We need not accept in full measure Dr. Lester Ward's picturesque story of the manner in which women were made subject to men, i.e., that female sex-selection so overdid the business of rewarding with favor the strength, the fighting quality, and the cunning which grew to mental power in the male, that when human men and women were reached, woman found a master ready-made by her subhuman sisters. We may, however, find a most suggestive indication of the real reasons for that masculine supremacy in Doctor Ward's testimony to the way in which the female sex, when it had the power of special selection of the kind of mates it wanted, set a fashion in masculine attainment which did work later against her own command of the sex-relation. Women did not become subject to men because of physical weakness. The savage woman does continuous work heavier and more strength-demanding than that assigned to the savage man. It was not even that the primitive woman had always to carry the child as she worked, and had therefore a double burden, although that greatly helped men in gaining supremacy. It was rather that the larger leisure of primitive man and his consequent development of thought and imagination enabled him to secure religion and statecraft as allies to his physical claims. The intellectual side of the male development was doubtless greatly aided by female selection, and when man was reached he already knew how to outwit other men and most women in the race for power.
The Three Chief Sources of Influence.—It has been well said that the "three great sources of influence in barbarous as in civilized countries are religion, military power, and money." All these influences became masculine monopolies ages ago.
The ancient woman was sometimes a priestess and often a healer in her simple fashion and in all ages has acted as nurse in illness and care-taker of the aged and the feeble when these have received care. She has been mistress of the ceremonials of birth and death and marriage when these have been parts of the family ritual, and courtship has been largely in her charge. 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. "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. 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.