AND 
 
 LABOR 
 
 HREINER
 
 A 
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR
 
 WOMAN 
 
 AND 
 
 LABOR 
 
 BY 
 
 OLIVE SCHREINER 
 
 AUTHOR OF 
 
 "THE STORY OF AN AFRICAN FARM," "DREAMS," 
 "DREAM LIFE AND REAL LIFE," ETC. 
 
 THIRD EDITION 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY 
 PUBLISHERS
 
 Copyright, 1911, by 
 FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY 
 
 All rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign 
 languages, including the Scandinavian 
 
 March, 1911.
 
 College 
 Library 
 
 Ho 
 138 I 
 537 
 
 DEDICATED 
 
 TO 
 
 CONSTANCE LYTTON 
 
 " Glory of warrior, glory of orator, glory of song 
 Paid with a voice flying by to be lost on an endless aea 
 Glory of virtue, to fight, to struggle, to right the wrong 
 Nay, but she aim'd not at glory, no lover of glory she: 
 Give her the glory of going on and still to be." 
 
 TEHTXYSOK. 
 
 OLIVE SCHKEINEK. 
 
 DE A AE, 
 
 CAPE OF GOOD HOPE, 
 SOUTH AFBICA. 
 1911. 
 
 1158096
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTEB PAGE 
 
 INTRODUCTION 3 
 
 I PARASITISM 27 
 
 II PARASITISM (continued) 69 
 
 III PARASITISM (continued) 113 
 
 IV WOMAN AND WAR ...... 157 
 
 V SEX DIFFERENCES 187 
 
 VI CERTAIN OBJECTIONS 207
 
 INTRODUCTION
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 IT is necessary to say a few words to explain 
 this book. The original title of the book was 
 "Musings on Woman and Labor." 
 
 It is, what its name implies, a collection of 
 musings on some of the points connected with 
 woman's work. 
 
 In my early youth I began to write a book 
 on Woman. I continued the work till ten 
 years ago. It necessarily touched on most 
 matters in which sex has a part, however in- 
 completely. 
 
 It began by tracing the differences of sex 
 function to their earliest appearances in life; 
 not only as when in the animal world two ame- 
 boid globules coalesce, and the process of sex- 
 ual generation almost unconsciously begins, 
 but to its yet more primitive manifestations 
 in plant life. In the first three chapters I 
 
 [3]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 traced, as far as I was able, the evolution of 
 sex in the different branches of non-human life. 
 Many large facts surprised me in following 
 tnis line of thought by their bearing on the 
 whole modern sex problem. Such facts as 
 this, that in the great majority of species on 
 the earth the female form exceeds the male in 
 size and strength and often in predatory in- 
 stinct; and that sex relationships may assume 
 almost any form on earth as the conditions of 
 life vary; and that, even in their sexual rela- 
 tion towards offspring, those differences which 
 we, conventionally, are apt to suppose are in- 
 herent in the paternal or the maternal sex 
 form, are not inherent as when one studies 
 the lives of certain toads, where the female de- 
 posits her eggs in cavities on the back of the 
 male, where the eggs are preserved and 
 hatched; or, of certain sea animals, in which 
 the male carries the young about with him and 
 rears them in a pouch formed of his own sub- 
 stance; and countless other such. Above all, 
 this important fact, which had first impressed 
 me when as a child I wandered alone in the 
 African bush, and watched cock-o-veets sing- 
 ing their inter-knit love-songs, and small sing- 
 
 [*]
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 ing birds building their nests together, and 
 caring for and watching over, not only their 
 young, but each other, and which has power- 
 fully influenced all I have thought and felt on 
 sex matters since ; the fact that along the line 
 of bird life and among certain of its species sex 
 has attained its highest and esthetic, and one 
 might almost say intellectual, development on 
 earth: a point of development to which no hu- 
 man race as a whole has yet reached, and which 
 represents the realization of the highest sexual 
 ideal which haunts humanity. 
 
 When I had ended these three chapters I 
 went on to deal as far as I was able with 
 woman's condition in the most primitive, the 
 savage and semi-savage states. I had always 
 been strangely interested in watching the con- 
 dition of the native African women in the 
 primitive society about me. When I was 
 eighteen I had once a conversation with a 
 Kafir woman still in her untouched primitive 
 condition, a conversation which made a more 
 profound impression on my mind than any but 
 one other incident connected with the position 
 of woman has ever done. She was a woman 
 whom I cannot think of otherwise than as a 
 
 [5]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 woman of genius. In language more eloquent 
 and intense than I have ever heard from the 
 lips of any other woman, she painted the con- 
 dition of the women of her race; the labor of 
 women, the anguish of woman as she grew 
 older, and the limitations of her life closed in 
 about her, her sufferings under the condi- 
 tion of polygamy and subjection; all this she 
 painted with a passion and intensity I have not 
 known equaled; and yet, and this was the in- 
 teresting point, when I went on to question 
 her, combined with a deep and almost fierce 
 bitterness against life and the unseen powers 
 which had shaped woman and her conditions 
 as they were, there was hot one word of bit- 
 terness against the individual man, nor any 
 will or intention to revolt; rather, there was a 
 stern and almost majestic attitude of accept- 
 ance of the inevitable; life and the conditions 
 of her race being what they were. It was this 
 conversation which first forced upon me the 
 fact, which I have since come to regard as 
 almost axiomatic, that the women of no race 
 or class will ever rise in revolt or attempt to 
 bring about a revolutionary readjustment of 
 their relation to their society, however intense 
 
 [6]
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 their suffering and however clear their per- 
 ception of it, while the welfare and persistence 
 of their society requires their submission: that,- 
 wherever there is a general attempt on the part 
 of the women of any society to readjust their 
 position in it, a close analysis will always show 
 that the changed or changing conditions of that 
 society have made woman's acquiescence no 
 longer necessary or desirable. 
 
 Another point which it was attempted ade- 
 quately to deal with in this division of the book 
 was the probability, amounting almost to a 
 certainty, that women's physical suffering and 
 weakness in childbirth and certain other direc- 
 tions was the price which woman has been com- 
 pelled to pay for the passing of the race from 
 the quadrupedal and four-handed state to the 
 erect, which was essential if humanity as we 
 know it was to exist (this of course was dealt 
 with by a close physiological study of women's 
 structure) ; and also to deal with the highly 
 probable, though unproved and perhaps im- 
 provable, suggestion that it was mainly the 
 necessity which woman was under of bearing 
 her helpless young in her arms while procuring 
 food for them and herself, and of carrying 
 
 [7]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 them when escaping from enemies, that led to 
 the entirely erect position being forced on de- 
 veloping humanity. 
 
 These and many other points throwing an 
 interesting light on the later development of 
 women (such as the relation between agricul- 
 ture and the subjection of women) were gone 
 into in this division of the book dealing with 
 primitive and semi-barbarous womanhood. 
 
 When this division was ended, I had them 
 typewritten and with the first three chapters 
 bound in one volume about the year 1888, and 
 then went on to work at the last division, which 
 I had already begun. 
 
 In this I went on to deal with what is more 
 popularly known as the women's question: 
 with the causes which in modern European 
 societies are leading women to attempt re- 
 adjustment in their relation to their social 
 organism; with the direction in which such re- 
 adjustments are taking place; and with the 
 results which in the future it appears likely 
 such readjustments will produce. 
 
 After eleven years, 1899, I had finished 
 these chapters, and had them bound in a large 
 volume with the first two divisions. There
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 then only remained to revise the book and 
 write a preface. In addition to the prose 
 argument I had in each chapter one or more 
 allegories; because while it is easy clearly to 
 express abstract thoughts in argumentative 
 prose, whatever emotion those thoughts awaken 
 I have not felt myself able adequately to 
 express except in the other form. 1 And I 
 had also tried throughout to illustrate the sub- 
 ject with exactly those particular facts in the 
 animal and human world, with which I had 
 come into personal contact, and which had 
 helped to form the conclusions which were 
 given, as it has always seemed to me that in 
 dealing with sociological questions a knowl- 
 edge of the exact way in which a writer has 
 arrived at his view is necessary in measuring 
 its worth. The work had occupied a large 
 part of my life, and I had hoped, whatever 
 its deficiencies, that it might at least stimulate 
 other minds, perhaps more happily situated, 
 to an enlarged study of the question. 
 
