Mother Right

Introduction

Bachofen published “Das Mutterrecht” in Stuttgart in 1861, a large volume subtitled “an investigation of the gynaecocracy of the ancient world according to its religious and legal nature”. Drawing on myths, legends, tomb inscriptions and reports of customs from Lycia, Crete, Egypt, India, Greece and Italy, he proposed a sequence of stages from unregulated sexual life through a religiously grounded rule of women to the paternal law that triumphed in Rome. Little noticed at first, the book was taken up in ethnology and by Engels, later by the circle around Klages and by Alfred Baeumler, and in the twentieth century by parts of the women’s movement. Today its stage theory is rejected, but it remains a key text in the history of research on myth and gender.

Connections

Criticized in

• Wife and Mother in the Development of Law1907 · Marianne Weber