The position of the chief-mother in the collective family is now one of the vital problems of Eastern nations trying to adjust the family system to modern ideas.

The father's power is so much a delegated responsibility and the relationship between the lesser wives and the younger wives so much closer to the chief-mother than to the chief-father that the grandmother's position may be that of a tyrant.

A series of questions which a group of Chinese students in an American university has drawn up include such as the following: "Where a young girl is brought into the home to be reared as the future bride of the boy in the family, is there any limit to the authority of the mother-in-law ?" The mother-in-law in such cases being usually the older or chief-mother, she is really the grandmother-in-law.
=Memory of the Aged Valued in Primitive Life.=--The position of aged men in primitive life secured some advantages because of the dependence upon memory for the carrying on of continued and conscious social existence before literature was born.

The aged man who had been an important member of some military order or "fraternity" and remembered the exact words and motions of a valued ritual could be sure of having his continued life provided for by all those who desired to learn and to retain the means of perpetuating the religious cult thus expressed.

Also those who remembered vital tribal occurrences and dealings with other tribes and could rehearse the same with exactness must have been considered of social use, and the older they were the more their memory gathered and the more their recital seemed sacred and hence the more the reciter was cherished.
Nothing corresponding to this social value of the aged man, who could make permanent in ritual or in song or in story the experiences of the group, can be traced in the valuation of the experience of the aged woman in the periods before written literature.