Boarding schools -- England -- Fiction; University of Oxford -- Fiction
He didn't care whether women had votes or not: that was inessential.
The great thing was to smash the home by making it a commercial unit.
This, he maintained, could be done by the State endowment of motherhood
and by marriage contracts in which payment for all domestic work should
be made by the husband. There must be honest, open payment; wheedling
and pin-money must go. Probably the best solution would be to insist
on a fixed percentage of the husband's income going to the wife as a
matter of course so long as she lived with him and kept his house.
Even more important was the case of the children. They too must be
economic members of a commercial unit. Of course in early childhood
that was impossible, but as soon as they reached a reasonable age--say
seventeen--they too should have a legal claim to a certain percentage
of the family income, to be continued until they were self-supporting.
In the interest of youth, no one should be compelled to support himself
until the age of twenty-four, for it was wicked to drive people into
offices at eighteen, before they had known freedom of any kind. During
these seven years the child might either take his salary and go or stay
at home as a paying guest. The amount paid for such board would depend
on the standard of life of the family. After all the parents had
brought the child into the world without asking if he wanted it, and
consequently, so far from having rights with regard to the fruit of
their pleasure, they had only duties. Aristotle was reduced to pulp
with regard to this point.
Such a policy would safeguard the liberties of the child, who, on
reaching a reasonable age, could always go away and need not accept his
father's politics and religion with his father's beef. The home would
thus be a compulsory association only during early childhood and would
be a voluntary association for the adolescent. Thus would we solve the
woman question and build an honest, self-reliant nation. Let Dr
Bosanquet maunder on about organisms and compare the family meal--that
ghastly rite--to the Holy Communion. To hell with such sentimentality!
(_Applause._)
Martin then reverted to political philosophy and maintained that no
group whose membership was not spontaneous could have a vital purpose
and a common will. In so far as the family remained compulsory it
could have no such will: because a man was born a Jones he need not
have the same interests as the rest of the Jones' group: indeed most
great men loathed their relations. For the small children a home of
some sort, whether private or municipal, was inevitable. The question
was whether they were going to save the young adult from sentimental
tyranny by insisting on incomes and latch-key rights for sons and
daughters and building up a multitude of voluntary co-operative groups
on a strictly business basis.
"Of course I admit it is more or less impossible," he said as he
finished. "But we may as well talk theory."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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