Robert Stephen Briffault MC* ([ʁo.ˈbɛʁ stə.ˈfɑ̃ bʁi.ˈfo], 1874 – 11 December 1948) was a French surgeon who found fame as a social anthropologist and later in life as a novelist.
[6] After service on the Western Front during the war, (where he was twice awarded the Military Cross)[3]), he settled in England[6] where he turned to the study of sociology and anthropology.
The former is entirely the product of the female’s instincts, and she, not the male, is the head.”[12] In the chapter where Briffault outlines his law, he applies it to tigers, elks, lions, zebras, gazelles, buffaloes, deer, monkeys, beavers, lions, birds and other animals, and only references humans briefly in order to contrast human behavioural patterns from those of animals: “There is in fact no analogy between that [animal] group and the patriarchal human family; to equate the two is a proceeding for which there is no justification.
We may occasionally find the male employed in foraging for the brood and for the mother, while the latter is lying quiescent in charge of her eggs or brood; but there is nothing in those appearances to justify us in regarding the animal family as patriarchal; on the contrary, the conduct of the group is entirely determined not by the male but by the female.”[13]In 1930, H. L. Mencken wrote the following in his Treatise on the Gods: Primitive society, like many savage societies of our own time, was probably strictly matriarchal.
Their father, at best, was simply a pleasant friend who fed them and played with them; at worst, he was an indecent loafer who sponged on the mother.
This matriarchal organisation of the primitive tribe, though it finds obvious evidential support in the habits of higher animals, has been questioned by many anthropologists, but of late one of them, Briffault, demonstrated its high probability in three immense volumes [The Mothers: A Study of the Origins of Sentiments and Institutions].
They not only show that, in what we may plausibly assume about the institutions of early man and in what we know positively about the institutions of savages today, the concepts inseparable from a matriarchate colour every custom and every idea: they show also that those primeval concepts still condition our own ways of thinking and doing things, so that "the societal characters of the human mind" all seem to go back "to the functions of the female and not to those of the male."