[The Family and it’s Members by Anna Garlin Spencer]@TWC D-Link bookThe Family and it’s Members CHAPTER III 11/24
It seems apparent, therefore, that a socially delegated power of absolute control by the father was highly useful in the period when the state was growing, and the school was separating itself from the hearth-stone, and the economic system was changing from barter to the complicated exchange of the present time, and religion itself was merging its ideals from the innumerable private ceremonials of noble families into the worship of one chief, emperor, or despot who must receive the homage of all, and so on to the incarnation of divine power in one King and Lord of Heaven. "Order" is not only, as we were once told, "Heaven's first law," but social order, human experience declares, comes before the recognition of equality of personal rights within that order.
The great lady of the Middle Ages who begged of her King a "new Lord" within a month after the death of her husband because her "lands were being taken and her estate defrauded by hostile lords who surrounded her castle," and only a husband for herself, a new father for her children and a new owner for the inherited property could protect from this robbery, realized the social advantages of the patriarchal system in appropriate social conditions. To-day, when so much of the community protection surrounds the family and so much in education, law, and social custom aids the wife and mother toward independent action, we are naturally horrified at the thought of life and death power of the husband and father and shocked at recital of the humiliations and privations of women's subject condition in the past.
We have to remember, however, that social history seems to indicate that no system of human association has grown up and persisted without great need for some, at least, of its dominant features.
The protection of wife and child, which rested for so long upon man's conception of "property" to be defended from outside attack, was a chief necessity in the rougher and coarser ages of the world. The main hindrance to social progress, however, is the tendency of forms of institutional life and methods of social relationship to persist after the need for them has ceased.
This hindrance has been shown perhaps most harmfully in the retention of the patriarchal power of the father after his abdication from the throne was called for by ethical and humane considerations.
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