Page:Alexandra Kollontai - Communism and the Family (1920).djvu/6

 gradually the traces off the past which have become outlived are being discarded, and that new relations are being introduced between man and woman. We have only to ask: "What is it that has become outlived in our family system and what, in the relations of the working man and working woman and the peasant and peasant woman, are their respective rights and duties which would best harmonize with the conditions of life in the new Russia, in the worker's Russia which our Soviet Russia now is?" Everything compatible with this new, condition would be maintained; all the rest, all the superannuated rubbish which has been bequeathed to us by the cursed epoch of servitude and domination which was characteristic of the landed proprietors and the capitalists, all this shall be swept aside together with the exploited class itself, with these enemies of the proletariat and of the poor.

The family in its present form is also simply one of the legacies of the past. Formerly solid, compact in itself, indissoluble—for such was considered to be the character of marriage that had been sanctified by the priest in person—the family was equally necessary to all its members. Were it not for the family, who would have nourished, clothed, and trained the children, who would have guided them in life? The orphans' lot in those days was the worst that could befall one. In the family such as we have become accustomed to it is the husband who earns and supports wife and children. The wife, on her part, is occupied with the housekeeping and the bringing up of the children, as she understands it. But already for a century this