 In 1899 I was living in Johannesburg, 
 
 i The allegory "Three Dreams in a Desert" which T pub- 
 lished about nineteen years ago was taken from this book; and 
 I have felt that perhaps being taken from its context it was 
 not quite clear to every one. 
 
 [9]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 when, owing to ill-health, I was ordered sud- 
 denly to spend some time at a lower level. 
 At the end of two months the Boer War 
 broke out. Two days after war was pro- 
 claimed I arrived at De Aar on my way back 
 to the Transvaal; but martial law had al- 
 ready been proclaimed there, and the mili- 
 tary authorities refused to allow me to re- 
 turn to my home in the Transvaal and sent 
 me down to the Colony; nor was I allowed 
 to send any communication through, to any 
 person who might have extended some care 
 over my possessions. Some eight months 
 after, when the British troops had taken and 
 entered Johannesburg, a friend, who, being 
 on the British side, had been allowed to go 
 up, wrote me that he had visited my house 
 and found it looted and that all that was of 
 value had been taken or destroyed; my desk 
 had been forced open and broken up, and 
 its contents set on fire in the center of the 
 room, so that the roof was blackened over the 
 pile of burnt papers. He added that there 
 was little in the remnants of paper of which 
 I could make any use, but that he had gath- 
 ered and stored the fragments till such time 
 
 [10]
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 as I might be allowed to come and see them. 
 I thus knew my book had been destroyed. 
 
 Some months later in the war when con- 
 fined in a little up-country hamlet many hun- 
 dreds of miles from the coast and from Johan- 
 nesburg ; with the brunt of the war at that time 
 breaking round us, de Wet was said to have 
 crossed the Orange River and to have been 
 within a few miles of us, and the British 
 columns moved hither and thither. I was liv- 
 ing in a little house on the outskirts of the 
 village, in a single room, with a stretcher and 
 two packing-cases as furniture, and with only 
 my little dog for company. Thirty-six armed 
 African natives were set to guard night and 
 day at the doors and windows of the house; 
 and I was only allowed to go out during cer- 
 tain hours in the middle of the day to fetch 
 water from the fountain in the middle of the 
 village, or to buy what I needed. I was al- 
 lowed to receive no newspapers or magazines. 
 
 A high barbed wire fence, guarded by 
 armed natives, surrounded the village, through 
 which it would have been death to try to es- 
 cape. All day the pom-poms from the ar- 
 mored trains that paraded on the railway line
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 nine miles distant could be heard at intervals; 
 and at night there was the talk of the armed 
 natives as they pressed against the windows, 
 and the tramp of the watch with the end- 
 less "Who goes there?" as they walked round 
 the wire fence through the long, dark hours 
 when I was neither allowed to light a candle 
 nor strike a match. When a conflict was 
 fought near by, the dying and wounded were 
 brought in; three men belonging to our lit- 
 tle village were led out to execution; death 
 sentences were read in our little market- 
 place; our prison was filled with our fellow- 
 countrymen; and we did not know from hour 
 to hour what the next would bring to us. 
 
 Under these conditions I felt it necessary I 
 should resolutely force my thought at times 
 from the horror of the world around me, to 
 dwell on some abstract question, and it was 
 under these circumstances that this little book 
 was written, being a remembrance mainly 
 drawn from one chapter of the larger book. 
 The armed native guards standing against the 
 windows, it was impossible to open the shut- 
 ters, and the room was therefore so dark that 
 even the physical act of writing was difficult. 
 
 [12]
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 A year and a half after, when the war was 
 over and peace had been proclaimed for about 
 four months, I with difficulty obtained a per- 
 mit to visit the Transvaal. I found among 
 the burnt fragments the leathern back of my 
 book intact, but the front half of the leaves 
 had been completely burnt away; the back 
 half of the leaves next to the cover were still 
 all there, but so browned and scorched with 
 the flames that they broke as you touched 
 them; and there was nothing left but to de- 
 stroy it. I even then had a hope that at some 
 future time I might yet rewrite the whole 
 book. But life is short; and I have found 
 that not only shall I never rewrite the book, 
 but I shall not have the health even to fill out 
 and harmonize this little remembrance from 
 it. 
 
 It is with some pain that I give out this 
 fragment. I am only comforted by the 
 thought that perhaps all sincere and earnest 
 search after truth, even where it fails to reach 
 it, yet often comes so near to it that other 
 minds more happily situated may be led, by 
 pointing out its very limitations, to obtain a 
 larger view. 
 
 [13]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 I have dared to give this long and uninter- 
 esting explanation, not at all because I have 
 wished, by giving the conditions under which 
 it was written, to make excuse for any repeti- 
 tions or lack of literary polish in the book, for 
 these things matter very little; but because 
 (and this matters very much) it might lead to 
 misconception on the subject-matter itself if 
 its genesis were not understood. 
 
 Not only is it not a general view of the 
 whole vast body of phenomena connected with 
 woman's position, but it is not even a bird's- 
 eye view of the whole question of woman's 
 relation to labor. 
 
 In the original book the matter of the 
 parasitism of woman filled only one chapter 
 out of twelve, and it was mainly from this 
 chapter that this book was drawn. The ques- 
 tion of the parasitism of woman is, I think, 
 very vital, very important; it explains many 
 phenomena which nothing else explains; and 
 it will be of increasing importance. But for 
 the moment there are other aspects of woman's 
 relation to labor practically quite as pressing. 
 In the large book I had devoted one whole 
 chapter to an examination of the work woman 
 
 [14]
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 has done and still does in the modern world, 
 and the gigantic evils which arise from the 
 fact that her labor, especially domestic labor, 
 often the most wearisome and unending known 
 to any section of the human race, is not 
 adequately recognized or recompensed. Es- 
 pecially on this point I have feared this book 
 might lead to a misconception of the great 
 insistence on the problem of sex parasitism, 
 and the lighter dealing with other aspects lead 
 to the impression that woman's domestic labor 
 at the present day (something quite distinct 
 from, though indirectly connected with, the 
 sexual relation between man and woman) 
 should not be highly and most highly recog- 
 nized and recompensed. I believe it will be 
 in the future, and then when woman gives up 
 her independent field of labor for domestic or 
 marital duty of any kind, she will not receive 
 her share of the earnings of the man as a more 
 or less eleemosynary benefaction, placing her 
 in a position of subjection, but an equal share, 
 as the fair division, in an equal partnership. 1 
 
 i It may be objected that where a man and woman have 
 valued each other sufficiently to select one another from all 
 other humans for a life-long physical union, it is an imperti- 
 
 [15]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 Especially I have feared that the points dealt 
 with in this little book, taken apart from other 
 aspects of the question, might lead to the con- 
 ception that it was intended to express the 
 thought that it was possible or desirable that 
 woman in addition to her child-bearing should 
 take from man all his share in the support 
 and care of his offspring and of any woman 
 who fulfilled with regard to himself domestic 
 duties of any kind. In the chapter in the 
 original book devoted to man's labor in con- 
 nection with woman and with his offspring 
 more than one hundred pages were devoted 
 in illustrating how essential to the humaniz- 
 ing and civilizing of man, and therefore of 
 the whole race, was an increased sense of 
 sexual and parental responsibility, and an 
 increased justice towards woman as a domes- 
 
 nence to suppose there could be any necessity to adjust eco- 
 nomic relations. In love there is no first nor last! And that 
 the desire of each must be to excel the other in service. 
 
 That this should be so is true; that it is so now, in the case 
 of union between two perfectly morally developed humans, is 
 also true; and that this condition may in a distant future be 
 almost universal is certainly true. But dealing with this mat- 
 ter as a practical question to-day, we have to consider not 
 what should be, or what may be, but what, given traditions and 
 institutions of our societies, is, to-day. 
 
