descendants were
apt to supplant the more enervated class or race. In the absence of
machinery and of a vast employment of the motor-forces of nature,
parasitism could only threaten a comparatively small section of any
community, and a minute section of the human race as a whole. Female
parasitism in the past resembled gout--a disease dangerous only to the
over-fed, pampered, and few, never to the population of any society as a
whole.

At the present day, so enormous has been the advance made in the
substitution of mechanical force for crude, physical, human exertion
(mechanical force being employed today even in the shaping of
feeding-bottles and the creation of artificial foods as substitutes
for mother's milk!), that it is now possible not only for a small and
wealthy section of women in each civilised community to be maintained
without performing any of the ancient, crude, physical labours of their
sex, and without depending on the slavery of, or any vast increase in
the labour of, other classes of females; but this condition has already
been reached, or is tending to be reached, by that large mass of women
in civilised societies, who form the intermediate class between poor
and rich. During the next fifty years, so rapid will undoubtedly be the
spread of the material conditions of civilisation, both in the societies
at present civilised and in the societies at present unpermeated by
our material civilisation, that the ancient forms of female, domestic,
physical labour of even the women of the poorest classes will be little
required, their place being taken, not by other females, but by always
increasingly perfected labour-saving machinery.

Thus, female parasitism, which in the past threatened only a minute
section of earth's women, under existing conditions threatens vast
masses, and may, under future conditions, threaten the entire body.

If woman is content to leave to the male all labour in the new and
all-important fields which are rapidly opening before the human race;
if, as the old forms of domestic labour slip from her for ever
and evitably, she does not grasp the new, it is inevitable, that,
ultimately, not merely a class, but the whole bodies of females in
civilised societies, must sink into a state of more or less absolute
dependence on their sexual functions alone. (How real is this apparently
very remote danger is interestingly illustrated by a proposition gravely
made a few years ago by a man of