222 SEX 



The ladies were defended and honoured and 

 idealised, often obeyed; and the working- 

 women got considerable protection with a new 

 kindliness. The well-known and diagram- 

 matic illustration that the woman with child 

 had a right to game and fish from the lord's 

 preserves, and a right to gather in fields and 

 orchards, points forward to a kind of pro- 

 tection which the socialistic sentiments of 

 our modern civilisation, as they reach towards 

 concrete expression, may again sanction and 

 develop. 



Some students of the chivalrous period 

 have pointed out, and with some authority of 

 scholarship as well as reason, that the domi- 

 nant attitude of man to woman during the 

 chivalrous age was that of every militarist 

 period that of the Cave Man, the forceful 

 master. It is enough to admit the common- 

 place that each thesis, from that of the 

 matriarchate to that of the most modern 

 feminism, from that of the patriarchate to 

 that of the anti-suffragists, has its corre- 

 sponding antithesis. 



Christianity did much for the status of 

 women, increasing culture did much, and 

 women-geniuses did much, but the general 

 ideas of the patriarchate required another 

 kind of hammer to break them and that 

 hammer was economic. " The commercial 

 and industrial system, and the general diffu- 

 sion of education that has accompanied it, 

 and which has also its roots in economic 

 causes, has been the chief motive force in 

 revolutionising the status of women." 



