had both reached and passed thirty per cent and six years later, in , was touching the astonishing forty per cent level.5 With almost half of the fertile population living in more or less free cohabitation instead of formal marriage, much of the existing family law collapsed. Legislators in parliament and the government tried to remain neutral by not favouring any particular form of family life, as well as treating marriage and cohabitation equally. The radicalism of the policy-makers almost undermined marriage as an institution essential to society. New laws made it easier to end a marriage than to nullify a sales contract for a bicycle, if the parties so agreed and had no common children under the age of sixteen. The Swedish legislature took the lead in showing the Western world what modernity meant to family law. The law promoted an attitude of allowing whatever to be permissible.6 The new doctrine of state neutrality in matters of family law expressed an astonishingly strong individualism in a welfare state ethos that declared collectivism to be its salvation message. Of course this may seem confusing. Many of the relevant acts passed in recent years by parliament were intended to protect the children of divorced parents. For good reasons policy-makers were convinced that children should not bear the burden and consequences of their parents’ unwillingness to continue with a family life that had broken down emotionally. A child should be entitled to have good relations to both parents, to spend time together with her father as well as her mother, to have a reasonable standard of living before coming of age, and, finally, to equal inherit from the parents with regard to other half-brothers and half-sisters born in formal marriage. Protecting children meant that the state and the law could not give preferential 117 5 Agell (1982), 19. 6 A. Agell, “Den svenska familjelagstiftningen: En resa utan mål?” Juridiska Föreningen för FinlandTidskrift, 1978, 1.
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