authority. The family might come and go wherever food could be most easily found, sometimes congregating with other families in spots where the supply was plentiful, and at other times. wandering off by itself alone; always, however, the small family, with the father at its head, was both the production and consumption, and hence also the political unit of society.

name.

In the fully developed economy of the republican clan the family became merely a consumption group, while production was carried on by an organization of men; hence the women and their children were still in economic subjection to the men, and the form of the family was still paternal. Every man was head of his own household, the lord of his wife and children, and absolute sovereign in all domestic affairs. The wife, therefore, left her own people and came to dwell with those of her husband, while the children were added to his family stock and bore his The institution of the family as it existed among the Plains Indians, is an example of this type of paternal household.1 Under the régime of the communal clan the form of the family changed. Here production was controlled by an organization composed of both men and women. The elevating effect of these conditions upon the position of women in domestic life was at once apparent. The wife was now no longer the humble dependent and chattel of her husband. On the contrary, in every department of social life she regarded herself, if not as his superior, at any rate as his equal. The ideals of family life prevalent in the agricultural communities of the Pueblos and those which reigned in the hunting tribe of the Plains, were, in fact, diametrically opposed to each other. In the latter the father's power was supreme; in the former the mother was the head of the family, owning the dwelling and adding the children to her gens. Thus, while the republican clan economy led to the establishment of the paternal authority; on the other hand, the communal clan economy resulted in the development of the maternal family.

1 Schoolcraft, "Hist. Ind. Tribes," I, 235, 236; II, 131; V, 183; II, 132— "The husband exercises unbounded authority over the person of his wife."

The disappearance, however, of the paternal group in the agricultural community cannot be accounted for solely by a reference to conditions prevailing at the moment. For since men and women shared control of the surplus, there was no more reason why the mother of the family should have had any more influence over it than had the father. In fact, the fundamental reason for the existence of the maternal family lay in the conditions governing the organization of the community when on the transitional stage between the hunting and the agricultural life. In these circumstances the women's clan, as a result of its monopoly of the increasingly important agricultural surplus, became the dominant power; and hence it was in this stage of progress that the maternal family found its origin. Later, when the full communal clan economy was established, and the influence of men and women was really equal, the women kept the advantage they had gained, and the maternal family still prevailed. A study of the transition stage, in which the simultaneous existence of both paternal and maternal ideals may be observed, as well as the gradual supersedure of the former by the latter, is a convincing proof of the determining influence of economic conditions upon the institution of the family.

Dr. Barton,1 in his analysis of primitive Semitic life, has made a study of just such a community. Here the women's clan dominated the economic life of the oasis, while the men's clan reached its fullest development in caring for the flocks and in conducting caravans across the desert; hence in the oases the maternal, in the desert the paternal, type of family predominated. An examination of Iroquois society brings to light a somewhat similar state of affairs.

...

In the Iroquois village, where the women's clan carried on production and controlled the surplus, the maternal family prevailed. "The children," . . says Lafitau, "belonging to the women who have produced them, are counted as members of the household of the wife, and not of the husband." It was the mother and her relatives who controlled the children, gave them

1 Barton, "A Sketch of Semitic Origins." See pp. 38-39.

1

2 Lafitau, I, 72-73.

names, brought them up, attended to their marriages and funerals, adopted strangers, and, in fact, managed the general life and activities of the household.

Nevertheless, the men's clan was powerful enough to have a decided influence upon the institution of the family. It will be remembered that every gens was subdivided into two clans, the women's and the men's; the one devoting itself to production, the other to defending the gentile group. Now, neither clan could afford to allow any of its members to marry and in so doing to transfer his or her services to any other organization; yet religious scruples forbade marriage between members of the same gens; the result was that marriage became a mere contract between members of different gentes, the bargain involving no obligation to live together; and so the typical Iroquois household consisted of a number of women, their children and their male relatives, all members of the same gens: in other words, the family life of father, mother and children tended to disappear entirely. The overwhelming testimony of both earlier and later witnesses goes to substantiate the assertions just made. According to Lafitau,3 66 the husband and the wife do not leave their families and their cabins to set up a family and a cabin apart. Each remains at home, . . . . The goods of the husband do not go to the cabin of the wife, where he himself is a stranger." Again in the Jesuit Relation, it is asserted that "their marriages make only the bed common to the husband and wife; each one lives during the day with his or her own relatives. The wife goes to her husband at night, returning early next morning to the home of her mother or of her nearest relative, and the husband does not dare to enter his wife's cabin until she has had some children by him."

