The relation of women to men and of women to family life demanded of
most women easy and rapid adjustment to the requirements of others and
led to their mediation between every institution and the personal
life. The household mastership of men, and the fact that they could
choose for favor the sort of women most agreeable to them as masters,
placed at the centre of the family, and therefore at the centre of the
life-process itself, the type of womanhood that lent itself most
easily to social adjustment. And it placed that type at the centre of
the social order when the "cake of custom" most needed to be broken to
allow of a more democratic association. The type of womanhood which
masculine selection, working through long ages, has made the
essentially "womanly" type, is one in which physical beauty, charm of
manner, general rather than special ability, affectionate and
competent response to family, easy adaptability to whatever social
system her marriage might give entrance, and unswerving loyalty to the
ethical traditions and religious sanctions of her day and generation,
combine to attract the love of man and the devotion of children.
Some of these elements of character are especially needed to-day in
order to make democracy work, and to secure against dangers incident
to decay of autocratic control, and hence may later prove of great
social use in the modern state.
The idealization of womanhood by man, which seems never to have made
him uneasy in claiming control of her person or estate, has embodied
itself in the artist's pictures of Truth and Justice, and Knowledge
and Charity, in feminine forms. These bear witness to the fact that
even when men were most insistent upon father-rights they were moulded
by intimate companionship with women in the home to some appreciation
of the value of feminine personality.
While, therefore, the moral discipline which came to the mother in the
old order of the family, led her to understand the value of
personality, and the need of ever-increasing effort to make the
individual lives within the family circle comfortable, happy and good,
the moral discipline of the patriarchal father led toward an
increasing conquest of nature, of other men, and of all the social
forces, in the interest of his own family group. This led at last to
his impersonation of many ideals in the "eternal womanly that leads us
on."
=The Higher Ideal of Fatherhood.=--Throughout this many-sided
discipline of marriage and parenthood there has been growing an ideal
of fatherhood so noble and so tender that it has easily become the
central thought in many religions.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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