The liberation of woman in every one of its aspects profoundly involves the destiny of the family. It signifies in all the larger activities of life the relative individualization of one-half of human kind. This means, of course, a weakening of the solidarity of the family group, so far as its cohesion is dependent on the remnants of mediæval marital authority. Will the ultimate dissolution of the family thus become the price of equality and freedom? Or rather, is it not almost certain that in the more salubrious air of freedom and equality there is being evolved a higher type of the family, knit together by ties--sexual, moral, and spiritual--far more tenacious than those fostered by the régime of subjection? How remarkable, in England as well as in America, is the revolution already accomplished! Few facts in social history are more instructive than the change which has taken place in the tone of the literature dealing with woman and her relations to marriage and the family. In the eighteenth century and until far down into the nineteenth it is for the most part utterly frivolous or sentimental. Vapid satire abounds. Erotic or facetious verse at the expense of the "fair sex" or "wedded love" finds ready popular response. Even in what is meant for earnest discussion woman is treated as a helpless being, to be petted, cajoled, or corrected, not too harshly, by her superior lord; or else she is edified with endless lectures on the sacred duty of guarding her virtue--a fact which throws a lurid and unintentional light on the moral standards of the age. Imagine an _Essay on Old Maids_,[800] tediously spun out in three volumes; or a book like Eliza Haywood's _Female Spectator_,[801] which, although in four volumes, had already reached its seventh edition in 1771. [800] _A Philosophical, Historical, and Moral Essay on Old Maids, by a Friend of the Sisterhood_ (London, 1785). Some of the gleanings from history in the second and third volumes are not entirely devoid of permanent interest. [801] HAYWOOD, _The Female Spectator_ (7th ed., London, 1771). This is a fairly representative compilation of gossip and literary anecdote regarding woman, but without a trace of sociological perception.