In the original book the matter of the parasitism of woman filled only one
chapter out of twelve, and it was mainly from this chapter that this book

was drawn. The question of the parasitism of woman is, I think, very
vital, very important; it explains many phenomena which nothing else

explains; and it will be of increasing importance. But for the moment
there are other aspects of woman's relation to labour practically quite as

pressing. In the larger book I had devoted one chapter entirely to an
examination of the work woman has done and still does in the modern world,

and the gigantic evils which arise from the fact that her labour,
especially domestic labour, often the most wearisome and unending known to

any section of the human race, is not adequately recognised or recompensed.
Especially on this point I have feared this book might lead to a

misconception, if by its great insistence on the problem of sex parasitism,
and the lighter dealing with other aspects, it should lead to the

impression that woman's domestic labour at the present day (something quite
distinct from, though indirectly connected with, the sexual relation

between man and woman) should not be highly and most highly recognised and
recompensed. I believe it will be in the future, and then when woman gives

up her independent field of labour for domestic or marital duty of any
kind, she will not receive her share of the earnings of the man as a more

or less eleemosynary benefaction, placing her in a position of subjection,
but an equal share, as the fair division, in an equal partnership. (It may

be objected that where a man and woman have valued each other sufficiently
to select one another from all other humans for a lifelongphysical union,

it is an impertinence to suppose there could be any necessity to adjust
economic relations. In love there is no first nor last! And that the

desire of each must be to excel the other in service.
That this should be so is true; that it is so now, in the case of union

between two perfectly morally developed humans, is also true, and that this
condition may in a distant future be almost universal is certainly true.

But dealing with this matter as a practical question today, we have to
consider not what should be, or what may be, but what, given traditions and

institutions of our societies, is, today.) Especially I have feared that
the points dealt with in this little book, when taken apart from other

aspects of the question, might lead to the conception that it was intended
to express the thought, that it was possible or desirable that woman in

addition to her child-bearing should take from man his share in the support
and care of his offspring or of the woman who fulfilled with regard to

himself domestic duties of any kind. In that chapter in the original book
devoted to the consideration of man's labour in connection with woman and

with his offspring more than one hundred pages were devoted to illustrating
how essential to the humanising and civilising of man, and therefore of the

whole race, was an increased sense of sexual and paternal responsibility,
and an increased justice towards woman as a domestic labourer. In the last

half of the same chapter I dealt at great length with what seems to me an
even more pressing practical sex question at this moment--man's attitude

towards those women who are not engaged in domestic labour; toward that
vast and always increasing body of women, who as modern conditions develop

are thrown out into the stream of modern economic life to sustain
themselves and often others by their own labour; and who yet are there

bound hand and foot, not by the intellectual or physical limitations of
their nature, but by artificial constrictions and conventions, the remnants

of a past condition of society. It is largely this maladjustment, which,
deeply studied in all its ramifications, will be found to lie as the

taproot and central source of the most terrible of the social diseases that
afflict us.

The fact that for equal work equally well performed by a man and by a
woman, it is ordained that the woman on the ground of her sex alone shall

receive a less recompense, is the nearest approach to a wilful and
unqualified "wrong" in the whole relation of woman to society today. That

males of enlightenment and equity can for an hour tolerate the existence of
this inequality has seemed to me always incomprehensible; and it is only

explainable when one regards it as a result of the blinding effects of
custom and habit. Personally, I have felt so profoundly" target="_blank" title="ad.深深地">profoundly on this subject,

that this, with one other point connected with woman's sexual relation to
man, are the only matters connected with woman's position, in thinking of

which I have always felt it necessary almost fiercely to crush down
indignation and to restrain it, if I would maintain an impartiality of

outlook. I should therefore much regret if the light and passing manner in
which this question has been touched on in this little book made it seem of

less vital importance than I hold it.
In the last chapter of the original book, the longest, and I believe the

most important, I dealt with the problems connected with marriage and the
personal relations of men and women in the modern world. In it I tried to

give expression to that which I hold to be a great truth, and one on which
I should not fear to challenge the verdict of long future generations--

that, the direction in which the endeavour of woman to readjust herself to
the new conditions of life is leading today, is not towards a greater

sexual laxity, or promiscuity, or to an increased self-indulgence, but
toward a higher appreciation of the sacredness of all sex relations, and a

clearer perception of the sex relation between man and woman as the basis
of human society, on whose integrity, beauty and healthfulness depend the

health and beauty of human life, as a whole. Above all, that it will lead
to a closer, more permanent, more emotionally and intellectually complete

and intimate relation between the individual man and woman. And if in the
present disco-ordinate transitional stage of our social growth it is found

necessary to allow of readjustment by means of divorce, it will not be
because such readjustments will be regarded lightly, but rather, as when,

in a complex and delicatemechanism moved by a central spring, we allow in
the structure for the readjustment and regulation of that spring, because

on its absoluteperfection of action depends the movement of the whole
mechanism. In the last pages of the book, I tried to express what seems to

me a most profound truth often overlooked--that as humanity and human
societies pass on slowly from their present barbarous and semi-savage

condition in matters of sex into a higher, it will be found increasingly,
that over and above its function in producing and sending onward the

physicalstream of life (a function which humanity shares with the most
lowly animal and vegetable forms of life, and which even by some noted

thinkers of the present day seems to be regarded as its only possible
function,) that sex and the sexual relation between man and woman have

distinct aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritualfunctions and ends, apart
entirely from physicalreproduction. That noble as is the function of the

physicalreproduction of humanity by the union of man and woman, rightly
viewed, that union has in it latent, other, and even higher forms, of

creative energy and life-dispensing power, and that its history on earth
has only begun. As the first wild rose when it hung from its stem with its

centre of stamens and pistils and its single whorl of pale petals, had only
begun its course, and was destined, as the ages passed, to develop stamen

upon stamen and petal upon petal, till it assumed a hundred forms of joy
and beauty.

And, it would indeed almost seem, that, on the path toward the higher
development of sexual life on earth, as man has so often had to lead in

other paths, that here it is perhaps woman, by reason of those very sexual
conditions which in the past have crushed and trammelled her, who is bound

to lead the way, and man to follow. So that it may be at last, that sexual
love--that tired angel who through the ages has presided over the march of

humanity, with distraught eyes, and feather-shafts broken, and wings
drabbled in the mires of lust and greed, and golden locks caked over with

the dust of injustice and oppression--till those looking at him have
sometimes cried in terror, "He is the Evil and not the Good of life!" and

have sought, if it were not possible, to exterminate him--shall yet, at
last, bathed from the mire and dust of ages in the streams of friendship

and freedom, leap upwards, with white wings spread, resplendent in the
sunshine of a distant future--the essentially Good and Beautiful of human

existence.
I have given this long and very wearisome explanation of the scope and

origin of this little book, because I feel that it might lead to grave
misunderstanding were it not understood how it came to be written.

I have inscribed it to my friend, Lady Constance Lytton; not because I
think it worthy of her, nor yet because of the splendid part she has played

in the struggle of the women fighting today in England for certain forms of
freedom for all women. It is, if I may be allowed without violating the

sanctity of a close personal friendship so to say, because she, with one or
two other men and women I have known, have embodied for me the highest