Love and Marriage

by Ellen Key

That she is without sufficient personal means or earnings to provide for her own and half of the children’s support, or that she has given up work for the sake of looking after the children.

Those who are unwilling to conform to the above conditions will not apply for the subsidy, which naturally cannot be greater than what is strictly necessary, and which will only in exceptional cases be distributed for longer than a child’s three first and most important years.

Those who renounced the subsidy would thus be as a rule the well-to-do, or those who wished to devote themselves to self-support and thus gave up, either altogether or after the first year, this help from the community. The arrangement would fulfil its purpose in those classes of society where at present the mother’s outdoor work, both in country and town, involves equally great dangers to herself and the children. The charges for this most important of defensive taxes ought, like other similar ones, to be graduated and thus to fall most heavily upon the rich, but upon the unmarried in the same degree as the married.

Inspection should be carried out by commissioners to be appointed in every commune, varying in number according to the size of the commune, but always composed of two-thirds women and one-third men. These would distribute the subsidy and supervise the care not only of young children but also of older ones. The mother who neglected her child would, after three cautions, be deprived of the subsidy and the child would be taken from her. The same would also apply to other parents who subjected their children to bodily or mental ill-treatment.

The mother’s maintenance would always amount to the same sum per annum, but for every child she would receive in addition the half of its maintenance, until the number of children was reached that the community might consider desirable from its point of view. Any children born beyond that number would be the affair of the parents. Every father would have to contribute a corresponding half of the child’s maintenance from its birth up to the age of eighteen. At present the community affords a man help as breadwinner for a family in the form of higher wages calculated to that end and a rising scale according to age, which, however, he receives whether he is married or single, childless or the father of a family. But by paying the subsidy to the mother, all need of unequal wages for the two sexes would cease, and the subsidy would really further the purpose that is of importance to the community: the rearing of the children.

The present system, on the other hand, maintains that most crude injustice, the difference between legitimate and illegitimate children; it frees unmarried fathers from their natural responsibility; it drives unmarried mothers to infanticide, to suicide, to prostitution.

All these conditions would be altered by a law which prescribed that every mother has a right, under certain conditions, to the support of the community during the years in which she is bearing the burden most important to the community; and that every child has a right to maintenance by both its parents, to the name of both and—so far as there may be property—to the inheritance of both.

Since the mother must now, with increasing frequency, be a breadwinner as well as the husband, it is just, even from this point of view, that she should share with him authority over the children. But since, furthermore, she has suffered more for them, thus loves them more and understands them better—and thus, as a rule, not only does more for them but also means more to them—it is likewise just that, whereas the mother now has to be satisfied with what power the father allows her, the conditions should be reversed, so that the mother should receive the greatest legal authority.

When the husband is not alone in bearing the burden of breadwinner, there will be a possibility of his duty as educator being realised. He will then have time to develop his qualities in this direction and the growing value of his fatherly care and fatherly love will lighten for the mother the task of education which at present often overwhelms her, since with a growing consciousness of its responsibility this task is becoming more and more difficult to perform with her increasing need of personal freedom of movement.