References
“The capitalist class, its press, and its lackeys, because they cannot defeat Socialism by rational argument, become frantic and misrepresent and slander it in a petty and disgusting manner. One of the favorite slanders they resort to is that ‘Socialism will break up the family.’ They are well aware of the fact that the family is a very delicate institution to meddle with, and hope that by slandering Socialism in this way they might cause people to look suspiciously at the Socialist movement. In answer to this charge Thomas Kirkup (Inquiry into Socialism) has the following to say:
‘It is still by many believed that Socialism tends to subvert the family and the Christian ideal of marriage. Some of the leading Socialist writers have indeed enunciated theories at variance with these institutions. But t should be remembered that such opinions are not peculiar to Socialism, and that they have been most strenuously opposed within the Socialist schools. As a theory of economic organization we cannot see that Socialism can have any special teaching adverse to marriage and the family. On the contrary, it should tend to purify and elevate both by eliminating the mercenary element so common in the marriages of to-day by relieving the drudgery of women, both indoors and out-of-doors, and by abolishing prostitution – that vilest plague-spot of the existing society. Its effect should be to promote a more general form of nurture and education for both sexes, and to make woman the happy and cultured friend and companion of man, and especially so to organize society that marriage should be a life union of man and woman endowed with kindred aims and dispositions, and not, as it so often is, a calculated arrangement dictated by convenience, wealth, and social position, in which youth is wedded to decrepitude and beauty to capital. At present love, marriage and the family are too much perverted b the mercenary spirit which it is a chief aim of Socialism to repress. To what baneful extent the Christian family has been injured by the employment of women, especially married women, in factories and mines, we need not repeat here. The economic reforms and ethical tendencies of Socialism should directly and powerfully tend to remove the worst evils connected with the mutual life of men and women.'”
– Daily People, New York, New York, 28 Feb 1909
