While thus the development of the ideas of personality and of love
have resulted in these demands of increased liberty for the individual
within marriage, the idea of solidarity and evolutionism, on the other
hand, demand great limitations of individual freedom. The knowledge
that every new being has a right to claim that its life shall be a
real value—as well as knowledge of the right of society that the new
life shall be a valuable one—has involved the demand of prohibiting
marriages which would be dangerous to the children, and of better
protecting the children where there is no marriage or where a marriage
has been dissolved.
The economic factor has in modern society an importance for marriage
which is felt to be more and more degrading as marriage becomes
established on the basis of love.
Marriages inwardly dissolved are now often held together because both
the parties would be in a worse financial position after divorce. The
husband can not or will not make his wife a sufficient allowance; he
is, perhaps, unable to realise her fortune, which he has invested in
his business, or perhaps he has spent it; the wife at marriage has
abandoned an occupation which she cannot now take up again in order to
support herself—and so on to infinity.
But even happy marriages suffer through the wife’s subordinate
position, economically as well as judicially.
It is, therefore, of great importance both in happy and unhappy
marriages that the wife should retain control over her property and
her earnings; that she should be self-supporting in so far as she
can combine this with her duties as a mother, and that she should be
maintained by the community during the first year of each child’s life.
Similar proposals have been made from the socialist side, but also in
other quarters.
A woman ought to be able to claim this subsidy if she can prove:
That she is of full legal age;
That she has performed her equivalent of military service by undergoing
a one year’s training in the care of children and in hygiene, and—if
possible—in nursing the sick;
That she will, herself, care for the children or provide other
efficient care;
That she is without sufficient personal means or earnings to provide
for her own and half of the children’s support, or that she has given
up work for the sake of looking after the children.
Those who are unwilling to conform to the above conditions will not
apply for the subsidy, which naturally cannot be greater than what
is strictly necessary, and which will only in exceptional cases be
distributed for longer than a child’s _three_ first and most important
years.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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