Getting Married · Chapter
What Is to Become of the Children? explained
Shaw argues that children should not be used as an obstacle to divorce, noting that broken homes arise from many causes and that unhappy households are bad for children.
What happens
Shaw argues that children should not be used as an obstacle to divorce, noting that broken homes arise from many causes and that unhappy households are bad for children. He advocates for state intervention to dissolve harmful families, comparing parental custody to marital property and calling for rational reform of family law.
Themes in this chapter
Divorce and Legal Reform
Shaw argues children are not a valid obstacle to divorce and calls for state power to dissolve families that fail their purpose.
Property and Ownership in Marriage
Shaw equates the theory that a child is the property of a parent with the theory that a wife is the property of a husband, both abhorrent and mischievous.
Hypocrisy and Social Pretense
Shaw criticizes the sanctimonious use of 'sanctity of the home' to justify returning children to abusive or criminal parents.
Key passages
“An unhappy household is a bad nursery.”
A miserable home environment is harmful for children.
Shaw uses this to argue that divorce can benefit children by removing them from a toxic setting.
“The theory that the wife is the property of the husband or the husband of the wife is not a whit less abhorrent and mischievous than the theory that the child is the property of the parent.”
Treating a spouse as property is just as repulsive and harmful as treating a child as property.
Shaw links marital and parental ownership, advocating for reform in both domains.
“If a family is not achieving the purposes of a family it should be dissolved just as a marriage should when it, too, is not achieving the purposes of marriage.”
A family that fails its function should be broken up, just as a failing marriage should be ended.
Shaw applies the same rational standard to families as to marriages.