Page:Alexandra Kollontai - Communism and the Family (1920).djvu/4

 separate credential entitling her to make herself independent of a brutish or drunken husband, accustomed to beat her. Henceforth, divorce may be amicably obtained within the period of a week or two at most. But it is just this ease of divorce which is a source of such hope to women who are unhappy in their married life, which simultaneously frightens other women, particularly those who have become accustomed to considering the husband as the "provider," as the, only support in life, and who do not. yet understand that woman must become accustomed to seek and to find this support elsewhere, no longer in the person of the man, but in the person of society, of the State.

There is no reason far concealing the truth from ourselves: the normal family of former days, in which the man was everything and the woman nothing—since she had no will of her own, no money of her own, no time of her own—this family is being modified day by day; it is almost a thing of the past. But we should not be frightened by this condition. Either through error or through ignorance we are quite ready to believe that everthing about us may remain immutable while everything is changing. It has always been so, and it will always be so. There is nothing more erroneous than this proverb! We have only to read how people lived in the past, and we shall learn immediately ‘that everything is subject to change and that there are no customs, nor political organisations, nor morals, which remain fixed and inviolable. And the family m the various epochs in the life of humanity has frequently changed in form; it was once quite different