The Position of Woman in Primitive Society: A Study of the Matriarchy

The Position of Woman in Primitive Society: A Study of the Matriarchy examines early social organization through the contested idea of "mother-right," tracing women‘s authority in kinship, descent, marriage, property, and religious custom. Written in a lucid, argumentative Edwardian prose, the book belongs to the formative moment of comparative anthropology, engaging evolutionary theories of Bachofen, Morgan, and their successors while also challenging assumptions about female subordination as universal or natural. C. Gasquoine Hartley, a British writer and reform-minded feminist, brought to anthropology the concerns of the women‘s movement and the intellectual habits of a social critic. Her interest in marriage, motherhood, sexuality, and civic status shaped her reading of ethnographic evidence: she sought not merely to catalogue "primitive" customs, but to recover historical possibilities obscured by patriarchal convention in modern Europe. This book is recommended for readers interested in feminist intellectual history, anthropology‘s early debates, and the genealogy of arguments about gender and social power. Though some terminology and methods reflect its period, Hartley‘s work remains valuable as a bold attempt to place women at the centre of social origins.