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This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1978

Family structures and family law have been moving in the same direction all over the world over the past two centuries. Although general agreement exists that these changes have something to do with industrialization and with the ensuing transformation of the material basis of individual subsistence, it is nearly impossible to disentangle cause and effect in this process of the simultaneous revolution of economic and family structures. The transition from a society in which status and the family constitute the basis of social security to a society in which survival and success are based on merit has led to a disintegration of the family. But a society cannot go on functioning well unless it protects its inept, and hence the disintegration of the family is a threat to social cohesion itself.

Reasons for the resistance of men to feminist demands are explored. A purely exploitative interpretation of the position of women is inadequate. Women who are relatively free are more productive, which is advantageous to men, but such women are also more able to resist exploitation. Women who are loved are more likely to give love in return, but this compels men to care about how their women are treated by other men. A view of the M role as purely aggressive is too narrow; men's dominant position allows them a wide range of M roles. The superordinate position of men creates a tendency for them to view the position of women in ways that make the rebellion of women surprising to them, & give it the appearance of ingratitude. Women still work more in the home than men do, & jobs have not become much less sexually segregated. The relatively lesser need for men in present economic & technological conditions, however, inevitably weakens men's position, leading toward social change. W. H. Stoddard.

The central sociol'al problem is to ascertain what sac patterns will maximize the protection of human rights. These rights are conceived as a specific part of the soc structure & examined, at the fam level, as a set of role obligations. The following areas in which human rights within the fam have been recently extended are summarized: mate choice, bride price or dowry, inter-caste & inter-class marriage, control by elders & other kin, inheritance, contraception, abortion, divorce, & egalitarianism within the fam. The trends noted are steps toward the securing of human rights. The authoritarian & the collaborative style of fam control are contrasted re relations to the macrostructure of society & pol'al control & individual psychol. Authoritarian control of the fam by the father is r'ed with such traits as these: deification of the parent, high evaluation of the father role, the child's passive adjustment to the present situation, the suppression of the child's aggression, suppression of sexual impulses in the child, & the fostering of dependency in the child. Collaborative or democratic att's of fathers r with egalitarian treatment of children, encouragement of their independence, & affection as a means of control. Adults who exhibit intolerance of others' rights are more likely than other adults to have grown up under authoritarian parental control & to continue that tradition with their own children. In the collaborative fam, given greater security in affection, & the right to have pleasure without guilt, the individual's tolerance of frustration is greater, & his need to attack others when things go wrong will be less. Thus, he is less likely to approve any denial of human rights to those who differ in pol'al or other beliefs. However the relations between personality variables & those of the larger soc structure are ambiguous. Although adults who are reared under ideal conditions would probably be more inclined to support human rights, it is not clear that traditional, patriarchal, even authoritarian, fam relations necessarily create authoritarian pol'al & soc structures. Nonetheless, the changes in the fam patterns over the past half cent, important in themselves, may also act as a catalyst that will eventually transform the massive flux of modern revolution into a clear movement toward greater human freedom. S. Schwartz.