t more adverse to the advance and even to the
conservation of a healthy and powerful society, than the parasitism
of its child-bearing women. For the prostitute, heavily as she weights
society for her support, returning disease and mental and emotional
disintegration for what she consumes, does not yet so immediately affect
the next generation as the kept wife, or kept mistress, who impresses
her effete image indelibly on the generations succeeding. (It cannot be
too often repeated that the woman who merely bears and brings a child
into the world, and then leaves it to be fed and reared by the hands
of another, has performed very much less than half of the labour of
producing adult humans; in such cases it is the nurse and not the mother
who is the most important labourer.)

No man ever yet entered life farther than the length of one navel-cord
from the body of the woman who bore him. It is the woman who is the
final standard of the race, from which there can be no departure for any
distance for any length of time, in any direction: as her brain weakens,
weakens the man's she bears; as her muscle softens, softens his; as she
decays, decays the people.

Other causes may, and do, lead to the enervation and degeneration of a
class or race; the parasitism of its child-bearing women must.

We, the European women of this age, stand today where again and again,
in the history of the past, women of other races have stood; but our
condition is yet more grave, and of wider import to humanity as a whole
than theirs ever was. Let us again consider more closely why this is so.

Chapter III. Parasitism (continued).

We have seen that, in the past, no such thing as the parasitism of the
entire body or large majority of the females inhabiting any territory
was possible. Beneath that body of women of the dominant class or race,
who did not labour either mentally or physically, there has always been
of necessity a far more vast body of females who not only performed the
crude physical toil essential to the existence of society before the
introduction of mechanical methods of production, but who were compelled
to labour the more intensely because there was a parasite class above
them to be maintained by their physical toil. The more the female
parasite flourished of old, in one class or race, the more certainly
all women of other classes or races were compelled to labour only too
excessively; and ultimately these females and their