s (and who is, undoubtedly,
wherever found, the most productive toiler known to the race); it is but
one step, though a long one, from this woman to the woman who produces
offspring freely but does not herself rear them, and performs no
compensatory social labour. While from this woman, again, to the one who
bears few or no children, but who, whether as a wife or mistress, lives
by the exercise of her sex function alone, the step is short. There
is but one step farther to the prostitute, who affects no form of
productive labour, and who, in place of life, is recognised as producing
disease and death, but who exists parasitically through her sexual
attribute. Enormous as is the distance between the women at the two
extremes of this series, and sharply opposed as their relation to the
world is, there is yet, in actual life, no sharp, clear, sudden-drawn
line dividing the women of the one type from those of the other. They
shade off into each other by delicate and in sensible degrees. And it
is down this inclined plane that the women of civilised races are
peculiarly tempted, unconsciously, to slip; from the noble height of
a condition of the most strenuous social activity, into a condition of
complete, helpless, and inactive parasitism, without being clearly aware
of the fact themselves, and without society's becoming so--the woman
who has ceased to rear her own offspring, or who has ceased to bear
offspring at all, and who performs no other productive social function,
yet shields the fact from her own eyes by dwelling on the fact that she
is a woman, in whom the capacity is at least latent. (There is, indeed,
an interesting analogous tendency on the part of the parasitic male,
wherever found, to shield his true condition from his own eyes and those
of the world by playing at the ancient ancestral forms of male labour.
He is almost always found talking loudly of the protection he affords to
helpless females and to society, though he is in truth himself protected
through the exertion of soldiers, policemen, magistrates, and society
generally; and he is almost invariably fond of dangling a sword or
other weapon, and wearing some kind of uniform, for the assumption of
militarism without severe toil delights him. But it is in a degenerate
travesty of the ancient labour of hunting where, at terrible risk to
himself, and with endless fatigue, his ancestors supplied the race with
its meat and defended it from destruction by wild b