Where Fathers Don't Count

Although it has almost deified "Mother," Western civilization is essentially patriarchal. But a genuine matriarchy in the heart of Florida was surveyed last week by Ethnologist Alexander Spoehr in a new Field Museum publication.

Spoehr has hobnobbed with the 600 surviving Florida Seminoles, "the descendants of that handful of conservative Indians who refused to move west [to Oklahoma] with the main body of the tribe after the Seminole wars of the 19th Century."

The Cow Creek Seminoles live in 20 scattered camps, "cluttered with dogs, pigs, chickens and small children, through which melange the women calmly move." Though every good matron owns an antique Singer sewing machine, their other modern conveniences are rarely more than battered old lard pails. Of their social structure Spoehr writes:

"The membership of the camp is based on the matrilineal lineage. A camp is usually composed of a woman, her daughters, and their children, and the husbands and unmarried brothers of these. . . . [Often] the camp is expanded to include female first cousins or even women more remotely related, together with their husbands and children. But in any event a basic rule is observed--the women in a camp belong to one clan. . . . When a man marries, he goes to his wife's camp, builds her a house, and moves in. Later on, if the two of them do not get along, a divorce is effected simply by the husband's . . . moving out."

These Seminole ways confirm Robert Briffault's assertion in his great study of matriarchies, The Mothers, that patriarchal marriage and the patriarchal family are "relatively late products of social evolution." Mother-dominated societies came first. Big reason: among primitive folk, sexual relations are often so free that only a child's mother is identifiable.

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