Love and Marriage

By
Ellen Key
Author of “The Century of the Child,” etc.
Translated from the Swedish by
Arthur G. Chater
With a Critical and Biographical Introduction by
Havelock Ellis
G. P. Putnam’s Sons
New York and London
The Knickerbocker Press

PUBLISHERS’ NOTE

In this treatise, the veteran Swedish reformer attacks problems the most vital to the welfare of the human race, problems which have throughout the centuries engaged the attention of leaders of thought.

The writers who have given attention to the complex subject of the relations of the sexes, of the obligations of the state in the control of these relations, and of the organisation of the family as the foundation of society, include such authors as Plato, Goethe, Richter, Rousseau, Mary Wollstonecraft, Fourier, Comte, Mrs. Browning, Mill, Ibsen, Westermarck, Charlotte Gilman, Havelock Ellis, and many others.

These problems are complex, and the difficulties presented by them most serious. No writer has ever yet presented solutions that could be accepted as finally satisfactory. Ellen Key writes with a profound antagonism to the philistinism and hypocrisy which have characterised much of the consideration given by the community to the subjects. She points out (as has, of course, been emphasised by many earlier writers) that the ignoring of an evil does not dispose of it, and that so far from preserving society from its influence, the burying of an evil merely tends to increase its corrupting and demoralising results.