tance;
the house was made too hot for him and he had no other choice but to
return to his own clan or, as was mostly the case, to look for another
wife in some other clan. The women were the dominating power in the
clans and everywhere else."

Bachofen discovered that in the communistic household, the supremacy of
woman was caused by the fact that the women all belonged to the same
gens while the men came from different gentes.

During this period the children belonged to the same gens as the mother
and took her name. At this time man's tools and weapons were yet crude
and they were his only possession. The woman owned the household goods
and utensils, the value of which for the preservation and preparation of
food was very great.

Bachofen has shown how women were strong factors in the demand for
monogamy through this and the earlier periods.

Man learned to till the soil and to domesticate animals; he captured
enemies from neighboring tribes and learned to make slaves instead of
food of them. And the conqueror became a master, and the slave an
instrument of production. It was the men who were lucky enough to be
first to enslave the enemy, to acquire more precious metals and larger
flocks, who evolved the state, to protect them against the commune, or
the mass, in their ownership of private property.

At the death of the father his own children were disinherited, in the
matriarchy. As increasing wealth strengthened the position of man, he
began to desire to overthrow the old maternal law and to establish a new
one that would permit inheritance in favor of his children. And so
monogamy became the law, and descent was traced by male instead of
female lineage. Engels says that "the downfall of maternal law was the
historic defeat of the female sex."

In order to insure the faithfulness of the wife, and the reliability of
paternal lineage, the women were given absolutely into the power of the
men. Husbands had power of life and death over their wives. In certain
countries today it is only the man who can dissolve the marriage bonds
and cast off his wife.

But gradually the old standards which were applied to men and women are
changing. New laws are written on our statute books. Civil laws
protecting male rule apply only to the wealthy classes and their
intercourse with the working class. In sex relations the sentiment, in
America particularly, has swung around in favor of woman.

Undoubtedly her growing economic