Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER VI RECLAIMING THE ILLEGITIMATE CHILD IN NORWAY To find the most enlightened laws concerning the unmarried mother and the illegitimate child, we must look to Scandinavia. It surely is not without significance that the native land of Ellen Key has gone ahead in this respect. The Swedish writer has said that she was better understood and more influential in Germany than in Sweden. But recent legislative advances in all three of the Scandinavian countries have put Germany decidedly in the second place as a champion of illegitimate children. To Norway must be given the credit for having produced actual constructive legislation and practical statesmanship in a field which has been too long neglected. It was Germany, as we have seen, which invented maternity insurance; but it is Norway which now stands out among the countries of modern Europe as the nation which has done the mosttoward rehabilitating the unmarried mother and reclaiming the illegitimate child for society. The disabilities of illegitimacy, so far as this overwhelming misfortune can be analyzed, may be divided into three different kinds: the poor economic outlook, anonymous paternity, and the social stigma. The last offers little chance for direct legal betterment. But the legal improvement of the first two of these handicaps is entirely feasible, and would relieve considerably the fell action of the social stigma. Besides, the history of illegitimacy in the past shows that it has not been uniformly stigmatized by the social orders of yesterday and the day before and teaches one to believe that it will not be uniformly stigmatized by the social orders of to-morrow and the day after. For instance, according to the ancient Swedish law, there were two degrees of illegitimacy, the child of a slave woman bein…
