Or so it seems to many students of the evolution of the family.
The mother and child made the first social grouping in which love and trust could work.

The father, as we know him, is a later asset of social progress.

He has taken into the home many things we want now to get rid of, as, for example, a social tendency toward masculine monopolies.

His genius for organization in political and economic fields has in many ways worked against the right alignment of men and women in family relations.

But can we do without the father altogether, save for a brief hour of service as a "biologic necessity"?
Still more, can we have for mothers that "calm and repose" which Ellen Key bespeaks for them unless they have fathers of efficiency and character to help them in their peculiar task of life-creation?
Is not the alternative to the father's partnership in family life the creation of a class of "state mothers" or the social endowment of all mothers by public grant?
=New Demand that Motherhood Have Social Support.=--In point of fact, all the demands for new freedom in respect to motherhood rest primarily upon the recognition by society-at-large of a claim upon it, financial as well as spiritual, for the benefit of all who are allowed to be mothers, in right of their own fitness for the function.