The family and its members

by Anna Garlin Spencer

All Children Entitled to Best Development Possible.—If the latter is all that is meant, the phrase the "abolition of illegitimacy" is unfortunate and the real agreement among philanthropists, educators and all right-thinking people on the just claim of all children (however they may chance to arrive on this troubled planet) to the best development possible, should be emphasized in the slogan. It is well to remember that only a minority of children in any country, and in many countries a very small minority, are involved directly in this problem of the right treatment of children born outside the legal family. It would seem the part of social wisdom, therefore, in this, as in all other matters of social control, to ask ourselves the question, What rule on the whole gives the best condition for the largest number of persons?—and on the answer to that question base our law and custom, then add considerate treatment for the minority who must in the nature of things have some handicap if the rule is obeyed by the majority.

The Work of the Children's Bureau.—To lessen this handicap, the Federal Children's Bureau in Washington, D.C., began in 1915 an inquiry into illegitimacy as a child welfare problem, causing studies to be made of laws in different States of the Union. The results of this study were published in 1919 in Bureau Publication No. 42. In 1920 conferences were held under the auspices of the Bureau to consider standards of protection which might be embodied in laws. A Committee appointed to draft suggestions arrived at and to recommend the same made a Report, which is published in Bureau Publication No. 77.

The National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws on request formed a Committee on Status and Protection of Illegitimate Children which reported at length to the Thirty-first Annual Meeting of that body in August, 1921. This report formed the basis of discussion by legal experts, and in the meeting at San Francisco of recent date a revised program for "Uniform State Legislation for Children Born Out of Wedlock" was accepted and recommended. The title used is itself an advance upon old ideas.

The Suggested Uniform Law.—It is less harsh to speak of "those born out of wedlock" than of the "illegitimate." Moreover, the recommendations include a suggestion that in future in all reference in legal papers or official notices to a child born out of wedlock it "shall be sufficient for all purposes to refer to the mother as the parent having the sole custody of the child or to the child as being in the sole custody of the mother, no explicit reference being made to illegitimacy except in birth certificates or records of judicial proceedings in which the question of birth out of wedlock is at issue." The general law in the States of our Union legitimatizes a child born out of wedlock by the subsequent inter-marriage of the parents. This makes it easy for men and women to repair an injury if they can marry after the birth of their child. In any case the recommendations for uniform State laws make it clear that the tendency is strong to bring legal pressure to bear upon the father of a child by an unwedded mother to pay the expenses of her confinement, to support the child under the laws requiring "support of poor relatives" or under statutes specifically obligating recognition of parental responsibility outside the marriage bond; and this obligation, it is held, should continue in recognition and enforcement until the child is sixteen years of age.

Although there is strong demand on the part of many to give the child born out of wedlock the "right to inherit from the father's estate even though not legitimated," the Committee of the Commissioners on Uniform State Laws do not so recommend. Their statement concerning Liability of the Father's Estate is as follows: "The obligation of the father where his paternity has been judicially established in his lifetime or has been acknowledged by him in writing or by the part performance of his obligations is enforceable against his estate in such an amount as the court may determine, having regard to the age of the child, the ability of the mother to support it, the amount of property left by the father, the number, age, and financial condition of the lawful issue, if any, and the rights of the widow, if any."

To this writer this covers the just obligation if rightly administered and by leaving still a distinction in law between the rights of children born within and those born outside the marriage bond helps to preserve the interests of the majority of children.

In any case the preservation of such distinctions as are left in the milder and more humane laws advocated should help in making men and women anxious to give all the children for which they may be responsible a legal right to both parents by due process of marriage.

Have Unmarried Women a Social Right to Motherhood?—It is not alone philanthropic interest in the welfare of a class of children now handicapped by birth outside of legal family bonds, that has issued the call to "abolish illegitimacy." The slogan is also an expression of a new demand that women fit to bear and rear children and deeply desiring that personal experience and the social obligation which it implies, should be given a social right to become mothers whether or not the fitting permanent mate be found for a life-union under the law. This demand is reaching a critical poignancy in those countries in which the Great War has added to a long-increasing "surplus of women" an astounding total of millions of women fit to marry whose rightful mates are buried on the fields of conflict. Shall these women, it is asked, be denied motherhood as well as wifehood? Shall the state lose the children these women, child-loving and noble and wise, might bear to help make good the horrible losses that war has entailed?

Moreover, women everywhere are discerning the shallow inconsistency between the ideal so long preached of motherhood as woman's chief if not her only contribution to normal life and genuine social usefulness and the abnormal economic conditions and double ethical standards which doom so many women to single life. Still deeper in the hearts of women, now for the first time free to give voice to inner questionings of the inherited organization of society which has bound them to conventions written solely by men in statute and custom, rises the query, Is the present fashion of courtship and wedding favorable for installing fit women as mothers or keeping to single life those least capable of that social function?

Ellen Key's Estimate of Motherhood.—Ellen Key expresses this feeling that fitness for a task so tremendous as parenthood is more important than any mechanism by which parenthood is secured when she says, "It is solely from one moral point of view that motherhood without marriage, as well as the right of free divorce, must be judged. Irresponsible motherhood is always sin with or without marriage; responsible motherhood is always sacred with or without marriage." And again she says, "The one necessary thing is to make ever greater demands upon the men and women who take to themselves the right to give humanity new beings." Ellen Key has also much to say about the superior value of what women can do in and through their race-service as mothers to anything they can do outside of that office, except perhaps as teachers helping mothers. Her feeling on this matter is echoed by not a few women who ask for the social right to motherhood even when denied or not desiring ordinary family life. She declares that "It is an indisputable fact that if the majority of women no longer had the calm and repose to abide at the source of life but wanted to navigate all the seas with men, the sex contrasts would resolve themselves not into harmony but into monotony. Until women come to realize this it must still be insisted that the gain to society is nothing if millions of women do the work that men could do better and evade or fulfil poorly the greater tasks of life and happiness, the creation of men and the creation of souls." To fulfil these tasks properly she insists that women require the same human rights as men but they should use their new power of choice "in the field of life, in those provinces in which imponderable values are created, values that cannot be reduced to figures and yet are the sole values capable of transforming humanity; for it is not utilities but complete human beings that elevate life." The same feeling that she expresses animates many women who desire fit women to be mothers, even if unmarried, at whatever cost to old forms of family autonomy.