Although the new marriage law is to give to adult citizens complete freedom to arrange their erotic relationships at their own responsibility and risk, with or without marriage, it remains necessary that double marriages (bigamy), sexual relationships within forbidden degrees, or on the part of persons suffering from transmissible disease, which the law has declared to be a hindrance to marriage, and also intercourse with persons under eighteen years of age, should be regarded as punishable offences. The same is true of homosexual and other perverse manifestations. The trial in such cases will be conducted by a judge, with the assistance of a jury of physicians and crimino-psychologists.
The writer does not believe that marriage will be transformed by legal changes in the way outlined above, but she is of opinion that what will happen is that “men and women will refuse to submit themselves to the unworthy forms of marriage, which will remain established by law, and will form free unions, the so-called ‘marriage of conscience,’” such as those which the Belgian sociologist Mesnil has recommended in his work, “Le Libre Mariage.”
It is, in fact, in Sweden, Ellen Key’s fatherland, in which these free marriages of conscience appear to have first obtained adherents. She records the free union of the professor of national economics at Lund, Knut Wicksell. Additional reports of free marriages in Sweden are given by the Swedish physician Anton Nyström.[204] He mentions among those who have formed free unions, without legal or ecclesiastical ceremony, but simply by public notification, in addition to the already mentioned university professor, also the editor of a leading newspaper, a physician and doctor of philosophy, and a candidate of philosophy. The latter is engaged in study with his wife at the high school at Göteborg. In February, 1904, they made a public announcement in the newspaper that they were entering on a “marriage of conscience,” since they had a conscientious objection to the ecclesiastical form of marriage. The principal of the college wrote an address to the young couple, stating that, although this union was not entered upon on immoral grounds, and therefore could not be regarded as a punishable offence, still, such a free union, unrecognized by the State, between man and woman, was not compatible with the good order of society, that it was injurious to the general ethical conception of the sacramental character of marriage, and also constituted a dangerous example, which others might be led to imitate. The principal therefore urged the young people most earnestly “to place their union as soon as possible on a legitimate footing.” This exhortation, however, led to no result.
Moreover, the University of Upsala was more free-thinking than that of Göteborg, for the above-mentioned professor and his wife were, for a long time after they had become united in free love, matriculated students at the University of Upsala, and the university authorities favoured them with no attention with regard to this matter.
In recent years, the public declaration of “free marriages” has also found observance in other European countries. Thus, not long ago the author who writes under the pseudonym of “Roda-Roda” announced in the newspapers his free union with the Baroness von Zeppelin; and in the Vossische Zeitung, No. 410, September 2, 1906, we find the following announcement:
“Dr. Alfred Rahmer
Wilhelmine Ruth Rahmer
geb. Prinz-Flohr
Frei-Vermählte”
(Free-Wedlock).
Similar public announcements are reported from Holland. Moreover, according to Nyström, it has since 1734 been legally established in Sweden, that in certain cases engagement is equivalent to marriage—namely, when the engaged woman becomes pregnant. “When a man impregnates his fiancée, the engagement becomes a marriage.... If the man refuse to go through the ceremony of marriage, and wishes to break off the engagement, the woman is legally declared to be his wife, and enjoys full conjugal rights in his house.” So runs this law.
We can predict with certainty that the adherents of free marriage, the number of “marriage protestants,” as Ellen Key happily calls them, will continue to increase. To such will belong all those who have an equal antipathy to coercive marriage, to the debasing intercourse with prostitutes, and to the transient casual love, such as is experienced in ordinary extra-conjugal sexual intercourse, the true “wild” love.
“It is only a question of time”—thus Ellen Key concludes her remarks on marriage reform—“when the respect felt by society for the sexual union will not depend upon the form of the life in common, by which two human beings become parents, but only on the worth of the children which these two are producing as new links in the chain of the generations. Men and women will then devote to their spiritual and physical preparation for sexual intercourse the same religious earnestness that the Christians devote to the welfare of their souls. No longer will divine laws regarding the morality of sexual relationships be considered the mainstay of morality; in place of these the desire to elevate the human race and a sense of personal responsibility will be the safeguards of conduct. But the conviction on the part of the parents that the purpose of life is also their own proper life—that is, that they do not exist only for the sake of children—should free them from certain other duties of conscience which at present bind them in respect of children—above all, from the duty of maintaining a union in which they themselves are perishing. The home will perhaps become more than it is at present; something at unity with the mother, something which—far from excluding the father—carries within itself the germ of a new and higher ‘family right.’...
“A greater and healthier will-to-live in respect of erotic feelings and demands—this it is that our time needs! Here from the feminine side real dangers threaten; and one of several ways in which these dangers must be averted is by the construction of new forms of marriage.