Hetaerism
Hetaerism – also spelled hetairism – from the Greek “hetaira”, meaning “courtesan” or “female companion,” is a term introduced by the Swiss scholar and ethnographer Johann Jakob Bachofen in his theory of mother right to denote unrestricted sexual relations. In contemporary scholarship, the more commonly used term for this phenomenon is promiscuity.
According to Bachofen, hetaerism made it impossible to establish paternity with certainty; therefore, descent could be traced only through the female line. As a result, women, as mothers and as the only reliably known parents of the younger generation, enjoyed a high degree of respect and honour, which, in Bachofen’s interpretation, eventually developed into women’s rule, or gynecocracy. This term was also introduced by Bachofen and is now rarely used in scholarship; it is generally treated as a historical equivalent of matriarchy.
In later ethnographic literature, the term hetaerism has sometimes been used to refer to survivals of group marriage, either once existing or still preserved among certain peoples. These include expiatory hetaerism, understood as the supposed right of certain persons to sexual access to a woman before her marriage, often associated with the so-called “right of the first night”; and hospitality hetaerism, also called guest hetaerism or hospitality prostitution, understood as the supposed right of a guest to sexual access to the wife or adult daughter of the host. Such customs are described in older ethnographic literature as having been recorded among different peoples, including in accounts relating to medieval Europe.
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