or to the works of a redoubtable mother-daughter team ofnLaura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane.nFree Land is the title of a Rose Wilder Lane novelndedicated to the American farmers who pulled up stakes andntook advantage of the western lands made available undernHomestead legislahon. The title is richly suggestive. Therenwas nothing “free” about land that men and women earnednby the sweat of their brow, and Mrs. Lane drew upon thenmemory of her father, Almanzo Wilder, for this portrayal ofngrinding poverty, blistering drought, and blizzards that couldnbe more devastating to human life than a tornado or majornhurricane. But in a deeper sense, these prairie lands werenfree, because the families who settled them were free. Nonone knew this better than Laura’s daughter Rose, whonmoved from the farm to the big city and who in her career asnjournalist went from being a fashionable leftist to a life ofnprotest as an anti-government, anti-war, anti-tax anarcholibertarian.nReading the firsthand accounts of the families who settiednthe frontier, “the land vaguely realizing westward,” I amnalways struck not so much by the hardship as by thenresilience of the settlers. Years ago Robert Hine (in Communitynon the Frontier) showed with what determination thenwomen, when there were women, set about establishing thennorms of family life under the most adverse conditions. Mennwere the leaders and organizers, but women were indispensablenboth for their labors and because they conveyed, inntheir very persons, the lares and penates of domestic life andnhuman society. Sarah Royce observed that the rough minersnof California were aware of how deeply they had sunk infonbarbarism: “Even in their intercourse with each other, theynoften alluded to this feeling, and in the presence of women,nthen so unusual, most of them showed it in a very markednmanner.”nhi heading west into a country without law, many of thensettlers apparently were afraid of encountering the anarchynand violence that has been portrayed in fiction, film, andntelevision in our own century. John Mack Faragher (Womennand Men on the Overland Trail) quotes one womannpioneer’s realization that “when we set foot on the rightnbank of the Missouri River we were outside the pale of civilnlaw.” But, as Faragher points out, the threat of anarchynrarely materialized. Settlers quickly organized themselvesneither into wagon trains or, even more frequently, intonparties of kinfolk. Fights there were, as there always arenwhen people — many of them previously strangers — arenput under severe physical and moral strain, but order did notnbreak down in the absence of official constraints. Far from it.nThen, as now, it is not police and courts that keep peoplenfrom killing and robbing each other. Wherever an extensivenpolice force is required, it is a sign of a social dissolution sonhopeless that no penal system can prevail against it. In mynneighborhood, you hardly need police, and where they arenneeded — in the projects of Washington, New York, andnChicago — the police are virtually powerless.nRead through the Little House books, and you will findnfew mentions of law or police. Even where the institutionsnof law and order existed in rural and frontier America, theynwere never the primary mechanisms of social control.nFamilies minded their own business, quite literally, andnwhen they had cause to quarrel with a neighbor, it was rarelyn14/CHRONICLESnnnthe cause of a suit or action. What government there wasnhad no authority to interfere within households, where anfather’s word was law. A man had not only legal butneconomic control over his wife and children down to thenmiddle of the century, and even when the various MarriednWomen’s Acts were passed, giving wives the right to makencontracts and wills, the man of the family remained in factnthe lord and master in his own home.nFeminists and men not worthy of the name like to speaknof “the patriarchy” as an oppressive tyranny from whichnwe are only just beginning to liberate ourselves. In one sensenthey are right. Despite the vicissitudes that male dominancenhas undergone in history — relatively low in imperial Romenand high in England under the Tudors and Stuarts — adultnmales have been in control since the days of Adam or, if younprefer, of Homo erectus. Feminists are also probably right inntheir contention that Western civilization, when comparednwith many savage and barbarous cultures, has been remarkablynpatriarchal. I say remarkably rather than uniquely,nbecause all great civilizations have shared this quality.nWhile it is dangerous to compare the experiences ofndifferent peoples at different stages of their development, anbrief glance at Western man’s record as patriarch is suggestive.nHomer’s Odyssey is, to a great extent, fiction, but itndoes portray a society in which women like Penelope andnArete (Queen of the Phaeacians) exercise enormous influence,nwhile in Periclean Athens women were rigidly supervisednand segregated from most male activities. Contrastndemocratic Athens with royal and oligarchic Sparta, wherenthe women were, proverbially, indulged to the point ofnlicense. The Republican Rome that defeated the childmurderingnCarthaginians allowed household heads fullnenjoyment of the patria potestas, the power of life and deathnover their dependents, but the Roman law of Diocletian’snday — when most citizens had become wards of the imperialnstate — generously protected the rights of women andnchildren. In our own history, that is in the history of Britainnand America, it is a cliche that patriarchal power wasnstrengthened in the 17th century and remained strong downninto the Victorian era.nFor those of us who think that history has lessons to teach,nit would seem that patriarchal power tends to be stronger innsocieties that emphasize personal liberty and self-government,nweaker under regimes, like Sparta and later Rome, innwhich the state exercises great power over private life. Thisnshould not be surprising, since the only alternative tonpaternal supremacy is government supremacy. A man’snchildren, even when they are grown, could never bynthemselves represent a threat to his power, and the samenholds true for his wife, whose “rights” have almost alwaysnbeen protected primarily by her male relatives — fathers,nbrothers, and husbands.nToday, women’s rights are the subject of legislation andnjudicial fiats. Whenever you hear the word “rights,” it isntime to release the safety on your Browning, because younknow that some politician somewhere is planning to makenhimself richer and more powerful at your expense. This isnnot a new insight. Aristotie, in his discussion of tyranny,nobserved that it was the habit of tyrants to champion thencause of women and social inferiors. This is not a questionn