Ellen Key and Her Gospel
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."
