I propose, therefore, to run rapidly over the known phases of human development, and show how the attitude of women has varied in proportion to the growth of enlightenment and moral feeling. We will catch what glimpse we can of the first human pair that wandered over a strange earth in the faintest dawn of humanity. We will learn, from races that have lingered in primitive ways for untold ages, how, as the family grew into the race (or the rough social group into the clan),[1] the issues of the corporate life were naturally appropriated by the men. We will see how, as savagery rises to barbarism, as the social life grows larger and more varied, the warriors and their chief keep control of it, save where some exceptional circumstance disposes them to take account of the woman's will. We shall find the woman still patient and laborious in the early years of civilisation, and will note how, as the corporate life begins to look to other things than the mere defence of the State, as social construction is studied, the woman, awakened by the light of culture that breaks through the narrow windows of her home, comes forth to claim her share in the control of that larger national life, with which she must prosper or suffer no less than the man. We shall see how the division of labour handed down from the barbaric ages breaks down, how the law comes to invade every corner of the little territory in which she had held sway, how she demands that her knowledge and feeling be consulted in the framing of such laws, and how she builds up a larger ideal of womanhood that will add dignity and worth to maternity by a recognition of her essential humanity. CHAPTER II. WOMAN BEFORE CIVILISATION FEMINIST writers in the second half of the nineteenth century were often seduced by an interesting theory that all, or nearly all, nations in the simplest stage of political structure were ruled by their women. A learned Swiss jurist, Dr. Bachofen, thought he had discovered very generally among the tribes that linger at the threshold of civilisation a practice of tracing descent through the mother only, and concluded that this pointed to an earlier phase in which the mothers ruled the community. This theory of the matriarchate was, somewhat unfortunately, enlisted in the campaign for a revision of woman's position. I say unfortunately because, if it were true that the rule of the women belonged almost wholly to a simpler and barbaric age, and was abandoned when tribes rose to civilisation, a demand for a return to the older order would not be free from ambiguity. A Nordau or a Carpenter may gird as he pleases at civilisation. Essentially it is a correction of the errors of infancy.