The marital relationship was acknowledged, however, by the rendition of certain mutual services. According to Lafitau: "Not only is the wife obliged to furnish food to her husband, to put

1 Powell," Wyandot Gov't," Eth. Rep., 1879-1880, p. 64; Morgan, "Anc. Soc.," p. 71.

2 Jes. Rel., X, 269; Morgan, "Anc. Soc.," p. 84.

Lafitau, I, 261, note 1.

Jes. Rel., XLIII, 265.

up provisions for him when he goes on a journey, either to war or to the chase, or on a trading expedition; but she is also obliged to help her husband's relatives in their field work, and to keep up their fire: for that there are fixed times when she is obliged to have a certain quantity of wood carried to the house."1 The husband, on the other hand, owed certain duties to his wife: "he is obliged to make her a mat, to repair her cabin, or to build her a new one when the first falls into ruins. The whole produce of his hunting belongs by rights to the household of his wife, the first year of his marriage. The following years he is obliged to share it with her, whether she has remained in the village, or whether she has accompanied him. It is to the honor of the husband that his wife and his children should be well clothed and well kept, and it is for him to see to it."2

"The wife's household," Lafitau3 observes, "got rather the better of the bargain." "According to the common rule, it was considered desirable to marry a girl early; because, besides the fact that the women keep up the family, whose greatest strength lies in the number of the children, the cabin of the woman also profits by the right which the wife acquires over the produce of her husband's hunting. On the other hand, it is not well to hasten on the marriage of the young men, because, before they are married, all the produce of their hunting, all the fruits of their industry, belong by rights to their own cabin. Those of that cabin cannot but lose by their marriage, on account of the new obligations that they contract toward a wife and children whom it is to their credit to support well. And although the cabin of the wife also contracts some obligations in regard to that of the husband, the advantages cannot begin to make compensation for those which the young man brought it before being married. At least that is what I have noticed among the Iroquois." In fact, the advantage was often so decidedly on the side of the woman that the husband even consented to leave his own gens and come to live with his wife. . . . The mother,"

1 Lafitau, I, 577.

2 Lafitau, I, 579–580.

Lafitau, I, 561-562. Cf. Jes. Rel., LXVII, 41; XIV, 235.

says La Potherie, "who knows but too well the advantage of keeping him with her, quietly influences his mind, and it often happens that he never leaves her." In such a case the husband's own clan retained only a formal right to certain military services from him; in all his other activities he would be likely to be connected more and more surely, as time went on, with his wife's relatives. In short, the advantages on the wife's side of the marital bargain, and the occasional establishment of regular family life, though under the mother as the head, was evidence of the gradual weakening of the men's organization. When the process of absorption of the men's clan by the women's was completed, as it was among the Pueblo Indians, and the full-fledged communal clan came into being, then the ordinary family life reappeared.

The contractual relationship between husband and wife, due to the fact that both were members of powerful organizations economically independent of each other, elevated the position of the wife at least to one of equality with her husband. For one thing, the ordinary form of marriage among the Iroquois was monogamus. Few men would care to take upon themselves the burden of providing more than one woman with meat and skins, while few women would desire to supply fire-wood and corn to more than one husband. Exceptions to the rule sometimes occurred in the families of chiefs. Such men might become polygamists because of their desire to be influential over a large number of relatives and friends. Even chiefs, however, rarely had more than two wives.2

In their intercourse with each other, husband and wife were on an equal footing. If they could not agree, nothing was easier than to annul the contract between them. Divorce occurred at the will of either husband or wife. It was usually caused by the failure of one or the other to live up to the obligations involved

1La Potherie, III, 13 sq. Cf. Lafitau, I, 577.

2 Jes. Rel., XLII, 139; Schoolcraft, “Hist. Ind. Tribes," III, 191. Lafitau (I, 155) says that polyandry sometimes occurred among the Senecas. "Il en est, lesquelles ont deux maris, qu'on regarde comme légitimes."