Love and Marriage

by Ellen Key

Through the religion of life and its countless influences, through gradual, scarcely perceptible transformations, will love’s freedom more and more come to mean freedom for enduring love.

The spirit of the age, working through the standards of literature and public opinion, transforms with infallible certainty thoughts and feelings in the direction in which the strongest lead them.

It now rests with the young to be these strong ones.

With the growing desire for a many-sided enhancement of life, parentage will also become an ever more important condition of this enhancement. Young people will be no more willing to depreciate by a premature sexual life the value of those years which ought to be devoted to furthering their individual growth, than they will be to diminish their joy of parentage by putting a weak and unwelcome child into the world. For they will wish to possess all happiness fully and frankly. The expected child ought to give them beautiful dreams, not tormenting uneasiness; it must be carried in rejoicing, not in unwilling, arms, and must have received life from the fulness of happiness—not from a mischance.

Here as everywhere, what is the most genuine and lasting happiness for the individual is also for the moral enhancement the race.

When two lovers have this desire and have reached that maturity, when the will has a right to realisation, and is in full agreement with the health and beauty of themselves, of the new generation, and of society, it is right that they should come together, even though it may not be possible for their pure desire of common life and common work to take the form of marriage.

For him who has ears to hear, these figures will speak: they show that the average age of unlawful unions is the right age appointed by nature for marriage. Thus the statistics of Sweden for 1900 show that 6340 “illegitimate” children were born of mothers between 20 and 25 years old, while those born of mothers under 20 were 2028, and of mothers between 25 and 30, 3857. Another eloquent fact is that, even before the extension of compulsory military service, the highest figures of emigration, for men as well as women, occur among the unmarried within a year or two on either side of twenty.

By unlawful unions, the race is often defrauded of the children’s fitness for life, which is ruined by the unfavourable conditions in which the children are brought up; and by emigration the best blood of the country is drained away. And even if the latter is occasioned by a variety of causes, no thoughtful person could omit to reckon among them the difficulty of marrying at the right time. Another equally eloquent circumstance fully supported by statistical evidence is this: that prostitution increases in direct proportion as the general social conditions and the economical situation are unfavourable to marriage, and that it decreases as marriage is facilitated. And the majority of prostitutes—as of unmarried mothers—are of the right age for marriage.

The youth of the upper classes ought not, however, in their struggle against actual conditions, to descend to the irresponsibility of the lower classes. Educated young people must set an example to the rest, not only by entering into their matrimonial alliances at the right time, but also in a way that is unimpeachable as regards the claims of the race and of society. The young have a perfect right—like their contemporaries among the people—to assume the responsibility of founding a home, which may be denied to them, before the child is expected. But they have only a right to this kind of defiance if they are willing, as soon as they are able, themselves to provide for the new creatures who will one day replace them in the race. But above all things, educated young people must also take part in the social reform which—speaking broadly—will be the only solution of the marriage question.