Whatever the legal or political rights of an individual or class of individuals may be, the only way to maintain them is to exercise the powers those rights involve. To be indifferent to them, to allow to others the performance of a duty of political or social significance is to invite a deprivation of a right others cherish. The history of the political and legal rights of women must be traced by taking cognizance of a few individual cases where women exercised rights. This exercise of rights on the part of a few women does not indicate that the practice was universal but rather exceptional. If these rights were based on property, the failure to exercise them on the part of women did not show necessarily a disregard for their property rights, but that their interests were represented by the male members of the family whom they, in all probability, felt confident would guard their interests as well as they themselves could, or, perhaps better, since their knowledge of affairs outside of the household was of broader scope and their judgment based on business-world experience. This cannot be considered a usurpation of rights on the part of men but the recognition of the unity of the family. That it would lead to injustices was not contemplated by those who did not consider final results, but only immediate expediency. Some of the evils arising out of such practice were recognized in special rights extended to widows and spinsters. “As the official maintainer of right and justice, the mayor of Bristol and Exeter, and probably of some other towns, was the guardian of widows and orphans; in the former city a promise to ‘keep, maintain and defend the widows and orphans of this town safely in their rights,’ was a part of the mayor’s oath of office. And in the latter, the duty was so burdensome that a special office, that of chamberlain, was created in 1555, in order to provide for it.”[109] Women belonged to the family group, and all their interests were centered in the family. So long as their home relations were congenial there was no apparent reason why they should become familiar with the outside world in order to protect their interests since the interests of both parents were identical. These interests represented more nearly a unity of interests than individual interests. Here again we find convenience playing a large part in determining the respective fields of activity of the two sexes. Custom, convention, and the precepts of the church, although powerful influences in molding social institutions, would have been of little avail if contrary to the convenience of large industrial classes.