note in England. He proposed that a
compulsory provision should be made for at least the women of the upper
and middle classes, by which they might be maintained through life
entirely without regard to any productive labour they might perform,
not even the passive labour of sexual reproduction being of necessity
required of them. That this proposal was received by the women striving
to reconstruct the relation of the modern woman to life without
acclamation and with scorn, may have surprised its maker; but with no
more reason than that man would have for feeling surprise who, seeing
a number of persons anxious to escape the infection of some contagious
disease, should propose as a cure to inoculate them all with it in its
most virulent form!)

As new forms of natural force are mastered and mechanical appliances
perfected, it will be quite possible for the male half of all civilised
races (and therefore ultimately of all) to absorb the entire fields of
intellectual and highly trained manual labour; and it would be entirely
possible for the female half of the race, whether as prostitutes, as
kept mistresses, or as kept wives, to cease from all forms of active
toil, and, as the passive tools of sexual reproduction, or, more
decadently still, as the mere instruments of sexual indulgence, to sink
into a condition of complete and helpless sex-parasitism.

Sex-parasitism, therefore, presents itself at the end of the nineteenth
century and beginning of the twentieth in a guise which it has never
before worn. We, the European women of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, stand therefore in a position the gravity and importance of
which was not equalled by that of any of our forerunners in the ancient
civilisation. As we master and rise above, or fall and are conquered by,
the difficulties of our position, so also will be the future, not merely
of our own class, or even of our own race alone, but also of those
vast masses who are following on in the wake of our civilisation. The
decision we are called on to make is a decision for the race; behind us
comes on the tread of incalculable millions of feet.

There is thus no truth in the assertion so often made, even by
thoughtful persons, that the male labour question and the woman's
question of our day are completely one, and that, would the women of
the European race of today but wait peacefully till the males alone had
solved their problem, they would find that their own had b