 [16]
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 tic laborer. In the last half of the same 
 chapter I dealt at great length with what 
 seems to me the most pressing of practical 
 sex questions at this moment man's attitude 
 towards those women who are not engaged in 
 domestic labor. That vast and always in- 
 creasing body of women, who as modern con- 
 ditions develop are thrown out into the stream 
 of modern economic life to sustain themselves 
 and often others by their own labor; and who 
 yet are bound hand and foot, not by the in- 
 tellectual or physical limitations of their na- 
 ture, but by artificial constrictions and con- 
 ventions, the remnants of a past condition of 
 society. It is largely this maladjustment, 
 which, wisely studied in all its ramifications, 
 will be found to lie as the tap-root and central 
 source of one of the most terrible social 
 diseases that afflict us. 
 
 The fact that for equal work equally well 
 performed by a man and by a woman, it is 
 ordained that the woman on the ground of 
 her sex alone shall receive a less recompense, 
 is the nearest approach to a wilful and un- 
 qualified "wrong" in the whole relation of 
 woman to society to-day. That males of en- 
 
 [17]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 lightenment and equity can for an hour tolerate 
 the existence of this inequality has always 
 seemed to me almost incomprehensible; and it 
 is only explainable when one regards it as a 
 result of the blinding effects of custom and 
 habit. Personally I have always felt so pro- 
 foundly on this subject, that this and one 
 other matter connected with woman's sexual 
 relation to man are the only points connected 
 with woman's position in thinking of which I 
 have always felt it necessary to crush down in- 
 dignation and almost fiercely to restrain it, if 
 I should maintain impartiality of outlook. I 
 should therefore much regret if the passing 
 manner in which this question has been touched 
 on in this little book made it seem of less vital 
 importance than I hold it. 
 
 In the last chapter of the original book, 
 the longest, and to me the most important, I 
 dealt with the problems connected with mar- 
 riage and the personal relations of men and 
 women in the modern world. In it I tried to 
 give expression to what I believe to be a great 
 truth, and one on which I should not fear to 
 challenge the verdict of long future genera- 
 tions that the direction in which the en- 
 
 [18]
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 deavor of woman to readjust herself to the 
 new conditions of life is leading to-day is not 
 towards a greater sexual laxity or promiscuity 
 or an increased self-indulgence, but toward a 
 higher appreciation of the sacredness of all 
 sex relations, and a clearer perception of the 
 sex relation between man and woman as the 
 basis of human society, on whose integrity, 
 beauty, and healthfulness depend the health 
 and beauty of human life, as a whole. Above 
 all, that it will lead to a closer, more perma- 
 nent, more emotionally and intellectually 
 complete relation between the individual man 
 and woman. And if in the present disco-ordi- 
 nate transitional stage of our social growth 
 it is found necessary to allow of readjustment 
 by means of divorce, it will not be because 
 such readjustments will be regarded lightly, 
 but rather as when, in a complex and delicate 
 mechanism moved by a central spring, we al- 
 low in the structure for the readjustment and 
 regulation of that spring, because on its abso- 
 lute perfection of action depends the movement 
 of the whole mechanism. 
 
 In the last pages of the book, I tried to 
 express what seems to me a profound truth 
 
 [19]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 often overlooked. That as humanity and 
 human societies pass on slowly from their 
 present barbarous and semi-savage condition 
 in matters of sex into a higher, it will be 
 found, that over and above its function in 
 producing and sending onward the physical 
 stream of life (a function which humanity 
 shares with the most lowly animal and veg- 
 etable forms of life, and which even by some 
 noted thinkers of the present day seems to 
 be regarded as its only possible function), that 
 sex and the sexual relation between man and 
 woman have distinct esthetic, intellectual, and 
 spiritual functions and ends, apart entirely 
 from physical reproduction. That noble as is 
 the function of the physical reproduction of 
 humanity by the union of man and woman, 
 rightly viewed, that union has in it latent, 
 other, and even higher forms of creative energy 
 and life-dispensing power, and that its history 
 on earth has only begun. As the first wild rose 
 which hung from its stem with its center of 
 stamens and pistils and its single whorl of 
 pale petals had only begun its course, and was 
 destined, as the ages passed, to develop more 
 and more, stamen upon stamen to develop into 
 
 [20]
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 petal upon petal, and to assume a hundred 
 forms of joy and beauty. 
 
 And it would almost seem, that, on the path 
 toward the higher development of sexual life 
 on earth, as man has so often led in other 
 paths, that here it is perhaps woman, by reason 
 of those very sexual conditions which in the 
 past have crushed and trammeled her, who is 
 bound to lead the way, and man to follow. 
 So that it may be that at last, sexual love 
 that tired angel who through the ages has pre- 
 sided over the march of humanity, with dis- 
 traught eyes, with feather-shafts broken, and 
 white wings drabbled in the mires of lust and 
 greed, his golden locks caked over with the 
 dust of injustice and oppression till those 
 looking at him have sometimes cried in terror, 
 "He is the Evil and not the Good of life!" and 
 have sought, if it were possible, to exterminate 
 him shall yet, at last, with eyes bathed from 
 the mire and dust in the stream of friend- 
 ship and freedom, leap upwards, his white 
 wings spread, resplendent in the sunshine of a 
 distant future the essentially Good and 
 Beautiful of human existence. 
 
 I have given this long and wearisome ex- 
 [21]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 planation of the scope and origin of this little 
 book because I feel that it might lead to grave 
 misunderstanding were it not understood how 
 it came to be written. 
 
 I have inscribed it to my friend, Lady 
 Constance Lytton; not because I think it 
 worthy of her, nor because of the splendid part 
 she has played in the struggle of the women 
 fighting to-day in England for certain forms 
 of freedom for all women. It is, if I may 
 be allowed without violating the sanctity of 
 a close personal friendship so to say, be- 
 cause she, with one or two other men and 
 women I have known, have embodied for me 
 the highest ideal of human nature, in which 
 intellectual power and strength of will are 
 combined with an infinite tenderness and 
 wide human sympathy, a combination which, 
 whether in the person of the man or the 
 woman, is essential to the existence of the fully 
 rounded and harmonized human creature ; and 
 which an English woman of genius summed 
 in one line when she cried in her invocation of 
 her great French sister : 
 
 "Thou large-brained woman and large-hearted man !" 
 
 [**]
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 One word more I should like to add, as I 
 may not again speak or write on this subject. 
 I should like to say to the men and women 
 of the generations which will come after us 
 "You will look back at us with astonish- 
 ment! You will wonder at passionate strug- 
 gles that accomplished so little ; at the, to you, 
 obvious paths to attain our ends which we did 
 not take; at the intolerable evils before which 
 it will seem to you we sat down passive; at 
 the great truths staring us in the face, which 
 we failed to see; at the truths we grasped at, 
 but could never get our fingers quite round. 
 You will marvel at the labor that ended in so 
 little; but, what you will never know is how 
 it was thinking of you and for you, that we 
 struggled as we did and accomplished the little 
 which we have done ; that it was in the thought 
 of your larger realization and fuller life that 
 we found consolation for the futilities of our 
 own." 
 
 "All I aspire to be, and was not, comforts me." 
 
 o. s. 
 
 [23]
 
 PARASITISM
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 PARASITISM 
 
 IN that clamor which has arisen in the 
 modern world, where now this, and then that, 
 is demanded for and by large bodies of 
 modern women, he who listens carefully may 
 detect as a keynote, beneath all the clamor, 
 a demand which may be embodied in such a 
 cry as this: Give us labor and the training 
 which fits for labor! We demand this f not 
 for ourselves alone, but for the race. 
 
 If this demand be logically expanded, it 
 will take such form as this: Give us labor! 
 for countless ages, for thousands, millions it 
 may be, we have labored. When first man 
 wandered, the naked, newly-erected savage, 
 and hunted, and fought, we wandered with 
 him: each step of his was ours. Within our 
 bodies we bore the race, on our shoulders we 
 carried it; we sought the roots and plants for 
 its food; and, when man's barbed arrow or 
 
 [27]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 hook brought the game, our hands dressed it. 
 Side by side, the savage man and the savage 
 woman, we wandered free together and la- 
 bored free together. And we were contented! 
 
 Then a change came. 
 
