122 WOUSES AND HOUSE-LIFE OF THE AMERICAN ABORIGINES. 
husband and not the wife who left the house. But this influence of the 
woman did not reach outward to the affairs of the gens, phratry, or tribe, 
but seems to have commenced and ended with the household. This view 
is quite consistent with the life of patient drudgery and of general subor- 
dination to the husband which the Iroquois wife cheerfully accepted as the 
portion of her sex. Among the Grecian tribes descent had been changed 
to the male line at the commencement of the historical period. It thus 
reversed the position of the wife and mother in the household; she was of 
a different gens from her children, as well as her husband; and under monog- 
amy was now isolated from her gentile kindred, living in the separate and 
exclusive house of her husband. Her new condition tended to subvert 
and destroy that power and influence which descent in the female line and 
the joint-tenement houses had created. It is, therefore, the more surprising 
that so many traces of this anterior condition should have remained in the 
Grecian and other tribes, which Professor Bachofen has pointed out, since 
gyneocracy and mother-right, as discussed by him, must have originated 
among these tribes when under the gentile organization, and with descent in 
the female line. 
The “Joint Undivided Family” of the Hindus at the present time, 
‘Jomt in food, worship, and estate,” brought to our notice by Sir Henry 
Maine,’ is a similar but probably more numerous household than that of 
the Iroquois. As soon as special investigation is made, joint-tenement 
houses and communism in living are found to be persistent features of bar- 
barous life in the Old World as well as the New, but limited to the house- 
hold. Strabo informs us that the Gauls lived in great houses, constructed 
of planks and wicker, with dome roofs covered with heavy thatch? 
Wherever such houses existed there is at least a presumption that they 
were occupied by several families, who formed a single household and 
practiced communism. 
The Iroquois long-houses disappeared before the commencement of 
the present century. - Very little is now remembered by the Indians them- 
selves of their form and mechanism, or of the plan of life within them. 
Some knowledge of these houses remains among that class of Indians who 
1 Early History of Institutions, Holt’s ed., pp. 100 and 106. 2 Lib, iv, c. 4,8, 3, 
