through labors which were peaceful as well as arduous. For that process his individualism, developed through ages of free wandering and purely militant life, must be not only tamed somewhat, but harnessed to-the home life.
To accomplish that mighty social uplift by which offspring secured two-parents instead of one, woman's subjection to man was paid as the price of the higher form of family unity. Nor was her subjection to man in the ruder ages of the world wholly an evil to herself. It has been said that "woman was first the wife of any, second the wife of many, and third one of many wives." Each of these steps was an advance in her sexual relationship. All were stepping-stones to the monogamic union which is the standard of our civilization, and the realized ideal of all our best and wisest men and women. ....
Bebel says, "Woman was the first human being to taste of bondage." True, and her bondage has bten long and bitter; but the subjection of woman to man in the family bond was a vast step upward from the preceding condition. It gave woman release from the terrible labor-burdens of savage life; it gave her time and strength to develop beauty of person and refinement of taste and manners. It gave her the teaching capacity, for it put all the younger child-life into her exclusive care, with some leisure at command to devote to its mental and moral, as well as physical, well-being. It led to a closer relationship between man and woman than the world had known before, and thus gave each the advantage of the other's qualities. And always and everywhere the subjection of woman to man has had a mitigation and softening of hardships unknown to other forms of slavery, by reason of the power of human affection as it has worked through sex-attraction. As soon, however, as the slavery of woman to man was outgrown and obsolete it became (as was African slavery in a professedly democratic country like our own) "the sum of all villainies." And to-day there is no inconsistency so great, and therefore no condition so hurtful and outrageous, as the subjection of women to men in a civilization which like ours assumes to rest upon foundations of justice and equality of human rights. ....
To-day these considerations (especially the failure fully to apply the doctrine of equality of human rights to women, even in the most advanced centers of modern civilization) have an especial and most fateful significance in relation to the women of the more backward races as they are brought into contact with our modern civilization, I said the peoples with whom we are now being brought as a nation into vital relationship may be still in the matriarchate. If they are not, most of them are certainly in some transition stage from that to the father-rule. Not all peoples have had to pass through the entire subjection of women to men which marked our ancestral advance. The more persistent tribal relationship and collective family life have sometimes softened the process of social growth which was so harsh for women under the old Roman law and the later English common law. It may be