 We ceased from our wanderings, and, 
 camping upon one spot of earth, again the 
 labors of life were divided between us. While 
 man went forth to hunt, or to battle with the 
 foe who would have dispossessed us of all, we 
 labored on the land. We hoed the earth, we 
 reaped the grain, we shaped the dwellings, 
 we wove the clothing, we modeled the earthen 
 vessels and drew the lines upon them, which 
 were humanity's first attempt at domestic art ; 
 we studied the properties and uses of plants, 
 and our old women were the first physicians 
 of the race, as often, its first priests and 
 prophets. 
 
 We fed the race at our breast, we bore it 
 on our shoulders; through us it was shaped, 
 fed, and clothed. Labor more toilsome and 
 unending than that of man was ours; yet did 
 we never cry out that it was too heavy for us. 
 While savage man lay in the sunshine on his 
 skins, resting, that he might be fitted for war 
 
 [28]
 
 PARASITISM 
 
 or the chase, or while he shaped his weapons 
 of death, he ate and drank that which our 
 hands had provided for him; and while we 
 knelt over our grindstone, or hoed in the fields, 
 with one child in our womb, perhaps, and one 
 on our back, toiling till the young body was 
 old before its time did we ever cry out that 
 the labor allotted to us was too hard for us? 
 Did we not know that the woman who threw 
 down her burden was as a man who cast away 
 his shield in battle a coward and a traitor 
 to his race? Man fought that was his work; 
 we fed and nurtured the race that was ours. 
 We knew that upon our labors, even as upon 
 man's, depended the life and well-being of the 
 people whom we bore. We endured our toil, 
 as man bore his wounds, silently ; and we were 
 content. 
 
 Then again a change came. 
 
 Ages passed, and time was when it was no 
 longer necessary that all men should go to the 
 hunt or the field of war; and when only one 
 in five, or one in ten, or but one in twenty, 
 was needed continually for these labors. 
 Then our fellow-man, having no longer full 
 occupation in his old fields of labor, began to 
 
 [29]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 take his share in ours. He too began to cul- 
 tivate the field, to build the house, to grind 
 the corn (or make his male slaves do it) ; and 
 the hoe, and the potter's tools, and the thatch- 
 ing-needle, and at last even the grindstones 
 which we first had picked up and smoothed 
 to grind the food for our children, began to 
 pass from our hands into his. The old, sweet 
 life of the open fields was ours no more; we 
 moved within the gates, where the time passes 
 more slowly and the world is sadder than in 
 the air outside ; but we had our own work still, 
 and were content. 
 
 If, indeed, we might no longer grow the 
 food for our people, we were still its dressers ; 
 if we did not always plant and prepare the 
 flax and hemp, we still wove the garments for 
 our race; if we did no longer raise the house 
 walls, the tapestries that covered them were 
 the work of our hands ; we brewed the ale, and 
 the simples which were used as medicines we 
 distilled and prescribed; and, close about our 
 feet, from birth to manhood, grew up the chil- 
 dren whom we had borne; their voices were 
 always in our ears. At the doors of our 
 houses we sat with our spinning-wheels, and 
 
 [30]
 
 PARASITISM 
 
 we looked out across the fields that were once 
 ours to labor in and were contented. Lord's 
 wife, peasant's, or burgher's, we all still had 
 our work to do! 
 
 A thousand years ago, had one gone to 
 some great dame, questioning her why she did 
 not go out a-hunting or a-fighting, or enter 
 the great hall to dispense justice and confer 
 upon the making of laws, she would have an- 
 swered: "Am I a fool that you put to me 
 such questions? Have I not a hundred maid- 
 ens to keep at work at spinning-wheels and 
 needles? With my own hands daily do I 
 not dispense bread to over a hundred folk? 
 In the great hall go and see the tapestries I 
 with my maidens have created by the labors 
 of years, and which we shall labor over for 
 twenty more, that my children's children may 
 see recorded the great deeds of their fore- 
 fathers. In my store-room are there not 
 salves and simples, that my own hands have 
 prepared for the healing of my household and 
 the sick in the country round? Ill would it 
 go indeed, if when the folk came home from 
 war and the chase of wild beasts, weary or 
 wounded, they found all the womenfolk gone 
 
 [31]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 out a-hunting and a-fighting, and none there 
 to dress their wounds, or prepare their meat, 
 or guide and rule the household! Better far 
 might my lord and his followers come and 
 help us with our work, than that we should go 
 to help them! You are surely bereft of all 
 wit. What becomes of the country if the 
 women forsake their toil?" 
 
 And the burgher's wife, asked why she did 
 not go to labor in her husband's workshop, 
 or away into the market-place, or go a-trad- 
 ing to foreign countries, would certainly have 
 answered: "I am too busy to speak with 
 such as you! The bread is in the oven (al- 
 ready I smell it a-burning), the winter is 
 coming on, and my children lack good woolen 
 hose and my husband needs a warm coat. I 
 have six vats of ale all a-brewing, and I have 
 daughters whom I must teach to spin and 
 sew, and the babies are clinging round my 
 knees. And you ask me why I do not go 
 abroad to seek for new labors! God-sooth! 
 Would you have me to leave my household to 
 starve in summer and die of cold in winter, 
 and my children to go untrained, while I gad 
 about to seek for other work? A man must 
 
 [32]
 
 PARASITISM 
 
 have his belly full and his back covered be- 
 fore all things in life. Who, think you, would 
 spin and bake and brew, and rear and train 
 my babes, if I went abroad? New labor, in- 
 deed, when the days are not long enough, and 
 I have to toil far into the night! I have no 
 time to talk with fools! Who will rear and 
 shape the nation if I do not? " 
 
 And the young maiden at the cottage door, 
 beside her wheel, asked why she was content 
 and did not seek new fields of labor, would 
 surely have answered: "Go away, I have no 
 time to listen to you. Do you not see that 
 I am spinning here that I too may have a 
 home of my own? I am weaving the linen 
 garments that shall clothe my household in the 
 long years to come! I cannot marry till the 
 chest upstairs be full. You cannot hear it, 
 but as I sit here alone, spinning, far off across 
 the hum of my spinning-wheel I hear the 
 voices of my little unborn children calling to 
 me 'O mother, mother, make haste, that we 
 may be!' and sometimes, when I seem to be 
 looking out across my wheel into the sunshine, 
 it is the blaze of my own fireside that I see, 
 and the light shines on the faces round it; and 
 
 [33]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 I spin on the faster and the steadier when I 
 think of what shall come. Do you ask me 
 why I do not go out and labor in the fields 
 with the lad whom I have chosen? Is his 
 work, then, indeed more needed than mine for 
 the raising of that home that shall be ours? 
 Oh, very hard I will labor, for him and for 
 my children, in the long years to come. But 
 I cannot stop to talk to you now. Far off, 
 over the hum of my spinning-wheel, I hear the 
 voices of my children calling, and I must 
 hurry on. Do you ask me why I do not seek 
 for labor whose hands are full to bursting? 
 Who will give folk to the nation if I do 
 not?" 
 
 Such would have been our answer in 
 Europe in the ages of the past, if asked the 
 question why we were contented with our field 
 of labor and sought no other. Man had his 
 work; we had ours. We knew that we up- 
 bore our world on our shoulders; and that 
 through the labor of our hands it was sus- 
 tained and strengthened and we were con- 
 tented. 
 
 But now, again a change has come. 
 
 Something that is entirely new has entered 
 [34]
 
 PARASITISM 
 
 into the field of human labor, and left noth- 
 ing as it was. 
 
 In man's fields of toil, change has accom- 
 plished, and is yet more quickly accomplish- 
 ing, itself. 
 
