stom of
tracing descent and the inheritance of property in the female line (so
favourable to women) died. Mother-right passed away, remaining only as
a tradition, or practised in isolated cases among primitive peoples.
The patriarchal age, which still endures, succeeded. Women became
slaves, who of old had been dominant.

One final word more.

The opinion that the subjection of women arose from male mastery, or
was due to any special cruelty, must be set aside. To me the history
of the mother-age does not teach this. I believe this charge could not
have arisen, at all events it would not have persisted, if women, with
the power they then enjoyed, had not desired the gaining of a closer
relationship with the father of their children. With all the evils
that father-right has brought to woman, we have got to remember that
woman owes the individual relation of the man to herself and her
children to the patriarchal system. The father's right in his children
(which, unlike the right of the mother, was not founded on kinship,
but rested on the quite different and insecure basis of property) had
to be established. Without this being done, the family in its full and
perfect development was impossible. We women need to remember this,
lest bitterness stains our sense of justice. It may be that progress
social and moral could not have been accomplished otherwise; that the
cost of love's development has been the enslavement of woman. If so,
then women will not, in the long account of Nature, have lost in the
payment of the price. They may be (when they come at last to
understand the truth) better fitted for their refound freedom.

Neither mother-right alone, nor father-right alone, can satisfy the
new ideals of the true relationship of the sexes. The spiritual force,
slowly unfolding, that has uplifted, and is still uplifting,
womanhood, is the foundation of woman's claim that the further
progress of humanity is bound up with her restoration to a position of
freedom and human equality. But this position she must not take from
man--that, indeed, would be a step backwards. No, she is to share it
with him, and this for her own sake and for his, and, more than all,
for the sake of their children and all the children of the race.

This replacement of the mother side by side with the father in the
home and in the larger home of the State is the true work of the
Woman's Movement.

FOOTNOTES:

[97] It is abundantly evident to any on