wives. It is evident, then, that war and slavery would thus indirectly
tend to undermine the maternal system.

(2) Wife purchase would operate in the same way. Among peoples that had
developed a commercial life as well as slavery it early became the
practice to purchase wives. It is evident that these purchased wives
would be regarded as a sort of property, and the husband would naturally
claim the children as belonging to him. Among certain North American
Indians we find exactly this state of affairs. If a man married a wife
without paying the purchase price for her, then her children took her
name and belonged to her clan; but if he had purchased her, say with a
number of blankets, then the children took his name and belonged to his
clan.

(3) The decisive cause, however, of the breakdown of the maternal system
was the development of the pastoral stage of industry. Now, the grazing
of flocks and herds requires considerable territory and necessitates
small and compact groups widely separated from one another. Hence, in
the pastoral stage the wife must go with the husband and be far removed
from the influence and authority of her own kindred. This gave the
husband greater power over his wife. Moreover, the care of flocks and
herds accentuated the value of the male laborer, while primitively woman
had been the chief laborer. In the pastoral stage the man had the main
burden of caring for the flocks and herds. Under such circumstances
nothing was more natural than that the authority of the owner of the
family property should gradually become supreme in all matters, and we
find, therefore, among all pastoral peoples that the family is itself a
little political unit, the children taking the father's name, property
and authority passing down along the male line, while the eldest living
male is usually the ruler of the whole group.