 On lands where once fifty men and youths 
 toiled with their cattle, to-day one steam- 
 plough, guided by but two pair of hands, 
 passes swiftly; and an automatic reaper in 
 one day reaps and binds and prepares for the 
 garner the produce of fields it would have 
 taken a hundred strong male arms to harvest 
 in the past. The iron tools and weapons, 
 only one of which it took an ancient father of 
 our race long months of stern exertion to ex- 
 tract from ore and bring to shape and temper, 
 are now poured forth by steam-driven ma- 
 chinery as a mill-pond pours forth its water; 
 and even in war, the male's ancient and espe- 
 cial field of labor, a complete reversal of the 
 ancient order has taken place. Time was 
 when the size and strength of the muscles in 
 a man's legs and arms, and the strength and 
 size of his body, largely determined his fight- 
 ing powers, and an Achilles or a Richard 
 Coeur de Lion, armed only with his spear or 
 
 [35] '
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 battle-ax, made a host fly before him; to-day 
 the puniest manikin behind a modern Maxim 
 gun may mow down in perfect safety a pha- 
 lanx of heroes whose legs and arms and phys- 
 ical powers a Greek god might have envied, 
 but who, having not the modern machinery 
 of war, fall powerless. The day of the pri- 
 mary import to humanity of the strength in 
 man's extensor and flexor muscles, whether 
 in labors of war or of peace, is gone by for- 
 ever; and the day of the all-importance of the 
 culture and activity of man's brain and nerve 
 has already come. 
 
 The brain of one consumptive German 
 chemist, who in his laboratory compounds a 
 new explosive, has more effect upon the wars 
 of the modern peoples than ten thousand sol- 
 dierly legs and arms and the man who invents 
 one new labor-saving machine may, through 
 the cerebration of a few days, have performed 
 the labor it would otherwise have taken hun- 
 dreds of thousands of his lusty fellows dec- 
 ades to accomplish. 
 
 Year by year, month by month, and almost 
 hour by hour, this change is increasingly 
 showing itself in the field of modern labor; 
 
 [36]
 
 PARASITISM 
 
 and crude muscular force, whether in man or 
 beast, sinks continually in its value in the 
 world of human toil; while intellectual power, 
 virility, and activity, and that culture which 
 leads to the mastery of the inanimate forces 
 of nature, to the invention of machinery, and 
 to that delicate manipulative skill often re- 
 quired in guiding it, becomes ever of greater 
 and greater importance to the race. Already 
 to-day we tremble on the verge of a dis- 
 covery, which may come to-morrow or the 
 next day, when, through the attainment of a 
 simple and cheap method of controlling some 
 widely diffused, everywhere accessible, natu- 
 ral force (such, for instance, as the force of 
 the great tidal wave) there will at once and 
 for ever pass away even that comparatively 
 small value which still, in our present stage 
 of material civilization, clings to the expendi- 
 ture of mere crude, mechanical, human en- 
 ergy; and the creature, however physically 
 powerful, who can merely pull, push, and 
 lift, much after the mannej of a machine, will 
 have no further value in the field of human la- 
 bor. 
 
 Therefore, even to-day, we find that wher- 
 [37]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 ever that condition which we call modern civi- 
 lization prevails, and in proportion as it tends 
 to prevail wherever steam-power, electricity, 
 or the forces of wind and water, are compelled 
 by man's intellectual activity to act as the 
 motor-powers in the accomplishment of human 
 toil, wherever the delicate adaptations of scien- 
 tifically constructed machinery are taking the 
 place of the simple manipulation of the human 
 hand there has arisen, all the world over, a 
 large body of males who find that their an- 
 cient fields of labor have slipped or are slip- 
 ping from them, and who discover that the 
 modern world has no place or need for them. 
 At the gates of our dockyards, in our streets, 
 and in our fields, are to be found everywhere, 
 in proportion as modern civilization is really 
 dominant, men whose bulk and mere animal 
 strength would have made them as warriors 
 invaluable members of any primitive com- 
 munity, and who would have been valuable 
 even in any simpler civilization than our own 
 as machines of toil; but who, owing to lack 
 of intellectual power or delicate manual train- 
 ing, have now no form of labor to offer so- 
 ciety which it stands really in need of, and 
 
 [38]
 
 PARASITISM 
 
 who therefore tend to form our Great Male 
 Unemployed a body which finds the only 
 powers it possesses so little needed by its fel- 
 lows that, in return for its intensest physical 
 labor, it hardly earns the poorest sustenance. 
 The material conditions of life have been 
 rapidly modified, and the man has not been 
 modified with them; machinery has largely 
 filled his place in his old field of labor, and he 
 has found no new one. 
 
 It is from these men, who, viewed from 
 the broad humanitarian standpoint, are of 
 the most lovable and interesting type, and 
 who might in a simpler state of society have 
 been the heroes, leaders, and chiefs of their 
 people, that there arises in the modern world 
 the bitter cry of the male unemployed: "Give 
 us labor or we die!" l 
 
 Yet it is only upon one, and a compara- 
 tively small, section of the males of the modern 
 
 1 The problem of the unemployed male is, of course, not 
 nearly so modern as that of the unemployed female. It may 
 be said in England to have taken its rise in almost its present 
 form as early as the fifteenth century, when economic changes 
 began to sever the agricultural laborer from the land, and rob 
 him of his ancient forms of social toil. Still, in its most acute 
 form, it may be called a modern problem. 
 
 [39]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 civilized world that these changes in the ma- 
 terial conditions of life have told in such fash- 
 ion as to take all useful occupation from them 
 and render them wholly or partly worthless to 
 society. If the modern man's field of labor 
 has contracted at one end (the physical), at 
 the other (the intellectual) it has immeasur- 
 ably expanded! If machinery and the com- 
 mand of inanimate motor-forces have rendered 
 of comparatively little value the male's mere 
 physical motor-power, the demand upon his 
 intellectual faculties, the call for the expend- 
 iture of nervous energy, and the exercise of 
 delicate manipulative skill in the labor of hu- 
 man life, have immeasurably increased. 
 
 In a million new directions forms of hon- 
 ored and remunerative social labor are open- 
 ing up before the feet of the modern man, 
 which his ancestors never dreamed of ; and day 
 by day they yet increase in numbers and im- 
 portance. The steamship, the hydraulic lift, 
 the patent road-maker, the railway-train, the 
 electric tram-car, the steam-driven mill, 
 the Maxim gun and the torpedo boat, once 
 made, may perform their labors with the guid- 
 ance and assistance of comparatively few 
 
 [40]
 
 hands; but a whole army of men of science, 
 engineers, clerks, and highly-trained workmen 
 is necessary for their invention, construction, 
 and maintenance. In the domains of art, of 
 science, of literature, and above all in the 
 field of politics and government, an almost 
 infinite extension has taken place in the fields 
 of male labor. Where in primitive times 
 woman was often the only builder, and pat- 
 terns she daubed on her hut walls or traced 
 on her earthen vessels the only attempts at 
 domestic art; and where later but an indi- 
 vidual here and there was required to design 
 a king's palace or a god's temple or to orna- 
 ment it with statues or paintings, to-day a 
 mighty army of men, a million strong, is em- 
 ployed in producing plastic art alone, both 
 high and low, from the traceries on wall- 
 paper and the illustrations in penny journals, 
 to the production of the pictures and statues 
 which adorn the national collections, and a 
 mighty new field of toil has opened be- 
 fore the anciently hunting and fighting 
 male. Where once one ancient witch-doc- 
 tress may have been the only creature in a 
 whole district who studied the nature of herbs 
 
 [41]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 and earths, or a solitary wizard experiment- 
 ing on poisons was the only individual in a 
 whole territory interrogating nature; and 
 where later, a few score of alchemists and as- 
 trologers only were engaged in examining 
 the natures of substances or the movement of 
 planets, to-day hundreds of thousands of 
 men in every civilized community are labor- 
 ing to unravel the mysteries of nature, and 
 the practical chemist, the physician, the anat- 
 omist, the engineer, the astronomer, the 
 mathematician, the electrician, form a mighty 
 and always increasingly important army of 
 male laborers. Where once an isolated bard 
 supplied a nation with its literature, or where 
 later a few thousand priests and men of letters 
 wrote and transcribed for the few to read, to- 
 day literature gives labor to a multitude of 
 males almost as countless as a swarm of lo- 
 custs. From the penny-a-liner to the artist 
 and thinker, the demand for their labor con- 
 tinually increases. Where one town-crier 
 with stout legs and lusty lungs was once all- 
 sufficient to spread the town and country 
 news, a score of men now sit daily pen in hand, 
 preparing the columns of the morning's paper, 
 
 [4ft]
 
