toil? What if, the
increased culture and mental activity of woman necessary for her
entrance into the new fields, however desirable in other ways for
herself and the race, should result in a diminution, or in an absolute
abolition of the sexual attraction and affection, which in all ages of
the past has bound the two halves of humanity together? What if, though
the stern and unlovely manual labours of the past have never affected
her attractiveness for the male of her own society, nor his for her;
yet the performance by woman of intellectual labours, or complex and
interesting manual labour, and her increased intelligence and width,
should render the male objectionable to her, and the woman undesirable
to the male; so that the very race itself might become extinct through
the dearth of sexual affection? What, and if, the woman ceases to value
the son she bears, and to feel desire for and tenderness to the man who
begets him; and the man to value and desire the woman and her offspring?
Would not such a result exceed, or at least equal, in its evil to
humanity, anything which could result from the degeneration and
parasitism of woman? Would it not be well, if there exist any
possibility of this danger, that woman, however conscious that she can
perform social labour as nobly and successfully under the new conditions
of life as the old, should yet consciously, and deliberately, with her
eyes open, sink into a state of pure intellectual torpor, with all its
attendant evils, rather than face the more irreparable loss which her
development and the exercise of her gifts might entail? Would it not be
well she should deliberately determine, as the lesser of two evils,
to dwarf herself and limit her activities and the expansion of her
faculties, rather than that any risk should be run of the bond of desire
and emotion between the two sexual halves of humanity being severed? If
the race is to decay and become extinct on earth, might it not as well
be through the parasitism and decay of woman, as through the decay of
the sexual instinct?"

It is not easy to reply with rationality, or even gravity, to a
supposition, which appears to be based on the conception that a sudden
and entire subversion of the deepest of those elements on which human,
and even animal, life on the globe is based, is possible from so
inadequate a cause: and it might well be passed silently, were it not
that, under some form or other, this argument frequently