rents instead of one; that the division of labor should be more
equal, and man be fastened to domestic needs by bonds he could
not break, and 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 been 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