All the customs that relate to intimate household experiences have been shared by women as ritual and rule of life.
Men, however, took over the simple elements of religious feeling and social requirement in which women bore so great a part and made of them religious cults and theologies, and they then became a masculine monopoly.

Men also took over the simple healing of gifted women and made it first the prerogative of the "medicine man" and at last of the medical profession, from which women were barred until very lately.
The social customs which women once had power to enforce in so many ways became the "law," made and executed solely by men.

Art, science, literature, grew to great proportions as man acquired the opportunity and the skill to concentrate his intelligence upon specialties of effort; and from all the walks of educational preparation and of professional achievement women were debarred.

Hence, in the family order, in which the first and obvious place of women had been relatively high, man took the position of mastery by right of religious priesthood, by right of legal supremacy, and by right of monopoly of the money power.
Back of all this lay the assumption of the superior relation of the father to the spiritual life of the child.
Man gained his larger leisure first by the use of women as slaves when individual women became the property of individual men, and later by conquest over other men through which process he secured more slaves, and finally by the military systems that in various forms gave some men a chance to work at what they liked and from which they could gain advantage in the growing complexity of increasing social organization.
Man's larger leisure, which gave him money power or its equivalent in earlier forms of exchange, could not have been secured by him had not woman been socially and by religious sanction set to the constant task of the family service and the more peaceful occupations of primitive agriculture.
=Ancient Military Training of Youth.=--Doubtless man's military prestige and power gave him the greatest advantage over woman and was the source, more than anything else, of her subjection in the family order.

This came about not only because military success gave the women of conquered tribes into the absolute power of the conquerors, and broke for such the social bond of remaining mother-right, but because of the special training of boys and young men which the military systems of all ages have initiated.