Chapter XI · (continued 2)

Whilst Helene Stocker has laid especial stress upon the psychological and ethical relationships of free love, its equal importance from economical and social points of view has been discussed by Friedrich Naumann,[208] W. Borgius,[209] Lily Braun,[210] Maria Lischnewska,[211] and Henriette Fürth.[212]

Naumann rightly draws attention to the fact that our purely monetary economic system is favourable to the production of sterility, for the reason that in this system motherhood is equivalent to loss of money, because the wife ceases to earn money in a degree proportionate to the extent to which she becomes a mother. The burden of the upbringing of children must be made an affair of the community. At the present time, on the contrary, the producer of human beings is burdened upon all sides. He who has children has more rent to pay, and increased school expenses. Therefore, Naumann demands, as a first step to the recognition of the fact that it is a public duty to educate children, that school expenses shall no longer be demanded from the individual parent. Above all, however, it must be made easier to the wife to be a mother.

The wife as a personality demands her right to work, and her right to motherhood. The fact of the compulsory celibacy of an ever-increasing number of women competent to become mothers is the problem which here demands solution. According to the census of 1900, there were in Germany no less than 4,210,955 women between the ages of eighteen and forty years unmarried, the total number of women of corresponding age being 9,568,659—that is, 44 per cent. were unmarried. Among these there were 2,830,538 between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five years, the period most suitable to child-bearing, the total number of women of corresponding age being 3,593,644—that is, no less than 78 per cent. According to Lily Braun, there remain from 2,000,000 to 2,500,000 German women permanently unmarried; and we may expect the number of female celibates to increase. The economic conditions, the previously described unhealthy conditions of coercive marriage, and the efforts of women for emancipation, have a combined influence hostile to marriage. On the other hand, law and conventional morality co-operate in making life a martyrdom for the unmarried mother and for the illegitimate child.[213]

The woman who becomes a mother, when united only in the bonds of free love, is at the present day defamed, despised, a being without rights. The question of “maintenance” is a scandal of our time! It is the proof of the degree to which most men are devoid of conscience. An experienced lawyer has very forcibly described the intolerable conditions which at present obtain in this matter.[214] He published the following characteristic letter from a young master-butcher, which shows how meanly even a simple-minded man may endeavour to escape the duty of maintenance. The letter runs:

“Dear Dora,

“I wanted to come round to-day, and wished to deal with the matter by word of mouth, but I can’t do it, and so I must write to tell you that we cannot marry, for, in fact, I have now less money even than when I was a journeyman. The few hundred marks that I had I have put into the business; and, in fact, I really cannot marry; if I did, I couldn’t exist at all. I should have to shut up the shop. What should we do then? I shouldn’t be able to show my face in H—— again; besides, at best, the business is not worth very much. So, my dear Dora, write to me now how we can settle matters; you mustn’t draw the string too tight, or ask too much; if you do, you see, you will have to find your own way out of the trouble. Of course, I shall be glad enough to do what’s right, because I am as much to blame as you are. If after a while I get on as well as my brothers have done, I can do more for you. But just now I can’t help you much. Let’s hope you may find some other man with whom you may live more happily than you have lived with me. Dear Dora, don’t make such a fuss about it: there are plenty more in the same case, up and down the world; you are not the only one. Now, write to me directly what you want to do; let’s get the matter settled quietly; that’ll be better for you. Your mother won’t leave you in the lurch, and you will find it will all come right.

“Best love.

“Fritz H.

“P.S.—Write soon.”

Let us imagine the state of mind of the young woman who receives this letter, characterized as it is by such crafty heartlessness! And yet this heartlessness is no greater than that of modern European society, which simultaneously makes fun of the “old maid” and condemns the unmarried mother to infamy. This double-faced, putrescent “morality” is profoundly immoral, it is radically evil. It is moral and good to contest it with all our energy, to enter the lists on behalf of the right to free love, to “unmarried” motherhood. Let us make a clearance of this medieval bugbear of coercive marriage morality, which is a disgrace in respect of our state of civilization and economical development. Two million women in a condition of compulsory celibacy and—coercive marriage morality. It is merely necessary to place these two facts side by side, in order to display before our eyes the complete ethical bankruptcy of our time in the province of sexual morality.

In addition to this necessity for a radical alteration in sexual morality, we must, in the second place, enunciate the demand for a general insurance of motherhood, for the foundation of homes for pregnant women, for women in child-birth, and for infants. The fulfilment of these demands alone will bring us a great step forward in the restoration to health of our sexual life, and in the preparation of a more beautiful future.[215]

If it be true, as W. B. Stevenson reports,[216] that King Charles IV. decreed that all foundling children in Spanish America were to be regarded as of noble birth, in order that all professions might be open to them, we cannot but consider that this mode of thought and action, on the part of a ruler in the country of the Inquisition, was a shining example for our own time.

“Society,” says Eduard Reich, “as well as the Church, sins against the laws of morality, as long as it stands in the way of the advancement of illegitimate children, either by the maintenance of miserable prejudices against these poor beings, or by positive decrees. We shall never be able, even should the human race enter Paradise, to make it impossible for extra-conjugal procreation to occur: love-children will always exist. Since, then, it is not the fault of the latter that their parents have brought them into the world; and, further, since, even if all men were married, one could not impute it to a man as a moral transgression, if he, in the plenitude of his procreative powers, had intercourse with a beautiful girl, instead of with his wife (suffering, for example, from cancer, or some other serious disease); and since, on the other hand, a wife still in the full bloom of youth could not be blamed for unfaithfulness if, her elderly husband having been impotent for several years, she now has intercourse with a vigorous and healthy young man—for such reasons, let us throw the veil of forgetfulness over all well-intentioned human weaknesses, and no longer ask whether a citizen of the world has been engendered in the marriage-bed, or has sprung from the well-spring of love. To the reasonable being it is the man himself who is of value; and only blockheads, simpletons, and donkeys will inquire as to his origin.”[217]

And yet one more question I will address in conclusion to the adherents of coercive marriage morality. How many free-love relationships, how many illegitimate children have there not been at all times among the cultured classes, even among the pillars of the throne and the altar, precisely among those who, on account of their higher spiritual development, ought to possess a stronger ethical sensibility (nota bene, from the standpoint of coercive marriage morality). It would be an interesting task to collect statistics relating to such free unions, and the resulting “illegitimate” offspring, in the case of notable men and women! The marriage fanatics would be horrified! Quite apart from the innumerable secret relationships of this nature, and their consequences, a short observation and enumeration of the illegitimate loves and parentage of men and women of high standing, alike spiritual and moral, would alone suffice to illuminate the actual conditions, and would enable us to draw remarkable conclusions regarding coercive marriage. It is my intention, as soon as possible, to represent in a brief work the rôle of free love in the history of civilization, and to adduce proofs that free love is very well compatible with a moral life. Who would venture to reproach with immorality a Bürger, a Jean Paul, a Gutzkow, a Karoline Schlegel, a George Sand, or even a Goethe?[218]

It is a simple evolutionary necessity that free love, in association with progressive differentiation and with the reshaping of economic conditions, will find its moral justification also for those who at present judge and condemn it from the point of view of long outworn social conditions.