 PARASITISM 
 
 and far into the night a hundred compositors 
 are engaged in a labor which requires a higher 
 culture of brain and finger than most ancient 
 kings and rulers possessed. Even in the la- 
 bors of war, the most brutal and primitive 
 of the occupations lingering on into civilized 
 life from the savage state, the new demand 
 for labor of an intellectual kind is enormous. 
 The invention, construction, and working of 
 one Krupp gun, though its mere discharge 
 hardly demands more crude muscular ex- 
 ertion than a savage expends in throwing his 
 boomerang, yet represents an infinitude of 
 intellectual care and thought, far greater than 
 that which went to the shaping of all the 
 weapons of a primitive army. Above all, in 
 the domain of politics and government, where 
 once a king or queen, aided by a handful of 
 councilors, was alone practically concerned 
 in the labors of national guidance or legis- 
 lation; to-day, owing to the rapid means of 
 intercommunication, printing, and the con- 
 sequent diffusion of political and social infor- 
 mation throughout a territory, it has become 
 possible, for the first time, for all adults in a 
 large community to keep themselves closely
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 informed on all national affairs; and in every 
 highly-civilized state the ordinary male has 
 been almost compelled to take his share, how- 
 ever small, in the duties and labors of legis- 
 lation and government. Thus there has 
 opened before the mass of men a vast new 
 sphere of labor undreamed of by their ances- 
 tors. In every direction the change which 
 material civilization has wrought, while it has 
 militated against that comparatively small 
 section of males who have nothing to offer so- 
 ciety but the expenditure of their untrained 
 muscular energy (inflicting much and often 
 completely unmerited suffering upon them), 
 has immeasurably extended the field of male 
 labor as a whole. Never before in the history 
 of the earth has the man's field of remunera- 
 tive toil been so wide, so interesting, so com- 
 plex, and in its results so all-important to so- 
 ciety; never before has the male sex, taken 
 as a whole, been so fully and strenuously em- 
 ployed. 
 
 So much is this the case, that, exactly as 
 in the earlier conditions of society an excessive 
 and almost crushing amount of the most im- 
 portant social labor generally devolved upon 
 
 [44]
 
 PARASITISM 
 
 the female, so under modern civilized condi- 
 tions among the wealthier and fully civilized 
 classes, an unduly excessive share of labor 
 tends to devolve upon the male. That almost 
 entirely modern, morbid condition, affecting 
 brain and nervous system, and shortening the 
 lives of thousands in modern civilized societies, 
 which is vulgarly known as "overwork" or 
 "nervous breakdown," is but one evidence of 
 the even excessive share of mental labor de- 
 volving upon the modern male of the cultured 
 classes, who, in addition to maintaining him- 
 self, has frequently dependent upon him a 
 larger or smaller number of entirely parasitic 
 females. But, whatever the result of the 
 changes of modern civilization may be with 
 regard to the male, he certainly cannot com- 
 plain that they have as a whole robbed him 
 of his fields of labor, diminished his share in 
 the conduct of life, or reduced him to a con- 
 dition of morbid inactivity. 
 
 In our woman's field of labor, matters have 
 tended to shape themselves wholly otherwise! 
 The changes which have taken place during 
 the last centuries, and which we sum up un- 
 der the compendious term "modern civiliza- 
 
 [45]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 p 
 tion," have tended to rob woman, not merely 
 
 in part but almost wholly, of the more valua- 
 ble part of her ancient domain of productive 
 and social labor ; and, where there has not been 
 a determined and conscious resistance on her 
 part, have nowhere spontaneously tended to 
 open out to her new and compensatory fields. 
 
 It is this fact which constitutes our modern 
 "Woman's Labor Problem." 
 
 Our spinning-wheels are all broken; in a 
 thousand huge buildings steam-driven looms, 
 guided by a few hundred thousands of hands 
 (often those of men), produce the clothings 
 of half the world ; and we dare no longer say, 
 proudly, as of old, that we and we alone clothe 
 our peoples. 
 
 Our hoes and our grindstones passed from 
 us long ago, when the plowman and the mil- 
 ler took our place but for a time we kept fast 
 possession of the kneading-trough and the 
 brewing-vat. To-day, steam often shapes our 
 bread, and the loaves are set down at our very 
 door it may be by a man-driven motor-carl 
 The history of our household drinks we know 
 no longer; we merely see them set before us 
 at our tables. Day by day machine-prepared 
 
 [46] '
 
 PARASITISM 
 
 and factory-produced viands take a larger and 
 larger place in the dietary of rich and poor, till 
 the working man's wife places before her house- 
 hold little that is of her own preparation; 
 while among the wealthier classes, so far has 
 domestic change gone that men are not in- 
 frequently found laboring in our houses and 
 kitchens, and even standing behind our chairs 
 ready to do all but actually place the morsels 
 of food between our feminine lips. The army 
 of rosy milkmaids has passed away for ever, 
 to give place to the cream-separator and the, 
 largely, male-and-machinery-manipulated but- 
 ter pat. In every direction the ancient saw, 
 that it was exclusively the woman's sphere 
 to prepare viands of her household, has be- 
 come, in proportion as civilization has per- 
 fected itself, an antiquated lie. 
 
 Even the minor domestic operations are 
 tending to pass out of the circle of woman's 
 labor. In modern cities our carpets are 
 beaten, our windows cleaned, our floors pol- 
 ished, by machinery, or extra domestic, and 
 often male labor. Change has gone much 
 farther than to the mere taking from us of 
 the preparation of the materials from which 
 
 [47]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 the clothing is formed. Already the domes- 
 tic sewing-machine, which has supplanted 
 almost entirely the ancient needle, begins 
 to become antiquated, and a thousand ma- 
 chines driven in factories by central engines 
 are supplying not only the husband and son, 
 but the woman herself, with almost every 
 article of clothing from vest to jacket; while 
 among the wealthy classes, the male dress- 
 designer with his hundred male-milliners and 
 dress-makers is helping finally to explode 
 the ancient myth, that it is woman's exclusive 
 sphere, and a part of her domestic toil, to cut 
 and shape the garments she or her household 
 wear. 
 
 Year by year, day by day, there is a silently 
 working but determined tendency for the 
 sphere of woman's domestic labors to con- 
 tract itself; and the contraction is marked 
 exactly in proportion as that complex condi- 
 tion which we term "modern civilization" is 
 advanced. 
 
 It manifests itself more in England and 
 America than in Italy and Spain, more in 
 great cities than in country places, more 
 among the wealthier classes than the poorer, 
 
 [48]
 
 PARASITISM 
 
 and is an unfailing indication of advancing 
 modern civilization. 1 
 
 But it is not only, nor even mainly, in the 
 sphere of woman's material domestic labors 
 
 i There is, indeed, often something pathetic in the attitude 
 of many a good old mother of the race, who having survived, 
 here and there, into the heart of our modern civilization, is 
 sorely puzzled by the change in woman's duties and obliga- 
 tions. She may be found looking into the eyes of some ancient 
 crone, who, like herself, has survived from a previous state of 
 civilization, seeking there a confirmation of a view of life of 
 which a troublous doubt has crept even into her own soul. 
 "I," she cries, "always cured my own hams, and knitted my 
 own socks, and made up all the linen by hand. We always did 
 it when we were girls but now my daughters object!" And 
 her old crone answers her: "Yes, we did it; it's the right 
 thing; but it's so expensive. It's so much cheaper to buy 
 things ready made!" And they shake their heads and go their 
 ways, feeling that the world is strangely out of joint when duty 
 seems no more duty. Such women are, in truth, like a good 
 old mother duck, who, having for years led her ducklings to 
 the same pond, when that pond has been drained and nothing 
 is left but baked mud, will still persist in bringing her young- 
 lings down to it, and walks about with flapping wings and 
 anxious quack, trying to induce them to enter it. But the 
 ducklings, with fresh young instincts, hear far off the delicious 
 drippings from the new dam which has been built higher up 
 to catch the water, and they smell the duckweed and the long 
 grass that is growing up beside it; and absolutely refuse to 
 disport themselves on the baked mud and to pretend to seek 
 for worms where no worms are. And they leave the ancient 
 mother quacking beside her pond and set out to seek for new 
 pastures perhaps to lose themselves upon the way? perhaps 
 to find them? To the old mother one is inclined to say, "Ah 
 
 [49]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 that change has touched her and shrunk her 
 ancient field of labor. 
 
