Yet in this connection it is very necessary to remember that the reassertion of the patriarchate was as necessary a stage in human development as the maternal stage. Whatever may have been the advantages arising to women from the clan organisation (and that the advantages were great I claim to have proved) such conditions could not remain fixed for ever. For society is not stable; it cannot be, as the need for adjustment is always arising, and at certain stages of development different tendencies are active. No one cause can be isolated, and, therefore, it is necessary in estimating any change to take a synthetic view of many facts that are contemporaneous and interacting. Yet, it would seem that the social and domestic habits of a people are decided largely by the degree of dominance held either by women or men; and almost everything else depends on the accurate adjustment of the rights of the two sexes.
The social clan organised around the mothers carried mankind a long way--a way the length of which we are only beginning to realise. But it could not carry mankind to that family organisation from which so much was afterwards to develop. It was no more possible for society to be built up on mother-right alone than it is possible for it to remain permanently based on father-right.
But there is another aspect of this question that I must briefly touch upon. The opinion that the reversal in the position of authority of the mother and the father arose from male mastery, or was due to any unfair domination on the part of the husband must be set aside. To me the history of the mother-age does not teach this. I believe that the change to the individual family must have been regarded favourably by the women themselves, for such a change could not have arisen, at all events it would not have persisted, if women, with the power they then enjoyed, had not desired it. Nor need this bring any surprise. An arrangement that would give a closer relationship in marriage and the protection of a husband for herself and her children may well have come to be preferred by the wife. Nor do I think it unlikely that she, quite as strongly as the man, may have desired to live apart from her mother and her kindred in her husband's home. Individual interests are not confined to men.