The Greek poem before referred to shows in the pathetic attempt of Electra, the loyal daughter of the slain Agamemnon, to offer the required sacrifices at her father's grave, and her joy that the return of the son could make such sacrifices valid for peace of the dead and the service of the living yet to be born, shows vividly how religion made firm and binding the father's place in the family.
So deeply did this religious sanction of ancestor-worship affect the social "mores" that, as is shown so clearly in Spartan history, no man could shirk his duty of marriage and of parenthood without social opprobrium.

The well-known anecdote related by Plutarch of the youth who, educated rigorously to show respect to the aged fathers, is praised for flouting a grey-haired bachelor and refusing to rise and give him a seat in the open square because, as the youth scornfully says, "No children of yours will ever make sacrifice for his ancestors," pictures vividly the sense of responsibility to the family life once almost universal.
This feeling, bred by ancestor-worship, has persisted long after the church in its various forms has superseded the ancient family worship.
We find it as late as in Colonial times in Protestant New England, where the bachelor was fined and subjected to humiliating community supervision and the spinster, almost unknown above twenty years of age, if persisting in her single life was treated as an exception to be held in social tutelage.
=The Double Standard of Morals.=--The triple bond of money, military power, and economic supremacy, which made men masters in the family life, made them also able to free themselves from exclusive devotion to one wife, whether under the law of polygamy or professed monogamy; as it has been possible for men to divorce their wives for slight causes, while wives often received the death penalty for even supposed infidelity.

It has also instituted and maintained for ages a double standard of morals by which the same act mutually shared by men and women has been for men a slight peccadillo and for women a deadly sin.
Chastity has been made almost the sole virtue of women, invasion of which even by resisted force has destroyed her "honor," and voluntary rejection of which has made her a creature of social ostracism.

Man, on the other hand, has been forgiven all manner of slips from the straight and narrow way of marital fidelity, provided he could achieve something of importance in the world of thought or action.
This double standard of morals has reacted upon the family not only in preventing women from establishing social conditions suitable for their own best development and that of their children but has thrown over the home the dark shadow of commercialized prostitution with its cloud of evil thought, physical degeneracy and defrauded childhood.
=Basic Needs for Equality of Human Rights.=--When women as mothers have no power of guardianship of their own children; when they as persons have no power of self-defense against cruelty and outrage of their own fathers or husbands; when as members of society they have no contract-power but must suffer all manner of injustice unless highly fortunate in their male representative; when as citizens of a so-called democratic state they have no voice in either law or its enforcement, then they are indeed a subject class.

Any subject class dependent upon privilege or special favor for all the order and circumstance of life is clearly not a fit part of modern democratic society.