 Time was, when the woman kept her chil- 
 dren about her knees till adult years were 
 reached. Hers was the training and influence 
 which shaped them. From the moment when 
 the infant first lay on her breast, till her 
 daughters left her for marriage and her sons 
 went to take share in man's labor, they were 
 continually under the mother's influence. 
 To-day, so complex have become even the 
 technical and simpler branches of education, 
 o mighty and inexorable are the demands 
 which modern civilization makes for special- 
 ized instruction and training for all individuals 
 who are to survive and retain their usefulness 
 under modern conditions, that, from the 
 earliest years of its life, the child is of nec- 
 essity largely removed from the hands of the 
 mother, and placed in those of the special- 
 ized instructor. Among the wealthier classes, 
 scarcely is the infant born when it passes into 
 
 good old mother duck, can you not see the world has changed? 
 You cannot bring the water back into the dried-up pond ! May- 
 hap it was better and pleasanter when it was there, but it has 
 gone for ever; and, would you and yours swim again, it must 
 be in other waters." New machinery, new duties. 
 
 [50]
 
 PARASITISM 
 
 the hands of the trained nurse, and from hers 
 on into the hands of the qualified teacher; till, 
 at nine or ten, the son in certain countries of- 
 ten leaves his home forever for the public 
 school, to pass on to the college and university ; 
 while the daughter, in the hands of trained in- 
 structors and dependents, owes in the major- 
 ity of cases hardly more of her education or for- 
 mation to maternal toil. 
 
 Even among our poorer classes, the infant 
 school, and the public school, and later on the 
 necessity for manual training, take the son and 
 often the daughter as completely, and always 
 increasingly as civilization advances, from the 
 mother's control. So marked has this change 
 in woman's ancient field of labor become, that 
 a woman of almost any class may have borne 
 many children and yet at middle age be found 
 sitting alone in an empty house, all her off- 
 spring gone from her to receive training and 
 instruction at the hands of others. The an- 
 cient statement that the training and educa- 
 tion of her offspring is exclusively the duty of 
 the mother, however true it may have been 
 with regard to a remote past, has become an 
 absolute misstatement ; and the woman who 
 
 [51]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 should at the present day insist on entirely 
 educating her own offspring would, in nine 
 cases out of ten, inflict an irreparable injury 
 on them, because she is incompetent. 
 
 But, if possible, yet more deeply and rad- 
 ically have the changes of modern civilization 
 touched our ancient field of labor in another 
 direction in that very portion of the field 
 of human labor which is peculiarly and or- 
 ganically ours, and which can never be wholly 
 taken from us. Here the shrinkage has been 
 larger than in any other direction, and touches 
 us as women more vitally. 
 
 Time was, and still is, among almost all 
 primitive and savage folk, when the first and 
 all-important duty of the female to her society 
 was to bear, to bear much, and to bear un- 
 ceasingly! On her adequate and persistent 
 performance of this passive form of labor, 
 and on her successful feeding of her young 
 from her own breast, depended, not merely 
 the welfare, but often the very existence, of 
 her tribe or nation. Where, as is the case 
 among almost all barbarous peoples, the rate 
 of infant mortality is high; where the unceas- 
 ing casualties resulting from war, the chase, 
 
 [52]
 
 PARASITISM 
 
 and acts of personal violence tend continually 
 to reduce the number of adult males; where, 
 surgical knowledge being still in its infancy, 
 most wounds are fatal; where, above all, re- 
 current pestilence and famine, unfailing if of 
 irregular recurrence, decimated the people, it 
 has been all important that woman should em- 
 ploy her creative power to its very uttermost 
 limits if the race were not at once to dwindle 
 and die out. "May thy wife's womb never 
 cease from bearing," is still to-day the highest 
 expression of good will on the part of a native 
 African chief to his departing guest. For, 
 not only does the prolific woman in the primi- 
 tive state contribute to the wealth and strength 
 of her nation as a whole, but to that of her 
 own male companion and of her family. 
 
 Where the social conditions of life are so 
 simple that, in addition to bearing and suck- 
 ling the child, it is reared and nourished 
 through childhood almost entirely through the 
 labor and care of the mother, requiring no 
 expenditure of tribal or family wealth on its 
 training or education, its value as an adult 
 enormously outweighs, both to the state and 
 the male, the trouble and expense of rearing 
 
 [58]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 it, which falls almost entirely on the individual 
 woman who bears it. The man who has 
 twenty children to become warriors and la- 
 borers is by so much the richer and the more 
 powerful than he who has but one; while the 
 state whose women are prolific and labor for 
 and rear their children stands so far insured 
 against destruction. Incessant and persistent 
 child-bearing is thus truly the highest duty and 
 the most socially esteemed occupation of the 
 primitive woman, equalling fully in social im- 
 portance the labor of the man as hunter and 
 warrior. 
 
 Even under those conditions of civilization 
 which have existed in the centuries dividing 
 primitive savagery from high civilization, the 
 demand for continuous unbroken child-bear- 
 ing on the part of the woman as her loftiest 
 social duty has generally been hardly less 
 imperious. Throughout the Middle Ages of 
 Europe, and down almost to our own day, 
 the rate of infant mortality was almost as 
 large as in a savage state; medical ignorance 
 destroyed innumerable lives; antiseptic sur- 
 gery being unknown, serious wounds were still 
 almost always fatal; in the low state of san-
 
 PARASITISM 
 
 itary science, plagues, such as those which in 
 the reign of Justinian swept across the civi- 
 lized world from India to Northern Europe, 
 well nigh depopulating the globe, or the Black 
 Death of 1349, which in England alone swept 
 away more than half the population of the 
 island, were but extreme forms of the destruc- 
 tion of population going on continually as the 
 result of zymotic disease ; while wars were not 
 merely far more common but, owing to the 
 famines which almost invariably followed 
 them, were far more destructive to human life 
 than in our own days, and deaths by violence, 
 whether at the hands of the state or as the re- 
 sult of personal enmity, were of daily occur- 
 rence in all lands. Under these conditions 
 abstinence on the part of woman from incessant 
 child-bearing might have led to almost the 
 same serious diminution, or even extinction of 
 her people, as in the savage state; while the 
 very existence of her civilization depended on 
 the production of an immense number of in- 
 dividuals as beasts of burden, without the 
 expenditure of whose crude muscular force in 
 physical labor of agriculture and manufacture, 
 those intermediate civilizations would, in the 
 
 [56]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 absence of machinery, have been impossible. 
 Twenty men had to be born, fed at the breast, 
 and reared by women to perform the crude 
 brute labor which is performed to-day by one 
 small, well-adjusted steam crane; and the de- 
 mand for large masses of human creatures as 
 mere reservoirs of motor force for accomplish- 
 ing the simplest processes was imperative. So 
 strong, indeed, was the consciousness of the 
 importance to society of continuous child-bear- 
 ing on the part of woman, that as late as the 
 middle of the sixteenth century Martin Luther 
 wrote: "If a woman becomes weary or at last 
 dead from bearing, that matters not; let her 
 only die from bearing, she is there to do it"; 
 and he doubtless gave expression, in a crude 
 and somewhat brutal form, to a conviction 
 common to the bulk of his contemporaries, 
 both male and female. 
 
 To-day, this condition has almost com- 
 pletely reversed itself. 
 
