Page:Olive Malmberg Johnson - Woman and the Socialist Movement (1908).djvu/12

10 means nothing more or less than the seclusion of the wife of the economic master, be he slave-owner, feudal lord or modern capitalist. This seclusion has for its purpose the bringing up of legitimate heirs through which to perpetuate the economic mastery. It brought about the first degradation of woman, as it made her a parasite, and marriage a speculation. Among the ruling classes, it has remained so throughout. Marriage has been a contract seldom made by the contracting parties themselves. Parents, guardians and marriage brokers have attended to that business. The determining factor has been property. Where choice has been allowed at all it has been only within the given class of the chooser. Often the contract has been made without the parties seeing each other, generally without the least reference to their likes or dislikes. Children have been betrothed in the cradle or while too young to be concerned at all. Land, goods and chattels have been the world's most irresistible Cupid! It is a serious mistake to think that the "age of romance" was an age of marrying for love. On the other hand the romance as a rule headed for the very opposite of matrimony. The heroes were often already married, the heroines as often so.

The grand old institution of marriage has had very little to do with love, faith and troth!

We saw that polygamy was seldom practiced among our barbarian ancestors because food was too difficult to procure to allow the man that luxury. Even so throughout the ages have the poor been too poor to follow in the footsteps of the rich in creating the expensive corollaries of the monogamian family.

Among the poorer classes monogamy has been comparatively strict from the force of economic necessity. And as economic necessity is the world's greatest teacher, so among the propertyless monogamy has become the greatest moral virtue. It is therefore among the proletarians that the purest