Nietzold, Die Ehe in Ægypten zur Ptolemäisch-römischen Zeit, 1903, p. 3. This bond also accorded rights to any children that might be born during its existence.
See, e.g., Ellen Key, Mutter und Kind, p. 21. The necessity for the combination of greater freedom of sexual relationships with greater stringency of parental relationships was clearly realized at an earlier period by another able woman writer, Miss J. H. Clapperton, in her notable book, Scientific Meliorism, published in 1885. "Legal changes," she wrote (p. 320), "are required in two directions, viz., towards greater freedom as to marriage and greater strictness as to parentage. The marriage union is essentially a private matter with which society has no call and no right to interfere. Childbirth, on the contrary, is a public event. It touches the interests of the whole nation."
Ellen Key, Liebe und Ehe, p. 168; cf. the same author's Century of the Child.
In Germany alone 180,000 "illegitimate" children are born every year, and the number is rapidly increasing; in England it is only 40,000 per annum, the strong feeling which often exists against such births in England (as also in France) leading to the wide adoption of methods for preventing conception.