How to be happy though human / by W. Béran Wolfe.
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ad¬ judges, and we need no legal devices to prevent a feeble¬ minded child from becoming Prime Minister. Historic Origins oj our Sexual Morality How the change from matriarchy to patriarchy came about we do not know exactly. One thing we do know, and that is that the change was coincident with the rise of private property, and the change from an agricultural, communal civilization to a herding, individualistic civilization based on private property. When the first man took a mountain goat and domesticated it; when the first horse, cow, camel, or sheep was tamed to man’s uses ; and when the first man built a fence around a piece of grazing acreage for his own flocks, private property was born. Men and women can participate equally in agriculture, but the superior strength of men is an advantage in the control of herds and flocks. And these flocks gave man his superiority, because it is a sociological law that the sex which is predominantly con¬ cerned with obtaining the means of subsistence, becomes the dominant sex, and rules the other sex to its own purposes. While it was of little import to know your own father in matriarchal civilizations, with the rise of private property every father needed to know his own son so that he might be certain that his own flesh and blood would inherit his hard-won flocks and hard-kept acres. With this change, that unimportant piece of tissue, the female hymen, attained a sociological value. A man must marry a virgin to know that the result of his first intercourse with his wife would be his own child. Thus began the exaggeration of the value of chastity and modesty— obviously of no advantage to women, but of great advantage to men who desired to retain their patrimony intact. Thus also began the over-valuation of the male heir, and the under-valuation of the girl child. Thus began the concept that women were chattels, like so many