ecome a social
danger. The males of the dominant class have almost always contrived to
absorb to themselves the new intellectual occupations, with the absence
of necessity for the old forms of physical toil made possible in their
societies; and the females of the dominant class or race, for whose
muscular labours there was now also no longer any need, not succeeding
in grasping or attaining to these new forms of labour, have sunk into a
state in which, performing no species of active social duty, they have
existed through the passive performance of sexual functions alone, with
how much or how little of discontent will now never be known, since no
literary record has been made by the woman of the past, of her desires
or sorrows. Then, in place of the active labouring woman, upholding
society by her toil, has come the effete wife, concubine, or prostitute,
clad in fine raiment, the work of others' fingers; fed on luxurious
viands, the result of others' toil, waited on and tended by the labour
of others. The need for her physical labour having gone, and mental
industry not having taken its place, she bedecked and scented her
person, or had it bedecked and scented for her, she lay upon her sofa,
or drove or was carried out in her vehicle, and, loaded with jewels, she
sought by dissipations and amusements to fill up the inordinate blank
left by the lack of productive activity. And as the hand whitened and
frame softened, till, at last, the very duties of motherhood, which were
all the constitution of her life left her, became distasteful, and, from
the instant when her infant came damp from her womb, it passed into the
hands of others, to be tended and reared by them; and from youth to age
her offspring often owed nothing to her personal toil. In many cases so
complete was her enervation, that at last the very joy of giving life,
the glory and beatitude of a virile womanhood, became distasteful;
and she sought to evade it, not because of its interference with more
imperious duties to those already born of her, or to her society,
but because her existence of inactivity had robbed her of all joy in
strenuous exertion and endurance in any form. Finely clad, tenderly
housed, life became for her merely the gratification of her own physical
and sexual appetites, and the appetites of the male, through the
stimulation of which she could maintain herself. And, whether as kept
wife, kept mistress, or prostitute, she contributed nothing