Because from time to time powerful voices were raised, like George
Sand's or Almquist's, calling without consideration not only that
marriage immoral which was consummated without mutual love but also that
marriage immoral which was continued without mutual love--a purer
consciousness has awakened in questions regarding the conditions of the
genesis of the unborn race and elevated the conditions of the personal
dignity of man and woman. So eventually it will come to pass that no
finely sensitive woman will become a mother except through mutual love;
that this motherhood sanctioned legally or not so sanctioned shall be
considered the only true motherhood, and every other motherhood untrue.
Thus will mankind awaken to such a feeling of the "Sanctity of the
generation," and to such an understanding of the conditions of the
health, strength and beauty of the race, that every marriage which has
its source in worldly or merely sensual motives, or in reasons of
prudence or in a feeling of duty shall be considered as Almquist calls
it: "A criminal counterfeiting of the highest values of life." And the
same criminal counterfeit obtains in every married life which is
continued under the compulsion, the distaste or the resignation of one
of the two. Man will be penetrated with the consciousness that the whole
ethical conception which now in and with marriage gives to a husband or
a wife rights over the personality of the other, is a crude survival of
the lower periods of culture; that everything which is exchanged between
husband and wife in their life together, can only be the free gift of
love, can never be demanded by one or the other as a right. Man will
understand that when one can no longer continue the life in love then
this life must cease; that all vows binding forever the life of feeling
are a violence of one's personality, since one cannot be held
accountable for the transformation of one's feeling. Even though this
new moral ideal should in the beginning dissolve many untrue marriages
and thus cause much suffering, yet all this suffering is necessary. It
belongs to the attainment of the new erotic ethics which will uplift man
and woman in that sphere where now the spirit of slavery and of
obtuseness under a holy name degrade them; where social convention
sanctions prostitution alongside monogamy, and vouchsafes to the seducer
but not to the seduced, social esteem, calling the unmarried woman
ruined who in love has become a mother, but the married woman
respectable who without love gives children to the man who has bought
her!
The erotic-ethical consciousness of mankind cannot be uplifted until the
new idea of morality with all its consequences is clearly established.
This ideal has two types of adversary. One is the adherent of the
conventional morality; the other the supporter of the transitory union
to which the name of "free love" is erroneously applied.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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