“Whether this picture be accurate in detail or not there is at any rate a considerable body of evidence pointing to the ‘Matriarchate’ as a period during which women began medicine, the domestication of the smaller animals, the cultivation of vegetables, flax and corn, the use of the distaff, the spindle, the broom, the fire-rake and the pitchfork.

“In the Mother-Age the inheritance of property passed through the mother; the woman gave the children her own name; husband and father were in the background—­often far from individualized; the brother and uncle were much more important; the woman was the depository of custom, lore, and religious tradition; she was, at least, the nominal head of the family, and she had a large influence in tribal affairs.”

For some years past certain progressive women have shown signs of a reversion to the matriarchal state—­or shall we say a disposition to revive it?  In spite of human progress we travel more or less in circles, a truth of which the present war and its reversions is the most uncompromising example.

In the married state, for instance, these women have retained their own name, not even being addressed as Mrs., that after all is a polite variation of the Spanish “de,” which does not by any means indicate noble birth alone, women after marriage proudly announcing themselves as legally possessed.  For instance a girl whose name has been Elena Lopez writes herself after marriage Elena Lopez de Morena, the “de” in this case standing for “property of.”  It will be some time before the women of Spain travel far on the Northern road toward pride in sex deliverance, but with us, and in Britain, the custom is growing prevalent.

Then there is the hyphen marriage, more common still, in which the woman retains her own name, but condescends to annex the man’s.  Once in a way a man will prefix his wife’s name to his own, and there is one on record who prefixed his own to his wife’s.  But any woman may have her opinion of him.

So far as I have been able to ascertain these marriages are quite as successful as the average; and if the woman has a career on hand—­and she generally has—­she pursues it unhampered.  The grandmother or aunt takes charge of the children, if there are any, while she is at her duties without the home, and so far, the husband has been permitted the compensation of endowing the children with his name.

The reversion to the prehistoric matriarchate can hardly be complete in these days, but there are many significant straws that indicate the rising of a new wind blown by ancient instincts.  To look upon them as shockingly advanced or abnormal is an evidence of conservatism that does not reach quite far enough into the past.