The attempt has already been made by means of crèches, foundling institutions, and the like, to deal with this matter. But the protection of children without the protection of mothers is, and must remain, no more than patchwork; for the mother is the principal source of life for the child, and is indispensable to the child’s prosperity. Whatever ensures rest and care to the mother in her most difficult hours, whatever secures her economic existence for the future, and protects her from the contempt of her fellow-beings, by which her health is endangered and her life embittered, will serve to provide a secure foundation for the bodily and mental prosperity of the child, and will simultaneously give the mother herself a stronger moral hold. Therefore the Association for the Protection of Mothers will, above all, make the mothers’ position safe, by assisting them to the attainment of
Economic Independence
—especially such as are prepared to bring up their own children—by the formation in country and in town of
Homes for Mothers,
in which, in addition, arrangements will be made for the necessary care and upbringing of the children, the granting of legal protection, and the provision of medical aid. Experience has shown that such provision also corresponds to the wish of many of the fathers, and assists in retaining their help and interest for mother and child.
The Association will, however, above all, close the sources from which the present poverty of unmarried mothers arises, and these are more especially the moral prejudices which at the present day defame them socially, and the legal regulations which burden them almost exclusively with the economic care and responsibility for the child, and which entail on the father not at all, or in a quite insufficient degree, his contribution to the burden.
The Moral Defamation
of unmarried mothers would, perhaps, be comprehensible if we lived in economic and social conditions rendering it possible for every one to marry soon after attaining sexual maturity, so that the involuntary celibacy of adult persons was an abnormal state. In such a time as ours, however, in which no less than 45 per cent. of all women competent to bear children are unmarried, and those who actually marry do so for the most part at a comparatively late age, we must regard as untenable the view which considers the unmarried woman giving birth to a child to be an outcast, thrusts her out of society like the basest criminal, and gives her up to despair. Equally untenable appears
The Present-Day Legal View,
which, when the actual father has not gone through the forms prescribed by the State for a marriage, does not regard him as father in the legal sense, ascribes to him no relationship with the child procreated by him, and imposes on him no responsibility for the child or its mother, although in the majority of cases the mother is economically the weaker, and he himself economically the stronger party. There must, therefore, be a legal reform in the direction of equalizing as far as possible the position of the illegitimate and the legitimate child in relation to the father.