Regarding the destruction of female infants among early races, Mr. Darwin remarks:
They would not at that period have lost one of the strongest of all instincts common to all lower animals, namely the love of their young offspring, and consequently they would not have practised female infanticide.[143]
Another reason why female infanticide could not have prevailed to any considerable extent is seen in the fact that any diminution in the number of females, would have involved a scarcity of warriors, thus weakening their means of defence. From available facts it is quite evident that the practice of female infanticide throws no light on wife-capture.
Mr. McLennan declares that women among rude tribes are usually depraved and inured to scenes of depravity from their earliest infancy; hence when property began to amass in the hands of men, in order to assure paternity, it became necessary, that women be brought under subjection.
As the female, when free, is unwilling to pair with individuals for whom she feels no affection, and as under earlier conditions of human society women chose their mates, and so long as they remained together were true to them, it is reasonable to suppose that paternity was known, or at least that it might have been readily determined.
Mr. Morgan informs us that the “Turanian, Ganowánian, and Malayan systems of consanguinity show conclusively that kinship through males was recognized as constantly as kinship through females,” that a man had brothers and sisters, grandfathers and grandmothers traced through males as well as through females. Although under gentile institutions descent and all rights of succession were traced through mothers, kinship through fathers was easily ascertained.
Hence it is plain that Mr. McLennan’s assumption that women were enslaved in order to assure paternity, that they became subject to the dominion and control of men so that fathers might not be compelled to support children not their own, is not supported by the evidence at hand.
That it was through capture, the forcible carrying away of women at first singly and later in groups to foreign tribes, in which as aliens and dependents they were shorn of their right to the soil, that males were first enabled to arrogate to themselves the individual right to property is a fact which has been overlooked by Mr. McLennan.