First off, there are many matrilineal societies; off the top of my head I believe Tacitus notes in his Germinicus that the Suebi (indigenous Germanic tribes) were matrilineal, and even today you can see orthodox Jewish communities differentiating between those who are Jewish through the matrilineal line and those who do not.

However, to address your question, it's not really historical. Most societies do not make a conscious effort to justify the social structure in rational terms since the practice can many times be traced to prehistoric societal tendencies. I suspect /r/askanthropology would yield better results. Personally I like the theory that plough vs hoe societies lead to patrilineal vs matrilineal societies, but the actual evidence is quite scant. You pretty much have to extrapolate to prehistoric cultural practices that depends entirely on weakly inductive speculation.

The formation of such social practices ALWAYS occurred before history began, so you should cross-post to /r/askanthropology