In the past, under the mother-rule, the social elements of the family were emphasized, since her power was one delegated by the group of which she and her children were a part and closely related to peaceful ways and to primitive industrial arts.

Under the father-rule, the political and legal elements of the family were emphasized, since his was an autocratic and personal control of wife and children, even of adult sons, and in many cases of his own mother, and marked the beginning and worked toward the power of the modern state.

In all cases, however, it was as a representative of the group-ideal and the group-control that the parents held sway over the family; and if the family is to persist in the future as an institution it will hold its authority over individual lives as trustee of society-at-large.

Name, line of inheritance, rights and duties of one member toward other members and to the family group as a whole, must all be determined in the last analysis by the "mores" of the people and the time concerned.
=New Ideals Affecting the Family.=--To-day the ideal of equality of rights for men and women, and the ideal of ministration to childhood's needs, are stronger than the ideal of family control.

The social demand is, therefore, for standardization of family life and of child-care on a high plane of physical, mental, and moral development of each individual life rather than for an autocratic representation of the power of what Professor James 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.