The Family Way - F Roger Devlin

Review of Allan Carlson's "Third Ways: How Bulgarian Greens, Swedish Housewives, and Beer Swilling Englishmen Created Family-Centered Economies—And Why They Disappeared" (ISI Books, 2007)

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Ellen Karolina Sofia Key: socialist, feminist, eugenics advocate, disciple of Darwin and Nietzsche. None of these commitments prevented her from laying heavy emphasis on the maternal role and its importance to individual women, their children and the society of the future. Woman was “most free,” she wrote, “in the physical and psychic exercise of the function of maternity.” The mother was an “artist in education” who understood “the enormous significance of the first years.” What she most requires to fulfill this role properly is time, time and again time.” She believed the State should place as high a priority upon proper mothering as upon military service. For many years a popular women’s magazine, Morning Breeze, propagated Key’s ideal of the socialist housewife, carrying illustrations of athletic-looking Nietzschean Übermütter surrounded by swarms of healthy children.