s been indicated
elsewhere by the writer, the greatest of all social wastes since time
began. The idea that women were serviceable only for the procreative
function and the hardest drudgery of family service, and that they
lost all social value when they ceased to be attractive to the senses
of men or ended their personal ministrations to their own little
children, long obtained. This idea is responsible for the further
conception of old women as not only useless but a disagreeable burden.

Hence, while old men rose during many ages in social regard and
protection and care, old women became more and more miserable and
ill-treated where the collective family was superseded by the newer
type of individualistic bond between one man, one woman, and their
children. In the ancient patriarchal and collective family the oldest
mother might reign as queen. In the more modern type of family, made
the social fashion by what is called Christian civilization, the aged
woman, the grandmother, unless exceptionally attractive and
sweet-tempered and exceptionally able to help in the household tasks,
was the victim of the change from one system to the other. The fact
that women, if well-developed and well-treated, are younger at seventy
than are men and that more women than men live to be aged than when
the conditions of living were less favorable to the weak and delicate,
gave early in our civilization what must have seemed far too many old
women.

While women had the constant burden of a "steady job" within the home,
harder and more continuous than men had in their handicraft labor, yet
men were killed in battle in large numbers, and were physically able
to dangerously overdo in some labor "spurt" and hence more women than
men lived to be old. Hence, again, there were far more grandmothers
than grandfathers in the family in all mediaeval life. This led to many
cruelties to old women who were deemed "superfluous." While, however,
the actual experience of common people made conditions so hard for
grandmothers, the idealism within the religious field was favorable to
the mother of any age. The same church fathers who shunned marriage as
a cowardly concession to the body, and who wrote flaming
animadversions upon women in general, gave the Virgin and Child their
adoration and made a place of honor and of comfort to those women who
chose the religious vocation outside the home.

=Older Women in Religious Vocations Honored in Middle Ages.