etween the
lesser wives and the younger wives so much closer to the chief-mother
than to the chief-father that the grandmother's position may be that
of a tyrant. A series of questions which a group of Chinese students
in an American university has drawn up include such as the following:
"Where a young girl is brought into the home to be reared as the
future bride of the boy in the family, is there any limit to the
authority of the mother-in-law?" The mother-in-law in such cases being
usually the older or chief-mother, she is really the
grandmother-in-law.

=Memory of the Aged Valued in Primitive Life.=--The position of aged
men in primitive life secured some advantages because of the
dependence upon memory for the carrying on of continued and conscious
social existence before literature was born. The aged man who had been
an important member of some military order or "fraternity" and
remembered the exact words and motions of a valued ritual could be
sure of having his continued life provided for by all those who
desired to learn and to retain the means of perpetuating the religious
cult thus expressed. Also those who remembered vital tribal
occurrences and dealings with other tribes and could rehearse the same
with exactness must have been considered of social use, and the older
they were the more their memory gathered and the more their recital
seemed sacred and hence the more the reciter was cherished.

Nothing corresponding to this social value of the aged man, who could
make permanent in ritual or in song or in story the experiences of the
group, can be traced in the valuation of the experience of the aged
woman in the periods before written literature. There were, however,
as we can clearly see, traditions and customs, taboos and permitted
familiarities so many and varied that old women with good memories and
a personality that commanded attention must have had some accepted
value within the inner circles of family experience. We get from
folk-lore some clear intimations of this prestige and power of the
ancient old woman in intimate social relationship.

The power of old men received a great accession when political and
religious orders and legal rules began to make social organization
more definite and precise. "Old men for council; young men for war"
had an early meaning. "The venerable Senate" is not a modern phrase.
The "reverend father of the church" is an ancient allusion to the
respect for and leadersh