38 
THE AMERICAN-SC AN DIN AVI AN REVIEW 
written and spoken against it, and some have asserted that if it is 
enacted men will not have the courage to enter marriage. My reply 
has always been: What then shall we say of the women who dared 
to marry under the old regulation? They must indeed have been 
heroines. 
A most fanatical and unjust picture of the law is presented by the 
Danish writer Harald Nielsen in his book Modern Marriage. He 
condemns the law from first to last, but does not offer anything else 
in place of it. The book attracted a great deal of attention, all the 
more as the author at the same time made a lecture tour in Sweden to 
defeat the passage of the law in that country. It was of no avail, how¬ 
ever, for Sweden passed the law, and in Denmark a little book entitled 
Wliat New Is there in the Marriage Law by Professor Viggo Bentzon, 
chairman of the Danish section of the Commission, calmed the minds 
of the people by supplying some much needed facts. For the law 
itself is too complex and voluminous to be readily understood by the 
masses, and Harald Nielsen’s Modern Marriage could therefore 
easily mislead and frighten the general reader. 
What new’ then, is there in this disputed Scandinavian marriage 
law ? 
It gives the wife complete equality with the husband within the 
marriage relation both as regards economic rights and in relation to 
the children. Whereas the old law—to some extent alreadv revised— 
made the man undisputed head of the family and ruler over wife, 
children, and even unmarried women relatives, the new law places 
man and woman within marriage on the same level and attempts to 
base the whole relation on two free and equal ethical personalities. 
The first paragraph in the second part of the code, that relating 
to the regulations governing the married state, strikes the keynote 
when it says that man and wife “must be loyal to each other and must 
attend to the needs of the family together.” The second paragraph 
defines the duty of man and wife “together to maintain the home by 
contributions of money, work within the home, or in other ways, 
according to their ability and in conformity with standards of living 
deemed reasonable.” Under the head of “maintenance” comes all 
that is required to keep the house, educate the children, and provide 
for the personal needs of both parents. The most important difference 
between the new law and the old is that where formerly only the man 
was mentioned, it now reads “man and wife.” On the question of 
parental authority the new law says that “authority over the children 
of both belongs to both parents in conjunction.” It goes on to say 
that “if the parents do not agree in the exercise of authority, the chief 
magistrate can, in the interests of the children, delegate the authority 
to that one of the parents who seems best fitted, or he can determine 
which of them is to have power of decision in the particular instance 
