The effect, however, of such a plan as that proposed would inevitably be to leave the nobler, the more loving and less selfish of the men and women involved, more surely even than is now the case, the victims of the weaker, the more grasping, and the more selfish of the twain.
=Ellen Key and Her Gospel.=--Indeed, the high priestess of the gospel of freedom from legal bondage in sex-relation, Ellen Key, declares that "a higher culture in love can be attained only by correlating self-control with love and parental responsibility," a correlation she believes would "follow as a consequence when love and parental responsibility were made the sole conditions of sex-relations." She also says that "in all cases where there is an affinity of souls and the sympathy of friendship, love is what it always was and always will be, the cooeperation of the father with the mother in the education of the children as well as the cooeperation of the mother with the father in all great social works." She thus links her ideal of true freedom for the choices of love with social obligations and hence again with what is best in inherited family life.
In addition, however, to the claim that love should be freed from legal restraints in the interest of self-expression and self-development (whether or not from Ellen Key's high standpoint of parental responsibility) we have another attack upon the legal autonomy of the family, as we know it, in the demand of some radical feminists that "illegitimacy should be abolished." =What is Meant by This Demand ?=--A crusade against all sex-association that may result in children born out of wedlock is understandable but is surely not the counsel of perfection in sex-control intended by those making this demand.

What is meant seems rather that we should take ground against any legal distinction between the status of children born within and those born outside of legal marriage.

What would that be likely to mean in respect to the monogamic family?
The hard conditions attaching to both unmarried motherhood and unfathered childhood, often in the past wholly cruel and unsocial, have been much ameliorated during the last fifty years and largely through the efforts of those who held firmly to the value of legal marriage and the accepted family system in general.

Laws have been passed and firmly executed to find the shirking father and bring him to marriage with the woman involved; or if such marriage is not possible or feasible to compel him to make financial contribution toward the support and education of the child.
=The Legitimation of Children Born Out of Wedlock.=--If marriage occurs, then the child otherwise illegitimate may come within the legal family through appropriate laws which the most conservative now advocate.

In such cases the belated acceptance within the family bond does not count seriously against the child.