Guy A. Aldred Archive


Socialism and Marriage
Chapter 4


Written: 1914.
Source: PDF's from Marxists.org and OCR/Editing from RevoltLib.com
Transcription/Markup: Andy Carloff
Online Source: RevoltLib.com; 2021


“That a man and woman should occupy the same house, and daily enjoy each other’s company——so long as such an association gives birth to virtuous feelings, to kindness, to mutual forbearance, to courtesy, to disinterested affection—I consider right and proper,” wrote Robert Dale Owen in the Barton Trumpet, in May, 1831. “That they should continue to inhabit the same house and to meet. daily, in case such intercourse should give birth to vicious feelings, to dislike, to ill-temper, to scolding, to carelessness of each other’s comfort, and a want of respect for each other’s feelings—this, I consider, when the two individuals alone are concerned, neither right nor proper; neither conducive to good order nor virtue. I do not think it well, therefore, to promise, at all hazards to live together for life."

Most persons will agree with the above plea for divorce. It asserts the immorality of the marriage tie. It puts all contracts out of the question. Once the right to disregard laws in the part is admitted, the duty of ignoring them in their entirety is implied. And every fresh concession made in the direction of rendering divorce easier—for the wealthy, and not for the poor, however—is a confession of the failure morally of the laws to secure that harmony of being they are presumed to effect. For laws are but the perpetuation of past errors. To realize this tact is to believe in divorce. To subscribe to divorce is to accept free love. If tree love involves promiscuity, divorce involves it. The issue is between anarchy in love and compulsory loveless connection.

“When the two individuals alone are concerned,” qualifies R. D. Owen. Can any sane person believe that it is either right or proper, either conducive to good order or virtue on the part of the children to be brought up in a loveless home? Do not the children learn to hate their parents, and leave home at the earliest possible date in consequence?

Family life is the great lie of civilization. Parents sacrifice their honor for their children, and children destroy their genius for their parents.

What of the children? Are there no foundling hospitals? Are there no mothers denied the right to bring their children up tenderly, because they, the mothers, were not wedded to the fathers? What of these children? Since when has God told man it was justice to oppress the weak? If the foundling home is good enough for some children, it is good enough for all.

Under free love, all men would desert their children. Of course the argument is nonsense. Nothing of the kind would take place. All men are not scoundrels. Admitting that the present financial system continued, and that all fathers deserted the children, woman would cease to be the household drudge, man would become his own domestic serf, and the children, at the worst, would become all foundlings. They would -be clothed and fed, as to-day they are educated, by the state or else the community. If they are not pauperized by receiving common free education, they will not he pauperized by receiving common free clothing and food. If they are, then illegitimates should not be pauperized in this way. ‘The marriage laws should go, in the interest of the illegitimate.

This would have an economic effect. The workers’ wages are governed -by his cost of production. When the luxury of family life ceased to enter into that cost, his wages would decline. The children, heirs of the commonwealth, would be kept still out of the workers’ labor power.

We have said the question is an economic one. It is. No man has the right to help a woman because she needs help. If she has children by another man, however great her suffering, his chivalry must not lend a helping hand. Only where he has assaulted the woman’s chastity is he permitted to assist her. It is not justice, not the sufferings of the woman, not the tears of the children. It is the owning of the w0man’s person that counts. Men who believe in marriage laws laugh at the idea of “keeping” another man’s children. Why? Does the worker not keep the children of the rich-—and the parents into the bargain?

Analyze it, and this family life plea becomes individualism run mad. Driven by the wants of his family, the dock-worker fights for his job. Does he care about the family life of the weaker man he has ousted? Hunger and misery evolve a thief. The need to live manufactures the detective. Both have families. Both fight for them. The limb of the law wins—and his family is happy. The thief loses—-and a family tragedy is enacted. What of the children? Does the wedding-ring give them food?

“When the Scottish miners came out on strike in 1894,” wrote Mr. Chisholm Robertson recently in the Glasgow Evening Times, “and throughout the strike the miners of England and Wales continued at work, filled the markets depleted by the abstention from work of the Scottish miners. This was a veritable harvest to the miners over the border. It prolonged, however, the fight, finally defeating it, with much suffering to the families of the men on strike, great hardship to the workers of kindred trades, and entailed years of hurt to the Scottish coal trade.”

The English miners were thinking of their wives and children. Their family considerations prevented them being just to all women and children of their class in whom they had no property. Good husbands can make poor citizens. Good fathers make poor fighters against class injustice. Surely the marriage which reduces a man to a scab should go. Surely we are less than brutes if we cannot realize that our lives are mean and narrow if we do not secure happiness and joy to others. When we realize that, the class-struggle is substituted for the family struggle. We are no longer husbands, wives, and children—but comrades and chums, freely associating as the propaganda and our interest in it demands.