Assuming the question is about an excerpt from the article "Family and Households among Scandinavian Peasants" by Orvar Löfgren in Ethnologica Scandinavia (1974), the following statement supports the author's position: "marriage was necessary to support the economic underpinning of a typical family" (a).
Löfgren argues that marriage among peasants (and the ensuing children) enabled the families to be productive thanks to a division of the farming/housekeeping labor, as well as the ability to put resources in common. The phrase from the text which explicitly states this thesis is: "this made marriage a necessary condition for a viable farm unit."
