purposes, fortunately, this knotty problem of the origin of kinship through females, which has given sociologists so much trouble,[30] does not need to be solved.  We are concerned solely with the question, “Does kinship in the female line indicate the supremacy of women, or their respectful treatment?” and that question, as we have seen, must be answered with a most emphatic No.  There is not a single fact