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Woman and Labour-Part6_Oliver Schreiner(1855-1920)_English Literature(文学名著)-第2页

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locomotion; having become a mere distended bladder, which when filled with

eggs bursts and ends a parasitic existence which has hardly been life. It



is not impossible, and it appears, indeed, highly probable, that it has

been this degeneration and parasitism on the part of the female which has



set its limitation to the evolution of ants, creatures which, having

reached a point of mental development in some respects almost as high as



that of man, have yet become curiously and immovably arrested. The whole

question of sex-parasitism among the lower animals is one throwing



suggestive and instructive side-lights on human social problems, but is too

extensive to be here entered on.)



Again and again in the history of the past, when among human creatures a

certain stage of material civilisation has been reached, a curious tendency



has manifested itself for the human female to become more or less

parasitic; social conditions tend to rob her of all forms of active,



conscious, social labour, and to reduce her, like the field-tick, to the

passive exercise of her sex functions alone. And the result of this



parasitism has invariably been the decay in vitality and intelligence of

the female, followed after a longer or shorter period by that of her male



descendants and her entire society.

Nevertheless, in the history of the past the dangers of the sex-parasitism



have never threatened more than a small section of the females of the human

race, those exclusively of some comparatively small dominant race or class;



the mass of women beneath them being still compelled to assume many forms

of strenuous activity. It is at the present day, and under the peculiar



conditions of our modern civilisation, that for the first time sex-

parasitism has become a danger, more or less remote, to the mass of



civilised women, perhaps ultimately to all.

In the very early stages of human growth, the sexual parasitism and



degeneration of the female formed no possible source of social danger.

Where the conditions of life rendered it inevitable that all the labour of



a community should be performed by the members of that community for

themselves, without the assistance of slaves or machinery, the tendency has



always been rather to throw an excessiveamount of social labour on the

female. Under no conditions, at no time, in no place, in the history of



the world have the males of any period, of any nation, or of any class,

shown the slightest inclination to allow their own females to become



inactive or parasitic, so long as the actualmuscular labour of feeding and

clothing them would in that case have devolved upon themselves!



The parasitism of the human female becomes a possibility only when a point

in civilisation is reached (such as that which was attained in the ancient



civilisations of Greece, Rome, Persia, Assyria, India, and such as today

exists in many of the civilisations of the East, such as those of China and



Turkey), when, owing to the extensiveemployment of the labour of slaves,

or of subject races or classes, the dominant race or class has become so



liberally supplied with the material goods of life, that mere physical toil

on the part of its own female members has become unnecessary. It is when



this point has been reached, and never before, that the symptoms of female

parasitism have in the past almost invariably tended to manifest



themselves, and have become a social danger. The males of the dominant

class have almost always contrived to absorb to themselves the new



intellectual" target="_blank" title="n.知识分子">intellectualoccupations, with the absence of necessity for the old forms

of physical toil made possible in their societies; and the females of the



dominant class or race, for whose muscular labours there was now also no

longer any need, not succeeding in grasping or attaining to these new forms



of labour, have sunk into a state in which, performing no species of active

social duty, they have existed through the passiveperformance of sexual



functions alone, with how much or how little of discontent will now never

be known, since no literary record has been made by the woman of the past,



of her desires or sorrows. Then, in place of the active labouring woman,

upholding society by her toil, has come the effete wife, concubine, or



prostitute, clad in fine raiment, the work of others' fingers; fed on

luxurious viands, the result of others' toil, waited on and tended by the



labour of others. The need for her physical labour having gone, and mental




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