Love and Marriage

by Ellen Key

Do not abolish the most important of all collective education, that of the children through the parents and of the parents through the children.

Doubtless, love’s freedom will bring about more complicated family relations than at present. From this point of view there seems to be an evident advantage to the children in State institutions, where their lives would not be so immediately affected by dislocations in those of their parents. But to deprive the majority of children of their homes, because the minority might thus lose theirs, would be a worse expedient than that of connecting the home more closely with the mother and developing human beings so that they may remain friends even when they have ceased to be husband and wife, and may thus continue to be capable of co-operating for the welfare of the children.

In a word, it is not the family that ought to be abolished, but the rights of the family that must be reformed; not education by parents that ought to be avoided, but education of parents that must be introduced; not the home that ought to be done away with, but homelessness that must cease.

The State rearing of children would work like the feeding of foundlings on Pasteurised milk: they sickened when they were thus deprived of certain indispensable bacilli. The people who were brought up on the germ-free milk of universal benevolence, in the untainted air of uniform order; who had their origin in the love of the majority, their nourishment from the automatic machine of the institution, their education in the mould of the school, their occupation as wax-makers in the social hive—these unfortunate creatures might find existence so tame and so empty that those of them whom weariness of life had not driven to suicide before the age of twenty might use their atavistic longing for happiness in burning down the institutions and rebuilding homes for human beings.

Can people not understand that State care of children would force upon the young generation life’s last and hardest experience, that of not being the most important or the nearest to anyone, and that this heavy fruit—under which old trees may give way—might deform the young ones for ever? Do not people see that, even if many homes are now hell, we should not sink to the lowest circle of hell—which Dante’s fancy made ice-cold—until the warmth was quenched which the hearths of home still throw out, and their place was taken by the steam-heating of the institution? When existence is made up of beings with starved hearts, frozen souls, obliterated characteristics—what materials will these afford for constructing the society of which they will form part? Will they even care to produce children as raw material for the human factories; or the necessaries for the maintenance of that life in which the elements of personal happiness are wanting? Will they even have the energy to take a decision about the order of society which robs them of life’s greatest values?

So wonderfully strong is in man the need of having some place of his own, of being among his own, feeling himself at home in one poor corner of the world, in a single poor heart, that this feeling has even the power of clearing a morass into a spring by subterranean ways.

On a railway journey in the South I once saw a woman, whose face, figure, and manners betrayed the completest downfall. This mother had a beautiful six-year-old daughter. Never was it more horrible to see a child at her mother’s knee; never did an amulet seem more powerless than the saint’s image that a pitying hand had hung about the child’s neck. But when the child leaned towards her mother, she was embraced by the drunken harlot with a tender emotion, which restored to her a spark of human dignity. And when the child read in the looks of her fellow-travellers the disgust her mother inspired, her dark eyes glowed with angry sorrow and she took up before her mother a position of protesting affection. No one could doubt that this child ought to be taken out of such unclean hands. But I wonder whether a better guardian would be able to give her the great emotion which at that moment dilated the child’s soul? If in a case like this one can even hesitate about the line between disadvantage and advantage, then in many other cases one will be convinced that it is not necessarily where a child has the best food, the cleanest bed, the most uninterrupted care, that it will thrive best, but rather where its soul may be expanded by the warmest and greatest emotions. Moreover it is one of the sacred mysteries of life that most parents, in themselves and towards one another, are worse than the child sees them; for the last being before whom a wretch casts off his protecting rags of human dignity is his child.

Against the wickedness of parents, however, as against their ill-treatment, the child must be protected, and that in a much greater degree than now by a constant extension of the right and duty of society’s intervention in these cases. But, when it can be avoided, the children ought just as little to be deprived of the protection of home as the home should be deprived of the protection children give to it, by compelling the parents to at least some measure of self-discipline, self-control, and self-sacrifice, whereby their souls are extended beyond the individual ego. In the day when the “hardening” atmosphere of the State institutions encompasses all children, human virtue will sink with even greater rapidity them human happiness.

All that has been said above does not imply any blindness to the fact that even the best homes are now penitentiaries in comparison with what they may become when the formation of a home has become a science and an art. At present the home is fortunately—or unfortunately—neither inspected nor rewarded with prizes. But perhaps this time is coming—as already in France the seventh child is brought up at the cost of the State, and decorations are proposed for those women who have borne and brought up the greatest number of efficient children. Then, if not before, will the “liberated” women perhaps regain some interest in the development of their powers in the direction of the home.