Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 4.djvu/390

 : I am glad you have it. We are not working for ourselves alone; that is one reason why our society does not grow as fast as some others.

The paper of the Rev. Anna Garlin Spencer (R. I.) was a strong, philosophical presentation of our Duty to the Women of Our New Possessions:

Prof. Otis T. Mason, author of that important book, "Woman's Share in Primitive Culture," tells us that "the longer one studies the subject the more he will be convinced that savage tribes can now he elevated chiefly through their women." Why is this true? For the reason that the savage is in the stage of social order through which all civilized nations have passed at some period—the stage of the mother-rule more or less modified by partial masculine domination. It is a well-known fact of human history and prehistoric record that the Matriarchate, or the mother-rule, preceded the Patriarchate, or the father-rule. "All the social fabrics of the world are built around women. The first stable society was a mother and her child." The reason why the primitive descent of name and property, and the first fixed stake of home life, was the expression of this maternal relationship is obvious. Motherhood was demonstrated by nature before fatherhood was definitely known. Inheritance of name by the female line was alone possible; and that, as well as the female holding and transmitting of property, was a family or tribal or clan relationship, women always retaining rule and wealth not so much as individuals as custodians of communal life and possessions. Not only was the mother with the child the first founder of human society, but the woman in savage life was the first inventor and originator of all life-sustaining industries.

When man also began to "settle down"—whether from personal choice or from social pressure—when he, too, began to learn and practice the industrial arts heretofore solely in the hands of women, he began to press his more personal and individualistic claims of recognition and of property-owning against the family wealth of which the woman was the custodian.

As man more and more assumed the burden of the world's industries outside the home (which before had been woman's care alone), and as woman became more and more absorbed in purely domestic concerns, man's individualism assumed greater and greater power within the family life, and he gradually acquired the despotic family headship which marked the ancient patriarchal order of Rome. This was not a social descent, but an immense social uplift, in the age in which it was natural. Professor Mason says, and with profound truth, "Matrimony in all ages is an effort to secure to the child the authenticity of the father." It was necessary for social growth that offspring should have two parents instead of one; that the division of labor should be more equal, and man be fastened to domestic needs by bonds he could not break, and