degree in ante-bellum days and were even dwelt upon with alarm.

The third volume analyzes the factors that have consummated the revolution of the family during the past fifty years. Stress is laid on the advance of industrialism, urban concentration, the growth of the larger capitalism, the immigrant invasion, the passing of the frontier, the intensification of the struggle for the standard of living, the movements of rebellion and revolution represented by such manifestations as feminism and socialism, the development of volitional control of family evolution, and the outlook for a democratic future. At no previous point save in the last stages of chatteldom in the South does the economic factor extrude so overwhelmingly.

In common with the best recent historical works, due place has been given to "the Economic Interpretation," but with studied avoidance of fantastic exaggeration. The true claims of the dispassionate historical spirit have been held steadily in view. If it seem to the reader that undue attention has been given to pathological abnormalities, he should bear in mind that the American history with which most readers are familiar has been written by litterateurs or historians with little perspective save that which inheres in loyalty to the established order, in the attenuated atmosphere of the middle class, or in the desire to glorify the past, it may be of New England with its ancestral worthies, or of some other section in the romantic days. Those trained in the literature of such shallow schools naturally find it hard to put aside prepossessions and to refrain from confounding the disclosures of science with the product of the muck-raker.

Years of research, analysis, and rumination have gone

into the preparation of these volumes. Exhaustive investigation of source writings and secondary works together with painstaking reconstruction and interpretation of the course of events warrant the assurance that the present work is the most complete, fundamental, and authoritative treatment of the field that it covers. It is given to the public in the hope that it will call forth a vital interest in the further development of this aspect of our social history.

To William E. Zeuch, of Clark University, I am indebted for valued assistance. I also acknowledge special indebtedness to the libraries of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of Tennessee for access to the principal sources of my material, and to my wife for assistance and inspiration in the progress of the manuscript. I shall also be under obligation to such critics of the work as shall point the way to intrinsic improvement in the presentation of so momentous a theme.

ARTHUR WALLACE CALHOUN.

Clark University, November, 1916

I. OLD WORLD ORIGINS-THE WIDER

BACKGROUND1

American family institutions are a resultant of three main factors: the complex of medieval tradition evolved through the centuries on the basis of ancient civilization plus the usages of its barbarian successor; the economic transition from medieval landlordism to modern capitalism; and the influence of environment in an unfolding continent. It is necessary to begin this study with a survey of the European background.2

Medieval thought on the sex relation was inconsistent. Women were regarded, sometimes as perils, again as objects of worship. The extremes embodied themselves in celibacy and in the minne-cult. Which was the more pregnant of depravity it would be hard to say.3

Military mores are always, at bottom, disdainful of women. Chivalry with its sentimental immorality gave women hyperbolic praise in place of justice. Material advantage was the gist of medieval marriage. Women were an incident to their fiefs to be disposed of in loveless marriage. In the fifteenth century, cases of wives prostituted for gain to themselves and husbands were alleged in argument against matrimony. In the larger

1 Compare Goodsell, History of the Family, chapters vii-viii. The appearance of this work warrants brevity in the introductory chapters of the present treatise.

2 In introduction, see Bebel, Woman and Socialism, chapters i-iv; Cooke, Woman in the Progress of Civilization, chapters i-iii; Dealey, The Family, chapters i-iv; Goodsell, History of the Family, chapters i-ix.

8 Compare Cornish, Chivalry, chapter xii.

medieval cities there were official brothels - municipal, state, or church perquisites. Strangers of note were supplied prostitutes at municipal expense. The woman who in despair killed her child was put to cruel death, while the seducer perhaps even sat among the judges. Adultery of wives met severe punishment.*

It may be that marriages turned out as well in the Middle Ages as now and that adultery was not more frequent. There was not wanting certain appreciation of woman as wife and mother. But over against modern divorce laxity may be set medieval ecclesiastical jugglery which sold divorces while pretending to prohibit them. In like manner ecclesiastical impediments to marriage could be removed for a fee.

It is impossible to harmonize medieval "love" with the strong emphasis laid by feudalism on female chastity. The desire for concentrated transmission of feudal estates to legitimate offspring tended to monogamy and wifely purity. Chastity became woman's main virtue. The wife's highest duty was to furnish a legitimate male heir to the family perquisites. Even the peasant sought marriage distinctly as a means of getting heirs. Chastity was not incumbent on men. A kind of restraint was, indeed, incumbent on the males of the nobility so far as women of their own class were concerned; for male relatives would visit swift punishment on the man that ruined a girl's prospects of becoming the broodmare to some noble house. But women of the working class were legitimate prey of the contemptuous bestiality of the nobles."

The master-class encouraged and controlled marriage 4 Bebel. Woman and Socialism, 73-75.

5 On this paragraph, compare Meily, Puritanism, 33-35; Bebel, Woman and Socialism, 80.

among the menials as a means of propagating serfs and securing fees. The lord's power of intercourse with women of servile rank found expression in the jus primæ noctis which existed even into modern times.

It must be admitted that feudal days gave to women of the nobility a certain prestige and dignity. As chatelaines they even won military distinction in cases of siege. Prolonged separations emphasized the mutual needs of the two sexes. Life in the family remote from males of equal rank softened patriarchal asperities. The isolation of noble ladies exposing them somewhat to the lusts of base-born men required all knights to be their champions. Chivalry had, forsooth, its fairer side and performed a substantial service in grafting upon sex passion that romantic love which, distorted and perverted as it was by a sickly atmosphere in an age highly favorable to emotion rather than to reason, has become the basis of all that is fairest in sex relations to-day and holds the key to the future.

In the Middle Ages woman was in general an unrecorded cipher lost in obscure domestic toil and the bearing and rearing of numerous children. She generally welcomed a suitor at once for her one recourse was to lose her identity. Military slaughter tended to disturb the balance of the sexes and magnify the value of men. Perhaps the witch delusion which operated unbelievably to decimate the ranks of women was to their sex a blessing in disguise. But women in the Middle Ages probably enjoyed more equality with men than most of the time since. Some held responsible positions and displayed executive ability. In Saxon England women could be present at the local moot and even at the na

6 Compare Position of Women: Actual and Ideal, 46-47; Abram, English Life and Manners in the later Middle Ages, 44.