Page:Olive Malmberg Johnson - Woman and the Socialist Movement (1908).djvu/13

 Rh of all human feelings, modern sex-love with a view to marriage and life partnership, has sprung into life.

Even animals exercise choice at mating and often show strong likes and dislikes. Man has no doubt always had preferments. But sex-love, true, pure and lasting, is a very modern virtue and could spring only from generations of the strictest monogamy. While the ancients secluded their legitimate wives, and themselves remained perfectly unrestricted, the poor herdsman composed songs to his beloved one and his suit once won he was usually too poor to look for further adventure. While the feudal knight romanced for another man's wife or betrothed, the poor serf toiled and saved to get together that with which to purchase the "right of the first night" from the lord for the woman of his choice. Crude and simple and coarse and ignorant as these herdsmen and serfs might be, a life companionship purchased by a multitude of sacrifices, before and after marriage, could not fail to breed devotion, and devotion from generation to generation might well be expected to bear a child as pure as the modern sex-love.

While the modern heiresses look for titles with which to adorn their names, and titled degenerates look for fortunes with which to revive their faded glory; while middle class matrons dicker for position, money and support for their marriageable daughters; while immorality, scandal and divorce stalk rampant in the land, that part of the industrial proletariat that is separated from the scourges of both wealth and extreme poverty are remaining as nearly as possible pure from the taint that pollutes the upper and lower slums alike. With the proletariat property can play no part either as a matchmaker or an agent of oppression. The workers own nothing but their labor power, and that they all own alike. The "man with a good job" may appear as a desirable match from a proletarian point of view, but as a job is in itself a most unstable thing only the most superficial can allow it to influence their choice.

The average proletarian home is far from ideal. There