The guilty woman's fate is a matter relating to a distinct department of primitive law.

Family jurisdiction, as we find it, for instance, in an advanced community such as ancient Rome, meant the right of the _pater familias_, the head of the house, to subject his _familia_, or household, which included his wife, his children (up to a certain age), and his slaves, to such domestic discipline as he saw fit.

Such family jurisdiction was more or less completely independent of state jurisdiction; and, indeed, has remained so in Europe until comparatively recent times.
What light, then, does the study of primitive society throw on the first beginnings of family law as administered by the house-father?
To answer this question at all adequately would involve the writing of many pages on the evolution of the family.

For our present purpose, all turns on the distinction between the matripotestal and the patripotestal family.

If the man and the woman were left to fight it out alone, the latter, despite the "shrewish sanction" that she possesses in her tongue, must inevitably bow to the principle that might is right.