"The ancient fraternities," and the manner of education which separated those who would be "braves" from the family life in early youth, the strong bond of a common purpose made appealing to youthful imagination by mystic ceremonials and burnt into the consciousness by painful "initiations," all combined to teach men how to work together for common ends and in a way unknown to the training and opportunity of women.[4] This it was which gave a consistency and a power to man's collective life which woman could not gain in the past, and exclusion from which enabled man to become her legal and economic master even within the home.
The economic power which man acquired through specialization of labor, made possible for him by social excuse from exhausting personal service within the family; the political power, made possible for him by military achievement, from which women for the most part were strictly barred by the "Trade Unionism" of war preparation; the intellectual power, made a sex-monopoly in education and professional use and opportunity; and the religious sanction of priesthood and theology, which fastened all these to law and government, secured the complete subjection of mothers to fathers and gave woman in the family the status of her infant children.
=Ancestor-worship.=--This triple influence of money, military power, and religion, gave the definite basis for ancestor-worship, which has been so widespread and so influential in the setting of social customs.

Ancestor-worship, with its separate family ceremonials, for which the wife must learn her husband's family ritual, led to child-marriage, and that in turn to the slavery of the wife not only to the husband but to the older women of his family.

Child-marriage led also to many tragedies of racial decay before it was seen to be inimical to strength and power of achievement.

When child-marriage was not a part of marriage customs, however, and a suitable age was demanded, for sex-unions, ancestor-worship made the position of the father secure.

He alone could pass on the name and inheritance, the family worship and the dutiful service of his forefathers, to the children yet to be.