ers carried mankind a long
way--a way the length of which we are only beginning to realise. But
it could not carry mankind to that family organisation from which so
much was afterwards to develop. It was no more possible for society to
be built up on mother-right alone than it is possible for it to remain
permanently based on father-right.

But there is another aspect of this question that I must briefly touch
upon. The opinion that the reversal in the position of authority of
the mother and the father arose from male mastery, or was due to any
unfair domination on the part of the husband must be set aside. To me
the history of the mother-age does not teach this. I believe that the
change to the individual family must have been regarded favourably by
the women themselves, for such a change could not have arisen, at all
events it would not have persisted, if women, with the power they then
enjoyed, had not desired it. Nor need this bring any surprise. An
arrangement that would give a closer relationship in marriage and the
protection of a husband for herself and her children may well have
come to be preferred by the wife. Nor do I think it unlikely that she,
quite as strongly as the man, may have desired to live apart from her
mother and her kindred in her husband's home. Individual interests are
not confined to men.

With all the evils father-right has brought to women, we have got to
remember that the woman owes the individual relation of the man to
herself and her children to the patriarchal system. The father's
right in his children (which, unlike the right of the mother, was not
founded upon kinship, but rested on the quite different and insecure
basis of property) had to be re-established. Without this being done,
the family in its complete development was impossible. The survival
value of the patriarchal age consists in the additional gain to the
children of the father's to the mother's care. I do not think this
gain will ever be lost. We women need to remember this lest bitterness
stains our sense of justice. It may be that progress could not have
been accomplished otherwise; that the cost of love's development has
been the enslavement of women. If so, then women will not, in the long
account of Nature, have lost in the payment of the price. They may be
(when they come again to understand their power) better fitted for
their refound freedom.

Such is the history of the past, what is the promise of the future?