hAppiESt FamiLY

Ellen Key and Her Gospel

Indeed, the high priestess of the gospel
of freedom from legal bondage in sex-relation, Ellen Key, declares
that "a higher culture in love can be attained only by correlating
self-control with love and parental responsibility," a correlation she
believes would "follow as a consequence when love and parental
responsibility were made the sole conditions of sex-relations." She
also says that "in all cases where there is an affinity of souls and
the sympathy of friendship, love is what it always was and always will
be, the coöperation of the father with the mother in the education of
the children as well as the coöperation of the mother with the father
in all great social works." She thus links her ideal of true freedom
for the choices of love with social obligations and hence again with
what is best in inherited family life.

In addition, however, to the claim that love should be freed from
legal restraints in the interest of self-expression and
self-development (whether or not from Ellen Key's high standpoint of
parental responsibility) we have another attack upon the legal
autonomy of the family, as we know it, in the demand of some radical
feminists that "illegitimacy should be abolished."

Modern Ideals in Sex-relationship

To so separate mating and
parenthood as to make it the business of no one but the two chiefly
concerned when or how often such mating became a personal experience,
and to make it a matter of social indifference whether one or two
parents contracted with society for the right upbringing of the child
or children involved (with no troublesome questions asked about either
parent not in evidence in the contract), would certainly blur the
social outline of the family, as we know it, to the point of legal
nullification. There might, indeed, grow up in such an imagined
condition a form of contract between two persons mating, as well as
one between parents and state, in respect to parenthood's social
responsibilities, and where such personal contract was broken redress
from the courts might be sought and obtained. The effect, however, of
such a plan as that proposed would inevitably be to leave the nobler,
the more loving and less selfish of the men and women involved, more
surely even than is now the case, the victims of the weaker, the more
grasping, and the more selfish of the twain.

What Is the Modern Ideal in Child-care?

What is the ideal of those
most advanced in knowledge of childhood's needs and most sincere in
devotion to the welfare and happiness of the young? It is certainly
not one which ignores or minimizes the influence of the private home
or one which includes the belief that one parent, however wise or
good, can do as much for a child as two parents working in harmony
over a long period of years can accomplish.

Nor can the influence of such a proposed separation of mating and
parenthood upon the sex-relationship itself be ignored in any proposed
new ways of living together. Some of the critics of the family, as we
know it, may put "duty" in quotation marks when dealing with
sex-relationship in the effort to put "love" on the throne, but
experience shows that in all the intimate relationships of life some
stay from without the individual desire is needed to restrain from
impulsive change and lessen frictional expression of temperamental
weakness. On reason and a sense of obligation are based all successful
human arrangements, and these need social support.