tend to rob her of all forms
of active, conscious, social labour, and to reduce her, like the
field-tick, to the passive exercise of her sex functions alone. And the
result of this parasitism has invariably been the decay in vitality and
intelligence of the female, followed after a longer or shorter period by
that of her male descendants and her entire society.

Nevertheless, in the history of the past the dangers of the
sex-parasitism have never threatened more than a small section of the
females of the human race, those exclusively of some comparatively
small dominant race or class; the mass of women beneath them being
still compelled to assume many forms of strenuous activity. It is at
the present day, and under the peculiar conditions of our modern
civilisation, that for the first time sex-parasitism has become a
danger, more or less remote, to the mass of civilised women, perhaps
ultimately to all.

In the very early stages of human growth, the sexual parasitism and
degeneration of the female formed no possible source of social danger.
Where the conditions of life rendered it inevitable that all the labour
of a community should be performed by the members of that community for
themselves, without the assistance of slaves or machinery, the tendency
has always been rather to throw an excessive amount of social labour on
the female. Under no conditions, at no time, in no place, in the history
of the world have the males of any period, of any nation, or of any
class, shown the slightest inclination to allow their own females to
become inactive or parasitic, so long as the actual muscular labour
of feeding and clothing them would in that case have devolved upon
themselves!

The parasitism of the human female becomes a possibility only when a
point in civilisation is reached (such as that which was attained in the
ancient civilisations of Greece, Rome, Persia, Assyria, India, and such
as today exists in many of the civilisations of the East, such as those
of China and Turkey), when, owing to the extensive employment of the
labour of slaves, or of subject races or classes, the dominant race or
class has become so liberally supplied with the material goods of life,
that mere physical toil on the part of its own female members has become
unnecessary. It is when this point has been reached, and never
before, that the symptoms of female parasitism have in the past almost
invariably tended to manifest themselves, and have b