es called "the collectivity that
owns us." Hence certain problems which have never before been clear in
social consciousness are now arising to enter all debates on family
stability and family success.

=The Headship of the Father.=--During the middle ages of our
civilization and for centuries of our later past the headship of the
family rested securely in the father. Now the ideal of "Two heads in
council; Two beside the hearth; Two in the tangled business of the
world" is working toward democratization of the family. This leads
toward a legal status and an economic adjustment in which the relation
of husband and wife may be equalized toward each other and toward
their children. In this new process, which is a part of the general
movement we call democracy, there are special difficulties of
modification peculiar to the family relation. The monogamic ideal and
practice demands permanency, solidarity of interest and unity of
control both within and without the family circle, at least until all
the children of a marriage have reached maturity. The ideal of the
rightful individuation of women, and even of minor children, works
against that legal solidarity and obvious unity. The old way of
obtaining these elements of family stability, a method still in vogue
in many places and still defended by some persons, was to place all
power of control in the hands of the husband and father, and thus make
the wife a perpetual minor and leave the children wholly under
patriarchal bondage. The modern ideal of women as entitled to
self-ownership and self-control even when married, and the social
need, just beginning to be understood, for women as for men to fully
develop their powers and capacities militates against the legal
headship of the father. To-day there is a demand, growing in
insistency, that we accept the right of each member of the family
circle to individual development and work toward its realization.
There is also the demand that we retain inviolate the social means for
successful family life. Some do not hesitate to say that to fulfil
both these demands is not within human power.

=Is It Possible to Democratize the Family?=--The witty writer who
declares that "the democratization of the family is impossible, since
the family is by nature an autocracy and ruled by the worst
disposition in it," is not without endorsers. There are also those,
more serious in intent, who claim that the family as an inherited
institution i