Moreover, we are seeing as never before that the dangers that beset the child to-day are not those from which the mother alone, or the individual father and mother working together, can adequately protect.

They are dangers that only society can prevent and that society alone can abolish.
=Women's Leadership in Social Protection.=--Why, then, do we say that the protective function of individual motherhood is still demanded and still a large part of the modern mother's obligation?
Because she is to-day the one most clearly required, in our own country at least, to summon the social forces to lessen or abolish those dangers to which children are exposed.

The action of the solitary, primitive mother fighting off the despoiler of her child does not much resemble the banding together of modern women by the hundreds and by the thousands to abolish typhoid fever in some city in which it has become endemic through the greed of manufacturers who pollute the water supply.

It is, however, the same spirit in both; and in the modern instance it wakes, first, the fathers to their protective duty, and then the guardians of the public health, and then educates the public mind, and at last accomplishes the desired result through appropriate laws, well enforced.

It is a long step from the indirect "influence," the often deceitful cunning, the appeal to sex-attraction and the pleading of weakness by which for ages women sought to protect their children against harsh punishments, their daughters against marriage to those whom they loathed, and their sons to apprenticeship to work they could not choose, to the openly exercised power of the modern mother.