Page:Olive Malmberg Johnson - Woman and the Socialist Movement (1908).djvu/14

 12 are thousands of rocky reefs in the worker’s matrimonial sea. The inherited narrowness still clings to the woman, the inherited brutality still clings to the man. Then there are the troubles bred by economic conditions, by lack of work and small pay, and high cost of living and large families to be fed and clothed. "When poverty comes in through the door, love flies out through the window," is a proverb that holds good forever.

But the workers are too poor to indulge in the vices of the rich. Their troubles are of a different character. It takes at all times all a worker can make, to support home, wife and children. His wages do not allow him to support an "affinity." Such extravagance would too soon be detected, and a working woman of to-day sooner seeks the factory for employment than to sit neglected at home. No property brought her to the man, no property holds her there, and the legal and official trappings instituted for the control of property in matrimonial relations are meaningless to the working class. A new morality, a union based on mutual love and faith is growing in spite of all influences to the contrary. Out of this will spring the morals of the future, a monogamian family in the full sense of the word.