WOMAN AS WITCH 



49 



mankind a long way a way the length of which we 

 are only just beginning to realise. But it could not 

 carry mankind to that family organisation from which 

 so much was afterwards to develop. It was based upon 

 the mother as head of the group, and upon a form of 

 group-marriage of which it is hard now to judge im- 

 partially. If one of the worst abuses of the father-age 

 be really only a degenerate form of the older group- 

 marriage, and is not the pure outcome of male domina- 

 tion if there be a direct line of descent from the old 

 licentious worship of the mother-goddess to the extra- 

 vagances of witchcraft, to the spinning-room, and to the 

 legalised vice of to-day we have still to remember that 

 the perpetuation by one civilisation of the weak points 

 of an earlier one, and this possibly in an exaggerated 

 form, is no reason for the condemnation of the earlier 

 stage. The civilisation of woman handed down a mass of 

 useful custom and knowledge ; it was for after genera- 

 tions to accept that, and eradicate the rest. When I 

 watch to-day the peasant woman of Southern Germany 

 or of Norway toiling in the house or field, while the 

 male looks on, then I do not think the one a down- 

 trodden slave of the other. She appears to me the 

 bearer of a civilisation to which he has not yet attained. 

 She may be a fossil of the mother-age, but he is a fossil 

 of a still lower stratum barbarism pure and simple. 

 When we have once fully recognised the real magnitude 

 of what women achieved in the difficult task of civilisa- 

 tion in these olden times, then we shall be the less apt 

 to think her status unchangeable, to assume that she is 

 hopelessly handicapped by her function of child-bearing, 



VOL. II E 



