On this account
many men were not married, preferring to live with paid women.
Likewise, in the Gilbert Islands a man shows the same respect to a
woman as to a chief, by stepping aside when he meets her. If a man
strikes a woman, the other women drive him from the tribe. On Lukunor
the men used, in conversation with women, not the usual, but a
deferential form of language.[125]
The discoverers of the Friendly Islands found there a king in
authority over the people, and his wife in control of the king,
receiving homage from him, but not ruling.[126] In these and similar
cases woman's early relation to the household is formally retained in
the larger group and in the presence of an obviously masculine form of
organization.
But, in contrast with the survival in political systems of the
primitive respect shown mothers, we find the assertion of individual
male force within the very bosom of the maternal organization, in
the person of the husband, brother, or uncle of the woman. Among the
Caribs "the father or head of the household exerts unlimited authority
over his wives and children, but this authority is not founded on
legal rights, but upon his physical superiority.
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