WOMAN AS WITCH 



the real contributions of woman to early civilisation. 

 As we have seen, nothing is more helpful to us in 

 endeavouring to measure the social forces at work to- 



o 



clay than a true conception of the plastic character of 

 social institutions when we examine their growth during 

 long periods. That the status of woman varies with 

 both time and place is an invaluable concept at the 

 present juncture, and the woman of to-day will owe a 

 debt of gratitude to the mediaeval witch if it can be 

 shown that the record of her suffering furnishes facts 

 which go a long way to demonstrate that primitive 

 woman had a status widely divergent from that of 

 woman in the present or in the patriarchal age. 



In order to group my facts, I am going to briefly 

 sketch a form of social life which you will kindly look 

 upon as merely hypothetical. If in our inquiries as to 

 witchcraft we find customs which appear meaningless 

 except as fossils of such a state of society, then I think, 

 while still looking upon it as hypothetical, we may 

 venture to consider its further investigation a reason- 

 able task. Finally, if those of you who pursue the 

 matter for yourselves, should find exactly similar fossils 

 in early language, in the folklore of birth and marriage, 

 in primitive law, in hero-legend and saga, and in the 

 customs of still extant barbarous peoples, - - fossils 

 which no other hypothesis unites into a living whole 

 -then, I think, the hypothetical mother - age will 

 become for some of you what it is for me, an historical 

 fact. 



Let us try to conceive a group of individuals in 

 which inheritance is through the mother, where the 



