WOMAN AS WITCH 



have to tell us of a civilisation in which the woman was 

 all-prominent, and the comparison of this fossil civilisa- 

 tion with the habits of semi-civilised races still scattered 

 about the world enables us to draw up the general 

 scheme of a society which preceded the patriarchal, and 

 from which the patriarchate itself sprung. The key- 

 note to this older civilisation was the development of 

 woman's inventive faculty under the stress of child- 

 bearing and child-rearing disabilities. The mother-age 

 in diverse forms, it is true, has been a stage of social 

 growth for probably all branches of the human race. 

 The broad outlines of it seem to me to be now firmly 

 established, if the details must obviously, owing to 

 difference of climate, period of development, and other 

 circumstances, be diverse in character, and if the more 

 minute features, owing to the obscurity and failure of 

 the record, must often be matter of hypothesis and 

 subject for dispute. 



The mother-age, with its mother-right customs, was 

 a civilisation, as I have indicated, largely built up by 

 woman's activity, and developed by her skill ; it was an 

 age within the small social unit of which there was 

 more community of interest, far more fellowship in 

 labour and partnership in property and sex, than we 

 find in the larger social unit of to-day. For this reason 

 both socialists and workers for the emancipation of 

 women are apt at the present time to look back to this 

 early stage of civilisation as to a golden age, and to paint 

 in its details in colours which render them untrue to fact, 

 and destroy any suggestiveness they might otherwise have 

 for the future growth of our own society. The mother- 



