"Today we are no longer concerned to argue that status necessarily precedes contract and recognize that the two notions are not incompatible in one and the same society. In Maine's work we can excise the genetic argument and still profit from the discussion that remains. This can be said of many writers of the period, but even this patronizing judgement is superseded by the recognition that Maine and his most able contemporaries allowed themselves to be guided, by such facts as were available, to combat the products of more speculative evolutionism. He saw, for example, nothing in his facts which could lead him to agree with the popular fantasy that all societies had evolved from a condition of sexual promiscuity through a matriarchal period to a condition of society laying its main emphasis upon descent through males."