Those who renounced the subsidy would thus be as a rule the well-to-do,
or those who wished to devote themselves to self-support and thus gave
up, either altogether or after the first year, this help from the
community. The arrangement would fulfil its purpose in those classes of
society where at present the mother’s outdoor work, both in country and
town, involves equally great dangers to herself and the children. The
charges for this most important of defensive taxes ought, like other
similar ones, to be graduated and thus to fall most heavily upon the
rich, but upon the unmarried in the same degree as the married.
Inspection should be carried out by commissioners to be appointed in
every commune, varying in number according to the size of the commune,
but always composed of two-thirds women and one-third men. These
would distribute the subsidy and supervise the care not only of young
children but also of older ones. The mother who neglected her child
would, after three cautions, be deprived of the subsidy and the child
would be taken from her. The same would also apply to other parents who
subjected their children to bodily or mental ill-treatment.
The mother’s maintenance would always amount to the same sum per
annum, but for every child she would receive in addition the half of
its maintenance, until the number of children was reached that the
community might consider desirable from its point of view. Any children
born beyond that number would be the affair of the parents. Every
father would have to contribute a corresponding half of the child’s
maintenance from its birth up to the age of eighteen. At present the
community affords a man help as breadwinner for a family in the form
of higher wages calculated to that end and a rising scale according
to age, which, however, he receives whether he is married or single,
childless or the father of a family. But by paying the subsidy to the
mother, all need of unequal wages for the two sexes would cease, and
the subsidy would really further the purpose that is of importance to
the community: the rearing of the children.
The present system, on the other hand, maintains that most crude
injustice, the difference between legitimate and illegitimate children;
it frees unmarried fathers from their natural responsibility; it drives
unmarried mothers to infanticide, to suicide, to prostitution.
All these conditions would be altered by a law which prescribed that
every mother has a right, under certain conditions, to the support
of the community during the years in which she is bearing the burden
most important to the community; and that every child has a right to
maintenance by both its parents, to the name of both and—so far as
there may be property—to the inheritance of both.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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