Note 4 — Chapter VI · THE INFLUENCE OF THE WOMAN MOVEMENT UPON MARRIAGE

See Love and Ethics, Ralph Fletcher Seymour, Chicago, and also Mutter und Kind, published in Germany only, Pan-Verlag. My plan is a paternity assessment upon society as a contribution to the maintenance of children and a compensation of motherhood by the state.

Society has already shown by a series of institutions, maternity assurance, infants’ milk distribution, clothing and feeding of children, and many kindred social efforts, that the maintenance afforded by the father is not sufficient for the young generation; quite as little is the mother’s care, which is supplemented by other means, crèches, etc. But when the child finally becomes the unconscious “head of the family,” then it will be the affair of society to requite maternity. Marriage will then signify only the living together of two people upon the ground of love and the common parenthood of children. Maternal right will in law take the place of paternal right, but in reality the father will continue to retain all the influence upon the children which he personally is able to exert, just as has been hitherto the case with the mother.

In such circumstances there will be no more illegitimate children; no mothers driven out from the care of tender children to earn their daily bread; no fathers who avoid their economic duties toward their children, and who cannot be compelled by society to perform at least that paternal duty which animals perform now better than men: that of contributing their part to the maintenance of their progeny. There will be no mothers who for the sake of their own and their children’s maintenance need to stay with a brutal man; no mothers who, in case of a separation, can be deprived of their children on any ground except that of their own unworthiness. In a word, society must—upon a higher plane—restore the arrangement which is already found in the lower stages of civilisation, the arrangement which nature herself created: that mother and child are most closely bound together, that they together, above all, form the family, in which the father enters through the mother’s or his own free will.