The mother should receive yearly the same sum, but, in addition, she should receive for each child half of the cost of its support, as long as the number of children is not exceeded which the society has laid down as desirable. Children born in excess of this number would be a private concern of the parents. Every father must, from the time of birth until the child attains the age of eighteen years, provide one-half of the money needed for its support.
The existing immoral distinction between legitimate and illegitimate children is practically equivalent to freeing unmarried fathers from their natural responsibility, and drives unmarried mothers to death, prostitution, or infanticide.
All this would be done away with by a law ensuring from the State support for the mother during the first, most difficult years, and ensuring the child a right to support from both parents, a right also to the name of both, and to inheritance from both.
Legal expression is also demanded for the right of each member of a married couple to possess his or her property; those who wish to make any other arrangement can do so by special contract after a definite valuation of their property. And in respect of the right of inheritance, the domestic work of the wife (housekeeping and the care of the children) must receive due economic consideration—a matter hitherto ignored. Not only in respect of her property, but also in respect of all civil rights, and of the right of control over her own person, the married woman must be placed in the same position as the unmarried.
Ellen Key’s remarks on the removal of the coercion exercised at present on husband and wife in respect of living together are very interesting. She writes:
“There are persons who would have continued to love one another throughout the whole of their life had they not been compelled—day after day, year after year—to adapt their customs, their volitions, and their inclinations entirely according to one another’s tastes. So much unhappiness depends, indeed, upon matters of almost no importance, difficulties which two human beings endowed with moral courage and insight would easily have overcome, had it not been that the instinct towards happiness was overpowered by regard for ordinary opinion. The more personal freedom a woman (or man) has had before marriage, the more does she (or he) suffer in a home in which she does not possess an hour or a corner for her own undisturbed use. And the more the modern human being gains an increase in his individual freedom of movement, the more he feels the need for privacy in other relations, the more also will man and wife need these things in the married state....
“But at present custom (and law) demand from the married pair that they should lead a life in common, which often ends in a permanent separation, merely because conventional considerations prevented them from living apart!
“Also for those otherwise constituted, the narrow dependence, the compulsory belonging each to the other, the daily adaptation, the unceasing mutual consideration, may become oppressive. In continually increasing numbers people are beginning quietly to transform conjugal customs, so that they may correspond to the new needs. For instance, each goes for a journey by himself, when he feels the need for privacy; one of the pair seeks alone pleasures which the other does not value; in former times both would have ‘enjoyed’ them together, against the will of one, or both would have renounced what one could have genuinely enjoyed. More and more married people have separate bedrooms, and after a generation, it is probable that separate dwelling-houses for husband and wife will be sufficiently common to arouse no particular attention.”
With regard to the question of personal freedom in marriage, Ellen Key takes into account the possibility of marriage being kept secret on urgent grounds; also the introduction of new forms of divorce, the present procedure giving rise to such detestable practices in the law-courts—for example, the detailed statement of the grounds for divorce, or an account of the refusal or the misuse of “conjugal rights,” or an account of the malicious desertion of one party by the other.
The author, therefore, makes proposals for a new marriage law and a new divorce law.