Although Lubbock declares that the symbol of violence in marriage ceremonies “can only be explained by the hypothesis that the capture of wives was once a stern reality,” he claims not to believe that the early conditions under which men were compelled to capture their wives by violence, or do without them, were in any degree the result of feminine will in the matter.
In referring to the fallacious theory of Mr. McLennan, that the capture of women for wives arose from the practice of female infanticide, which, by producing a scarcity of women, created a necessity for marriage without the limits of the tribe, Sir John Lubbock, although seemingly unable to recognize the actual force which was in operation to prevent the “appropriation” of women by men, has nevertheless shown himself able to perceive the reason why foreign women were captured, and what the tendency in males was which demanded their presence.
After referring to the fact that no male could appropriate to himself a female belonging to the tribe, he says:
Women taken in war were, on the contrary, in a different position. The tribe, as a tribe, had no right to them, and men surely would reserve to themselves exclusively their own prizes. These captives then would naturally become wives in our own sense of the term.
Foreign women would become dependents, their captors having the undisputed right to the control of their persons.
At the outset, Sir John Lubbock finds himself confronted with the fact that a system of reckoning descent through women once prevailed over the habitable globe. According to his own reasoning, this system presupposes a condition of society under which property rights and all rights of succession were traced through women, still we find him offering the following belief concerning the matter. “I believe, however, that communities in which women have exercised the supreme power are rare and exceptional, if, indeed, they ever existed at all.”
Were we not already acquainted with the prejudices of most of the writers who have thus far dealt with this subject, in view of the facts everywhere represented going to prove that a system of gynecocracy once prevailed over the entire earth, this “belief” of Mr. Lubbock would be truly remarkable, especially when we learn the reason given by him for his conclusion. He says: