Love and Marriage

by Ellen Key

And yet we all know that long before our time, married men and their sons in country houses were too often ready to seduce the wives and daughters of their dependents as well as the servants of the house. The wives and mothers of these gentlemen were frequently not ignorant of this—but they were praised for their wisdom when they pretended to suspect nothing. It was a matter of common knowledge that not a few married men and married women had mistresses and lovers within their own social circle; and every one knew that in the towns many men, during or before marriage, had illegitimate families.

Serious preachers of morality doubtless reply that they no more condone this secret adultery than they would an open one; that they see in one and the other a manifestation of that power of sin which only religion can vanquish. We have the right then to ask, whether within their own ranks—among clergymen, missionaries, readers—no similar transgressions occur.

The honest ones answer Yes, but point out that this causes shame among their fellow-Christians, and that these believers themselves acknowledge that they have sinned. Such men of the world, who play the hypocrite to retain their respectability, do the same thing. But the great danger to society first comes in when free-thinkers with no qualms of conscience commit, and authors without moral indignation describe, the sin. This it is that degrades the ideal of morality.

Here we are at the very cross-roads of the old and the new morality.

The champions of the latter go on to ask whether all adulterers—children of this world as well as children of God—in their innermost consciousness really feel themselves to be sinners. The need which impelled them was perhaps so imperious that it justified them before their own conscience in choosing a lesser evil in preference to a greater, when—from one cause or another—they could not or ought not to satisfy the need in their marriage.

And if this be so, then the exponents of the new morality may have grounds for their opinion: that self-control cannot and must not be the only answer to all the problems of sexual life; that a solution must be found which shall by degrees prevent men from wasting, either in unchastity or in a celibacy disguised as marriage, the strength which belongs to the race. The solution can only be this, that we not only assert love’s freedom to unite without external tie, but also man’s right more freely than at present to loosen the tie, when real union is no longer possible.

When speaking of love’s selection, it was put forward that a growing insight into the value and conditions of the enhancement of the race might produce cases where a marriage could be openly broken without therefore being dissolved. But the true line of development will quite certainly be this: that divorce will be free, depending solely on the will of both parties or of one, maintained for a certain time; that public opinion as regards a dissolved marriage will take the broader view that it has already acquired in the question of a broken engagement, which at one time was thought just as humiliating as a divorce is now.

With ever-growing seriousness the new conception of morality is affirmed: that the race does not exist for the sake of monogamy, but monogamy for the sake of the race; that mankind is therefore master of monogamy, to preserve or to abolish it.

Even the advocates of free divorce know well enough that it will involve abuses. But at the same time they know that there is no better proof of man’s incredible indolence of mind than the uneasiness produced by the thought of possible abuses resulting from a new social form, while the ancient abuses are tolerated with the dullest tranquillity.

Whatever abuses free divorce may involve, they cannot often be worse than those which marriage has produced and still produces—marriage, which is degraded to the coarsest sexual habits, the most shameless traffic, the most agonising soul-murders, the most inhuman cruelties, and the grossest infringements of liberty that any department of modern life can show.