These are the claims the people of the present day make upon the form of marriage, if it is to express their personal will and further the growth of their personality. The actual institution of marriage, on the other hand, involves forms that have become meaningless and therefore repulsive, and places the parties under the law in a position with regard to one another which, looked at ideally, is as far beneath the merits and dignity of the modern man as it actually is beneath those of the modern woman.
While thus the development of the ideas of personality and of love have resulted in these demands of increased liberty for the individual within marriage, the idea of solidarity and evolutionism, on the other hand, demand great limitations of individual freedom. The knowledge that every new being has a right to claim that its life shall be a real value—as well as knowledge of the right of society that the new life shall be a valuable one—has involved the demand of prohibiting marriages which would be dangerous to the children, and of better protecting the children where there is no marriage or where a marriage has been dissolved.
The economic factor has in modern society an importance for marriage which is felt to be more and more degrading as marriage becomes established on the basis of love.
Marriages inwardly dissolved are now often held together because both the parties would be in a worse financial position after divorce. The husband can not or will not make his wife a sufficient allowance; he is, perhaps, unable to realise her fortune, which he has invested in his business, or perhaps he has spent it; the wife at marriage has abandoned an occupation which she cannot now take up again in order to support herself—and so on to infinity.
But even happy marriages suffer through the wife’s subordinate position, economically as well as judicially.
It is, therefore, of great importance both in happy and unhappy marriages that the wife should retain control over her property and her earnings; that she should be self-supporting in so far as she can combine this with her duties as a mother, and that she should be maintained by the community during the first year of each child’s life. Similar proposals have been made from the socialist side, but also in other quarters.
A woman ought to be able to claim this subsidy if she can prove:
That she is of full legal age;
That she has performed her equivalent of military service by undergoing a one year’s training in the care of children and in hygiene, and—if possible—in nursing the sick;
That she will, herself, care for the children or provide other efficient care;