VII. It is important to note that the causes which led to the change in the position of the sexes had no direct connection with moral development; it was not due, as many have held, to the recognition of fatherhood. The cause was quite different and was founded on property. It arose, in the first instance, through a property value being connected with women themselves. As soon as the women's kin began to see in their women a means by exchange of obtaining wives for themselves, and also the possibility of gaining worldly goods, both in the property held by women, and by means of the service and presents that could be claimed from their lovers, we find them exercising more or less strict supervision over the alliances of their female relatives. VIII. At first, and for a long time, the early freedom of women persisted in the widely spread custom of a preliminary period before marriage of unrestricted sexual relationships. But permanent unions became subject to the consent of the woman's kindred. It was in this way, I am certain, and for no moral considerations that the stringency of the sexual code was first tightened for women. IX. At a much later date virginity came to have a special market-value, from which time a jealous watch began to be kept upon maidenhood. It seems to me of very great importance that women should grasp firmly this truth: the virtue of chastity owes its origin to property. Our minds fall so readily under the spell of such ideas as chastity and purity. There is a mass of real superstition on this question--a belief in a kind of magic in purity. But, indeed, chastity had at first no connection with morals. The sense of ownership has been the seed-plot of our moral code. To it we are indebted for the first germs of the sexual inhibitions which, sanctified by religion and supported by custom, have, under the unreasoned idealism of the common mind, filled life with cruelties and jealous exclusions, with suicides and murders and secret shames. X. This intrusion of economics into the sexual relationships brought about the revolution in the status of women. As soon as women became sexually marketable, their early power was doomed. First came what I hold to have been the transitional stage of the mother-age. This will explain how it is that, even where matrilineal descent is in full force, we may find the patriarchal subjection of women. The mother's authority has been usurped by her male kindred, usually her brother.