The third dysgenic influence which works under cover of the institutional taboo is akin to the first in its ancient standards of “good” and “bad.”  We are only recently getting any standards for a good mother except a man’s choice and a wedding ring.  Men’s ideals of attractiveness greatly complicate the eugenic situation.  A good matchmaker, with social backing and money, can make a moron more attractive than a pushing, energetic girl with plenty of initiative, whose contribution to her children would be equal or superior to that of her mate.  A timid, gentle, pretty moron, with the attainment of a girl of twelve years, will make an excellent match, and bring into the world children who give us one of the reasons why it is “three generations from shirt-sleeves to shirt-sleeves.”  For such a girl, the slave to convention, exactly fits the feminine ideal which man has built up for himself.  And she will be a good wife and mother in the conventional sense all her life.  This following of an ideal feminine type conceived in irrational processes in former days inclines men to marry women with inferior genetic possibilities because they meet the more insistent surface requirements.  The heritage of our children is thus cut down, and many a potential mother of great men remains unwed.

The same survival of ancient sex taboos is seen in the attitude toward the illegitimate child.  The marriage ceremony is by its origin and by the forms of its perpetuation the only sanction for the breaking of the taboo on contact between men and women.  The illegitimate child, the visible symbol of the sin of its parents, is the one on whom most heavily falls the burden of the crime.  Society has for the most part been utterly indifferent to the eugenic value of the child and has concerned itself chiefly with the manner of its birth.  Only the situation arising out of the war and the need of the nations for men has been able to partially remedy this situation.

The taboos on illegitimacy in the United States have been less affected by the practical population problems growing out of war conditions than those of other countries.  As compared with the advanced stands of the Scandinavian countries, the few laws of progressive states look painfully inadequate.  Miss Breckinridge writes:[1]

“The humiliating and despised position of the illegitimate child need hardly be pointed out.  He was the son of nobody, filius nullius, without name or kin so far as kinship meant rights of inheritance or of succession.  In reality this child of nobody did in a way belong to his mother as the legitimate child never did in common law, for, while the right of the unmarried mother to the custody of the child of her shame was not so noble and dignified a thing as the right of the father to the legitimate child, she had in fact a claim, at least so long as the child was of tender years, not so different from his and as wide as the sky from the impotence of the married