It is, therefore, of tremendous social importance to the family, as truly as to all other inherited institutions, that women are now rapidly emerging from that subject condition of perpetual minority under the law to the individual responsibility and self-protective power of the legal adult.

This passage "from status to contract" was too long delayed (the position of women after the affirmation of liberty and equality for men in modern forms of government being so illogical as to cause much disturbance in the body politic), but it has, after all, been rapid in its final steps.

To-day the ideal of equal rights between the sexes and in relationship of men and women to society-at-large is fully accepted by a majority of the enlightened.

What is before us is the slow and in some respects difficult task of working out that ideal in social adjustments.

While at work on this task it behooves us to go over the past experience more carefully than many have yet done, to note what the patriarchal family gave to society and through society to wife and children as well as what of their just due it took from or refused to give to wife and children.
=Special Protection of Women Needed in Ancient Times.=--It seems not too much to say that in the time and place where men in general first attained power of property rights, of military supremacy, and of religious priesthood, most women needed some special protection from particular men.