[82] _Marriage and Kinship in Early Arabia_, p. 74. See also Marsden, _History of Sumatra_, p. 225.
In its ancient form the maternal communal family has notably persisted among the Padang Highlanders of Sumatra. These people live in village communities, with long timber houses placed in barrack-like rows, very similar to the communal dwellings of the American Indians. The houses are gay in appearance, and are adorned with carved and coloured woodwork. One dwelling will contain as many as a hundred people, who form a _sa-mandei_, or mother-hood. Again we find the family consisting of the house-mother and her descendants in the female line--sons and daughters, and the daughters' children. McGee thus describes these maternal households--[83]
[83] "The Beginning of Marriage," _American Anthropologist_, Vol. IX, p. 376.
"If the visitor, mounting the ladder steps, looks in at one of the doors of the separate dwellings, he may see seated beyond the family hearth the mother and her children, eating the midday meal, and very likely the father, who may have been doing a turn of work in his wife's rice-plot. If he is a kindly husband, he is there much as a friendly visitor, but his real home remains in the house in which he was born."
The husband has no permanent residence in the woman's house, and at dusk each evening the men may be seen walking across the village to join their wives and families. The father has no rights over his children, who belong wholly to the wife's _suku_, or clan. But this in no way implies that the father is unknown, for monogamy is the rule; as is usual the question is one rather of social right than of relationship. The maternal uncle is the male head of the house, and exercises under the mother the duties of a father to the children. The brother of the eldest grandmother is the male head of the family settlement and the clan consists of a number of these families. It would seem that these male rulers act as the agents of the female members, whose authority is great. This power is dependent on the inheritance; as is the descent, so is the property, and its transmission is arranged for the benefit of the maternal lineage. For this reason daughters are preferred rather than sons.