MOTHER-RIGHT IN ANCIENT ITALY.
Some time ago[1] I discussed the evidence for the existence of mother-right in ancient Greece, reaching a conclusion wholly negative. At that period I thought of making a complementary examination of the Italian evidence, but abandoned it for sheer lack of anything tangible to criticise. Since then, however, I have not lost interest in the subject, and this paper is an attempt to summarise and deal with all that may fairly be brought forward, or has been used as evidence,[2] by supporters of the idea that such a form of social organisation was in being in the Italy of classical times, or of such part of the pre-classical epoch as we have any knowledge of.
Let me again start by briefly defining the system we are searching for. It is that by which inheritance of name or property, position with regard to family or clan, in fact all that we express by the surname and its associations, come through the mother and not the father; in short, under which Tom is not Tom Johnson, but Tom Susanson. It does not necessarily involve polyandry, group marriage, or loose sexual relations; it does not involve the dominance of women, or even their ability to hold property (as distinct from transmitting it); but it does connote more or less complete absence of ties of legal kinship between father and child, and it puts the headship of the family into the hands, normally, of the maternal uncle.
