Books: Sex Seer

MARRIAGE AND MORALS—Bertrand Russell—Horace Liveright ($3).

The Thesis. Bertrand Russell displays present-day laws and ideas about sex as an extraordinary potpourri* obtained from savages, ascetics, Roman lawyers, Manichaean heretics, Teuton romanticists. All of them, says he, are based upon the idea of indissoluble connection between coition and conception, which is practically no longer true. Showing the disastrous effects of this makeshift state of affairs, he then considers various other possibilities, from the standpoint of the state, the child, the adult. His own proposal goes a step further than companionate marriage—as the family is...

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