reasons why anyone else should adopt my
view. I can produce considerations in support of my view, that is all.
But they are so implicit in all that has gone before that I will not
trouble to detail them here.

The conception of equality and fellowship between men and women is
an idea at least as old as Plato and one that has recurred wherever
civilization has reached a phase in which men and women were
sufficiently released from militant and economic urgency to talk and
read and think. But it has never yet been, at least in the historical
period and in any but isolated social groups, a working structural idea.
The working structural idea is the Patriarchal Family in which the woman
is inferior and submits herself and is subordinated to the man, the head
of the family.

We live in a constantly changing development and modification of that
tradition. It is well to bring that factor of constant change into mind
at the outset of this discussion and to keep it there. To forget it, and
it is commonly forgotten, is to falsify every issue. Marriage and the
Family are perennially fluctuating institutions, and probably scarcely
anything in modern life is changing so much; they are in their legal
constitution or their moral and emotional quality profoundly different
things from what they were a hundred years ago. A woman who marries
nowadays marries, if one may put it quantitatively, far less than she
did even half a century ago; the married woman's property act, for
example, has revolutionized the economic relationship; her husband has
lost his right to assault her and he cannot even compel her to cohabit
with him if she refuses to do so. Legal separations and divorces have
come to modify the quality and logical consequences of the bond.
The rights of parent over the child have been even more completely
qualified. The State has come in as protector and educator of the
children, taking over personal powers and responsibilities that have
been essential to the family institution ever since the dawn of history.
It inserts itself more and more between child and parent. It invades
what were once the most sacred intimacies, and the Salvation Army is
now promoting legislation to invade those overcrowded homes in which
children (it is estimated to the number of thirty or forty thousand) are
living as I write, daily witnesses of their mother's prostitution or in
constant danger of incestuous attack from drunken fathers and brothers.
And