Matrilineality
tracing of kinship through the female line
Matrilineality, at times called matriliny, is the tracing of kinship through the female line. It may also correlate with a social system in which people identify with their matriline, their mother's lineage, and which can involve the inheritance of property and titles. A matriline is a line of descent where a person inherits his or her mother's lineage. In a matrilineal descent system, individuals belong to the same descent group as their mothers. The matriline of historical nobility was also called their enatic or uterine ancestry, in contrast to the patrilineal or "agnatic" ancestry. The matriline is also sometimes referred to as the "distaff" side or "spindle" side.
Early human kinship
Scholars disagree on the nature of early human, that is, Homo sapiens, kinship. In the late 19th century, most scholars believed, influenced by Lewis H. Morgan's book Ancient Society, that early kinship was matrilineal. Friedrich Engels took this up in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. This thesis that our first domestic institution was the matrilineal clan, not the family, became communist orthodoxy.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Matrilineality” as tracing of kinship through the female line. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1136773. The Library of Congress control number is sh85082214. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank.
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This entry incorporates text from “Matrilineality” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.