Letourneau (_La condition de la femme_) and Otto Henne am Rhyn (_Das Frau in der Kulturgeschichte_) have collected many indications that woman had a better position at the beginning of Greek civilisation. Polygamy was generally abolished at an early date, and the mother seems at first to have occupied the central place in the family, as in Egypt. An old legend, preserved in later writers, represented that the women had originally the right to vote in the Council, like the men, and that, because they outvoted the men and gave a feminine name to Athens, the jealous male god, Poseidon, intervened, and the vote was taken from them. From these and other obscure traces we may gather that woman was not so "subordinate" when Greece was climbing to power. Letourneau, who observes that early Greek patriotism should rather be called "matriotism," gives the best suggestion of the way in which they lost influence. As private property and its value increased, the men shifted the line of inheritance from mother to father, and woman fell into economic dependence, with all its consequences. A clearer realisation of the father's part in the children aided this. In time the mother is slighted as being merely the soil that passively nurtures the seed. The father is the creator. I lay no stress on the abundance of female deities in the early Greek mythology. Westermarck points out that the presence of goddesses has not the significance that Reich and others ascribe to it, because we do not find woman's position varying with the number or importance of female deities. That is so; though, perhaps, there was more correspondence between the two when the myths were originally framed. But it seems to me that, as divine families were always given human complexions, they were bound to have wife and daughter goddesses, whatever woman's position in the tribe was. Religion apart, then, there is sufficient evidence that the Greeks began their career with woman in a fair position, though with the political power, as everywhere, in the hands of the men. By the golden age women were not only rigidly excluded from public life, but were thrust to a lower social level, and treated bitterly and contemptuously in literature. This, it must be remembered, is mainly true of Athens. In the kingdom of Sparta women had ample freedom and great respect, and in the outlying parts of Greece their position was much better than at Athens. But the chief interest remains in the fact that at Athens, with its intense public life, its thorough democracy, its high mental and moral culture, the position of woman was one of subordination.