Before the era of machine industry, men and women married early as an economic advantage to both, establishing a family group with a recognized division of labor and a concentration of authority. By the concentration of authority is not meant that women were submissive and docile in the household (although such was the prevailing ideal of women at that time) for such submission depends upon the characteristics of the individuals concerned, but male control of matters establishing the relation of the family to the outside world. The passivity of one parent was essential in a relation considering the family all important and the individual of little consequence. When the occupations of men were of such a nature as to cause a large death-rate among them, the number of unmarried women must have been necessarily large. These attached themselves to the households of relatives, and were in no sense a burden, for as long as the household was an industrial center their services were acceptable, and their economic relations to the household somewhat similiar to those of the married women. Those women who did not become part of a household took refuge in religious institutions. In a society where religious feeling is strong, those of the most aesthetic type and susceptible to the incongruities of life would be the first to separate themselves from earthly ties and attempt to live up to their convictions and ideals. Hence many women as well as men, who might have had marked influence in the molding of social institutions devoted themselves to a spiritual and secluded life leaving no offspring to whom they might transmit those characteristics making them superior to the type most adaptable to the prevailing customs of the time.[110] Thus we find religious institutions a check to the propagation of a feminine type which has played an important role in later history. With the decline of the monastic system, and the breaking up of the domestic system of industry, unmarried women were forced to establish relations to the economic world outside the home similar to those of men. If these women had dedicated themselves to a life of celibacy when they entered the industrial field, as they did when they entered the church, history would show them struggling for legal and political rights in the same manner as men. But the possibility of changing habits of life by marriage, freeing them from a serious economic responsibility prevented the growth of a class conscious spirit which would stimulate them to co-operate in bettering their conditions.