ne
sensibilities gave freshness to his observations regarding the condition
and capacity of women, while his reputation imparted gravity and
resonance to his utterances. Since then the signs in literature of the
breaking up of the status of women have become far too numerous to be
chronicled even in a volume. It is enough to have mentioned here some
typical initiatory names. Now, the movement may be seen at work
anywhere, from Norway to Italy, from Russia to California. The status
which women are now entering places them, not, as in the old communism,
in large measure practically above men, nor, as in the subsequent
period, both practically and theoretically in subordination to men. It
places them side by side, with like rights and like duties in relation
to society.

II

Condorcet, Mary Wollstonecraft, George Sand, Owen, Mill--these were
feathers on the stream. They indicated the forces that had their source
at the centre of social life. That historical movement which produced
mother-law probably owed its rise, as well as its fall, to demands of
subsistence and property--that is, to economic causes. The decay of the
subsequent family system, in which the whole power is concentrated in
the male head, is being produced by similar causes. The early communism,
and the modes of action and sentiment which it had produced, still
practically persisted long after the new system had arisen. In the
patriarchal family the woman still had a recognized sphere of work and a
recognized right to subsistence. It was not, indeed, until the sudden
development of the industrial system, and the purely individualistic
economics with which it was associated, at the beginning of the
nineteenth century, that women in England were forced to realize that
their household industries were gone, and that they must join in that
game of competition in which the field and the rules had alike been
chosen with reference to men alone. The commercial and industrial
system, and the general diffusion of education that has accompanied it,
and which also has its roots in economic causes, has been the chief
motive force in revolutionizing the status of women; and the epoch of
unrestricted competition on masculine lines has been a necessary period
of transition.[47]

At the present time two great tendencies are visible in our social
organization. On the one hand, the threads of social life are growing
closer, and organization, as regards the simple and comm