me 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. If marriage does not
occur, and there are many cases of irregular sex-relationship where
that is not the right solution of the problems involved in
illegitimacy, then the unmarried mother is helped to establish herself
with her child where cruel stigma and useless curiosity may be best
avoided. To aid in her protection she is encouraged by many agencies
and persons to take the title of "Mrs.," since that is a conventional
term at best and may be given according to age (as in the older
custom) or come to attach itself to motherhood as justly as to
wifehood. More and more society is reaching out through law and wise
philanthropy to fasten mutual responsibility for child-care and
nurture upon both parents even where they are not legally married.
This movement must go on until the handicap of the child born out of
wedlock is reduced to its lowest possible terms.[1]

=Philanthropic Tendencies Respect Legal Marriage.=--These tendencies,
however, are not in the direction, intentionally at least, of making
legal condition