res
of social order the power and responsibility of the man. Doubtless
that power and responsibility drew their chief sanction from the idea
of man as the real source of being. After man learned that he was as
much a parent in being father as woman was a parent in being mother,
nothing seemed to have contented him but spiritual supremacy in
parenthood. The classic picture and interpretation of this phase of
family development is contained in the great drama of the Greeks, the
trilogy of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Electra, Orestes, and the
Erinnyes. Here we see how the mother-side of life, once so powerful as
representative of tribal unity, was set aside and overborne by the
father-side, as Apollo proudly claims all generative power for man and
relegates the mother to the position of an underling nurse. It will be
remembered, however, that Athena, although, as Apollo said, "having a
father only," makes the mothers still invaluable as guardians of the
family altar and as those who can bless or blight both the fruitage of
the earth and of the marriage bed.

The Greeks, by virtue of their superior self-consciousness when
passing through radical social changes, and by virtue also of their
power of literary portrayal of experience, have set down for us, for
all time, the way by which man attained his unlimited power over woman
and over the family order.

We need not accept in full measure Dr. Lester Ward's picturesque story
of the manner in which women were made subject to men, _i.e._, that
female sex-selection so overdid the business of rewarding with favor
the strength, the fighting quality, and the cunning which grew to
mental power in the male, that when human men and women were reached,
woman found a master ready-made by her subhuman sisters. We may,
however, find a most suggestive indication of the real reasons for
that masculine supremacy in Doctor Ward's testimony to the way in
which the female sex, when it had the power of special selection of
the kind of mates it wanted, set a fashion in masculine attainment
which did work later against her own command of the sex-relation.
Women did not become subject to men because of physical weakness. The
savage woman does continuous work heavier and more strength-demanding
than that assigned to the savage man. It was not even that the
primitive woman had always to carry the child as she worked, and had
therefore a double burden, although that greatly helped men in gaining
supre