We can assert, however, that some moral values which men insisted upon in the women they chose for wives gave the race what at one time it needed most and still needs: namely, the habit of service to others, and the power of adaptability to changing and often difficult conditions.
Man's genius for organization institutionalizes every aspect of thought and activity he takes under his control.

The institution, organized at first for the benefit of personal life and the life-process, tends invariably toward a fixity of method and hardness of substance that finally sacrifices life-growth to its iron pressure until a new form of institution makes its way through struggle and suffering.
The relation of women to men and of women to family life demanded of most women easy and rapid adjustment to the requirements of others and led to their mediation between every institution and the personal life.

The household mastership of men, and the fact that they could choose for favor the sort of women most agreeable to them as masters, placed at the centre of the family, and therefore at the centre of the life-process itself, the type of womanhood that lent itself most easily to social adjustment.

And it placed that type at the centre of the social order when the "cake of custom" most needed to be broken to allow of a more democratic association.

The type of womanhood which masculine selection, working through long ages, has made the essentially "womanly" type, is one in which physical beauty, charm of manner, general rather than special ability, affectionate and competent response to family, easy adaptability to whatever social system her marriage might give entrance, and unswerving loyalty to the ethical traditions and religious sanctions of her day and generation, combine to attract the love of man and the devotion of children.
Some of these elements of character are especially needed to-day in order to make democracy work, and to secure against dangers incident to decay of autocratic control, and hence may later prove of great social use in the modern state.
The idealization of womanhood by man, which seems never to have made him uneasy in claiming control of her person or estate, has embodied itself in the artist's pictures of Truth and Justice, and Knowledge and Charity, in feminine forms.