races (and thereforeultimately" target="_blank" title="ad.最后，最终">ultimately of all) to absorb the entire fields of
intellectual and highly trained manual labour; and it would be entirely

possible for the female half of the race, whether as prostitutes, as kept
mistresses, or as kept wives, to cease from all forms of active toil, and,

as the passive tools of sexualreproduction, or, more decadently still, as
the mere instruments of sexualindulgence, to sink into a condition of

complete and helpless sex-parasitism.
Sex-parasitism, therefore, presents itself at the end of the nineteenth

century and beginning of the twentieth in a guise which it has never before
worn. We, the European women of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,

stand therefore in a position the gravity and importance of which was not
equalled by that of any of our forerunners in the ancient civilisation. As

we master and rise above, or fall and are conquered by, the difficulties of
our position, so also will be the future, not merely of our own class, or

even of our own race alone, but also of those vast masses who are following
on in the wake of our civilisation. The decision we are called on to make

is a decision for the race; behind us comes on the tread of incalculable
millions of feet.

There is thus no truth in the assertion so often made, even by thoughtful
persons, that the male labour question and the woman's question of our day

are completely one, and that, would the women of the European race of today
but wait peacefully till the males alone had solved their problem, they

would find that their own had been solved at the same time.
Were the entire male labour problem of this age satisfactorily settled

tomorrow; were all the unemployed or uselessly employed males at both ends
of societies, whom the changes of modern civilisation have robbed of their

ancient forms of labour, so educated and trained that they were perfectly
fitted for the new conditions of life; and were the material benefit and

intellectual possibilities, which the substitution of mechanical for human
labour now makes possible to humanity, no longer absorbed by the few but

dispersed among the whole mass of males in return for their trained labour,
yet the woman's problem might be further from satisfactorysolution than it

is today; and, if it were affected at all, might be affected for the worse.
It is whollyuntrue that fifty pounds, or two thousand, earned by the male

as the result of his physical or mental toil, if part of it be spent by him
in supporting non-labouring females, whether as prostitutes, wives, or

mistresses, is the same thing to the female or to the race as though that
sum had been earned by her own exertion, either directly as wages or

indirectly by toiling for the man whose wages supported her. For the
moment, truly, the woman so tended lies softer and warmer than had she been

compelled to exert herself; ultimately" target="_blank" title="ad.最后，最终">ultimately, intellectually, morally, and even
physically, the difference in the effect upon her as an individual and on

the race is the difference between advance and degradation, between life
and death. The increased wealth of the male no more of necessity benefits

and raises the female upon whom he expends it, than the increased wealth of
his mistressnecessarily benefits mentally or physically a poodle because

she can give him a down cushion in place of one of feathers, and chicken in
place of beef. The wealthier the males of a society become, the greater

the temptation, both to themselves and to the females connected with them,
to drift toward female parasitism.

The readjustment of the position of the male worker, if it led to a more
equitable distribution of wealth among males, might indeed diminish

slightly the accompanying tendency to parasitism in the very wealthiest
female class; but it would, on the other hand, open up exactly those

conditions which make parasitism possible to millions of women today
leading healthy and active lives. (The fact cannot be too often dwelt upon

that parasitism is not connected with any definiteamount of wealth. Any
sum supplied to an individual which will so far satisfy him or her as to

enable them to live without exertion may absolutely parasitise them; while
vast wealth (unhealthy as its effects generally tend to be) may, upon

certain rare and noble natures, exert hardly any enervating or deleterious
influence. An amusingillustration of the different points at which

enervation is reached by different females came under our own observation.
The wife of an American millionaire was visited by a woman, the daughter

and also the widow of small professional men. She stated that she was in
need of both food and clothing. The millionaire's wife gave her a leg of

mutton and two valuable dresses. The woman proceeded to whine, though in
vigorous health, that she had no one to carry them home for her, and could

not think of carrying them herself. The American, the descendant of
generations of able, labouring, New England, Puritan women, tucked the leg

of mutton under one arm and the bundle of clothes under the other and
walked off down the city street towards the woman's dwelling, followed by

the astonished pauper parasite.
The most helpless case of female degeneration we ever came into contact

with was that of a daughter of a poor English officer on half-pay and who
had to exist on a few hundreds a year. This woman could neither cook her

own food nor make her own clothes, nor was she engaged in any social,
political, or intellectual or artistic labour. Though able to dance for a

night or play tennis for an afternoon, she was yet hardly able to do her
own hair or attire herself, and appeared absolutely to have lost all power

of compelling herself to do anything which was at the moment fatiguing or
displeasing, as all labour is apt to be, however great its ultimate reward.

In a life of twenty-eight years this woman had probably not contributed one
hour's earnest toil, mental or physical, to the increase of the sum total

of productive human labour. Surrounded with acres of cultivable land, she
would possibly have preferred to lie down and die of hunger rather than

have cultivated half an acre for food. This is an extreme case; but the
ultimate effect of parasitism is always a paralysis of the will and an

inability to compel oneself into any course of action for the moment
unpleasurable and exhaustive.)

That the two problems are not identical is shown, if indeed evidence were
needed, by the fact that those males most actively employed in attempting

to readjust the relations of the mass of labouring males to the new
conditions of life, are sometimes precisely those males who are most

bitterly opposed to woman in her attempt to readjust her own position. Not
even by the members of those professions, generally regarded as the

strongholds of obstructionism and prejudice, has a more short-sighted
opposition often been made to the attempts of woman to enter new fields of

labour, than have again and again been made by male hand-workers, whether