SEX AND PRIMITIVE SOCIAL CONTROL

The greater strength and restlessness of man and the more stationary condition of woman have a striking social expression in the fact that the earliest groupings of population were about the females rather than the males.

While at a disadvantage in point of force when compared with the male, the female has enjoyed a negative superiority in the fact that her sexual appetite was not so sharp as that of the male.  Primitive man, when he desired a mate, sought her.  The female was more passive and stationary.  She exercised the right of choice, and had the power to transfer her choice more arbitrarily than has usually been recognized; but the need of protection and assistance in providing for offspring inclined her to a permanent union, and doubtless natural selection favored the groups in which parents co-operated in caring for the offspring.  But assuming a relation permanent enough to be called marriage, the man was still, as compared with the woman, unsettled and unsocial.  He secured food by violence or cunning, and hunting and fighting were fit expressions of his somatic habit.

The woman was the social nucleus, the point to which he returned from his wanderings.  In this primitive stage of society, however, the bond between woman and child was altogether more immediate and constraining than the bond between woman and man.  The maternal instinct is reinforced by necessary and constant association with the child.  We can hardly find a parallel for the intimacy of association between mother and child during the period of lactation; and, in the absence of domesticated animals or suitable foods, and also, apparently, from simple neglect formally to wean the child, this connection is greatly prolonged.  The child is frequently suckled from four to five years, and occasionally from ten to twelve.[95] In consequence we find society literally growing up about the woman.  The mother and her children, and her children’s children, and so on indefinitely in the female line, form a group.  But the men were not so completely incorporated in this group as the women, not only because parentage was uncertain and naming of children consequently on the female side, but because the man was neither by necessity nor disposition so much a home-keeper as the women and their children.

The tangential disposition of the male is expressed in the system of exogamy so characteristic of tribal life.  The movement toward exogamy doubtless originates in the restlessness of the male, the tendency to make new co-ordinations, the stimulus to seek more unfamiliar women, and the emotional interest in making unfamiliar sexual alliances.  But, quite aside from its origin, exogamy is an energetic expression of the male nature.  Natural selection favors the process by sparing the groups which by breeding out have heightened their physical vigor.[96] There results from this a social