 The advance of science and the amelioration 
 of the physical conditions of life tend rapidly 
 toward a diminution of human mortality. 
 The infant death-rate among the upper classes 
 in modern civilizations has fallen by more 
 
 [56]
 
 PARASITISM 
 
 than one-half; while among poorer classes it 
 is already, though slowly, falling: the in- 
 creased knowledge of the laws of sanitation 
 has made among all highly civilized peoples the 
 depopulation by plague a thing of the past, 
 and the discoveries of the next twenty or thirty 
 years will probably do away for ever with the 
 danger to man of zymotic disease. Famines 
 of the old desolating type have become an 
 impossibility where rapid means of transporta- 
 tion convey the superfluity of one land to 
 supply the lack of another ; and war and deeds 
 of violence, though still lingering among us, 
 have already become episodal in the lives of 
 nations as of individuals; while the vast ad- 
 vances in antiseptic surgery have caused even 
 the effects of wounds and dismemberments to 
 become only very partially fatal to human life. 
 All these changes have tended to diminish 
 human mortality and protract human life ; and 
 they have to-day already made it possible for 
 a race not only to maintain its numbers, but 
 even to increase them, with a comparatively 
 small expenditure of woman's vitality in the 
 passive labor of child-bearing. 
 
 But yet more seriously has the demand for 
 [57]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 woman's labor as child-bearer been diminished 
 by change in another direction. 
 
 Every mechanical invention which lessens 
 the necessity for rough, untrained, muscular, 
 human labor, diminishes also the social de- 
 mand upon woman as the producer in large 
 masses of such laborers. Already throughout 
 the modern civilized world we have reached a 
 point at which the social demand is not merely 
 for human creatures in the bulk for use as 
 beasts of burden, but, rather, and only, for 
 such human creatures as shall be so trained and 
 cultured as to be fitted for the performance 
 of the more complex duties of modern life. 
 Not, now, merely for many men, but, rather, 
 for few men, and those few, well-born and well- 
 instructed, is the modern demand. And the 
 woman who to-day merely produces twelve 
 children and suckles them, and then turns 
 them loose on her society and family, is re- 
 garded, and rightly so, as a curse and down- 
 draft, and not the productive laborer, of her 
 community. Indeed, so difficult and expen- 
 sive has become in the modern world the rear- 
 ing and training of even one individual, in a 
 manner suited to fit it for coping with the 
 
 [58]
 
 PARASITISM 
 
 complexities and difficulties of civilized life, 
 that, to the family as well as to the state, un- 
 limited fecundity on the part of the female 
 has already, in most cases, become an irre- 
 mediable evil. It is thus in the case of the 
 artisan, who at the cost of immense self- 
 sacrifice must support and train his children 
 till their twelfth or fourteenth year, if they are 
 ever to become even skilled manual laborers, 
 and who if his family be large often sinks 
 beneath the burden, allowing his offspring, 
 untaught and untrained, to become waste 
 products of human life. So with the pro- 
 fessional man, who by his mental toil is com- 
 pelled to support and educate, at immense 
 expense, his sons till they are twenty or older, 
 and to sustain his daughters, often throughout 
 their whole lives should they not marry, and to 
 whom a large family proves often no less 
 disastrous; while the state whose women pro- 
 duce recklessly large masses of individuals in 
 excess of those for whom they can provide 
 instruction and nourishment is a state, in so 
 far, tending toward deterioration. The com- 
 mandment to the modern woman is now not 
 simply "Thou shalt bear," but rather, "Thou 
 
 [59]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 shalt not bear in excess of thy power to rear 
 and train satisfactorily"; and the woman 
 who should to-day appear at the door of a 
 workhouse or the tribunal of the poor-law 
 guardians followed by her twelve infants, de- 
 manding honorable sustenance for them and 
 herself in return for the labor she had under- 
 gone in producing them, would meet with but 
 short shrift. And the modern man who on his 
 wedding-day should be greeted with the an- 
 cient good wish, that he might become the 
 father of twenty sons and twenty daughters, 
 would regard it as a malediction rather than 
 a blessing. It is certain that the time is now 
 rapidly approaching when child-bearing will 
 be regarded rather as a lofty privilege, per- 
 missible only to those who have shown their 
 power rightly to train and provide for their 
 offspring, than a labor which in itself, and un- 
 der whatever conditions performed, is benefi- 
 cial to society. 1 
 
 1 The difference between the primitive and modern view on 
 this matter is aptly and quaintly illustrated by two incidents. 
 Seeing a certain Bantu woman who appeared better cared for, 
 less hard worked, and happier than the mass of her companions, 
 we made inquiry, and found that she had two childless brothers ; 
 she herself had not married, but had borne by different men 
 
 [60]
 
 PARASITISM 
 
 Further, owing partly to the diminished 
 demand for child-bearing, rising from the 
 extreme difficulty and expense of rearing and 
 education, and to many other complex social 
 causes, to which we shall return later, millions 
 of women in our modern societies are so placed 
 as to be absolutely compelled to go through 
 life not merely childless, but without sex rela- 
 tionship in any form whatever; while another 
 mighty army of women is reduced by the dis- 
 locations of our civilization to accepting sexual 
 relationships which almost negate child-bear- 
 
 fourteen children, all of whom when grown she had given to 
 her brothers. "They are fond of me because I have given 
 them so many children, therefore I have not to work like the 
 other women; and my brothers give me plenty of mealies and 
 milk," she replied, complacently, when questioned, "and our 
 family will not die out." And this person, whose conduct was 
 so emphatically anti-social on all sides when viewed from the 
 modern standpoint, was evidently regarded as pre-eminently 
 of value to her family and to society because of her mere 
 fecundity. 
 
 On the other hand, a few weeks back appeared an account 
 in the London papers of an individual who, taken up at the 
 East End for some brutal offense, blubbered out in court that 
 she was the mother of twenty children. "You should be 
 ashamed of yourself!" responded the magistrate; "a woman 
 capable of such conduct would be capable of doing anything!" 
 and the fine was remorselessly inflicted. Undoubtedly, if some- 
 what brutally, the magistrate yet gave true voice to the mod- 
 ern view on the subject of excessive and reckless child-bearing. 
 
 [61]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 ing, and whose only product is physical and 
 moral disease. 
 
 Thus, it has come to pass that vast numbers 
 of us are, by modern social conditions, pro- 
 hibited from child-bearing at all, and that even 
 those among us who are child-bearers are re- 
 quired, in proportion as the class or race to 
 which we belong stands high in the scale of 
 civilization, to produce in most cases a limited 
 number of offspring; so that, even for these 
 of us, child-bearing and suckling, instead of 
 filling the entire circle of female life from the- 
 first appearance of puberty to the end of 
 middle age, becomes an episodal occupation, 
 employing from three or four to ten or twenty 
 of the threescore-and-ten-years which are al- 
 lotted to human life. In such societies the 
 statement (so profoundly true when made 
 with regard to most savage societies, and even 
 largely true with regard to those in the inter- 
 mediate stages of civilization) that the main 
 and continuous occupation of all women from 
 puberty to age is the bearing and suckling of 
 children, and that this occupation must fully 
 satisfy all her needs for social labor and ac- 
 
 [62]
 
 PARASITISM 
 
 tivity, becomes an antiquated and unmitigated 
 misstatement. 
 
 Not only are millions of our women pre- 
 cluded from ever bearing a child, but for those 
 of us who do bear the demand is ever increas- 
 ingly in civilized societies coupled with the 
 condition that if we would act socially we must 
 restrict our powers. 1 
 
 1 As regards modern civilized nations, we find that those 
 whose birth-rate is the highest per woman are by no means the 
 happiest, most enlightened, or powerful; nor do we even find 
 that the population always increases in proportion to the births. 
 France, which in many respects leads in the van of civilization, 
 has one of the lowest birth-rates per woman in Europe; and 
 among the free and enlightened population of Switzerland 
 and Scandinavia the birth-rate is often exceedingly low; while 
 Ireland, one of the most unhappy and weak of European na- 
 tions, had long one of the highest birth-rates, without any pro- 
 portional increase in population or power. With regard to 
 the different classes in one community, the same effect is ob- 
 servable. 
 
 The birth-rate per woman is higher among the lowest and 
 most ignorant classes in the back slums of our great cities 
 than among the women of the upper and cultured classes, 
 mainly because the age at which marriages are contracted always 
 tends to become higher as the culture and intelligence of indi- 
 viduals rises, but also because of the regulation of the number 
 of births after marriage. Yet the number of children reared 
 to adult years among the more intelligent classes probably 
 equals or exceeds those of the lowest, owing to the high rate of 
 infant mortality where births are excessive. 
 
 [63]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 Looking round, then, with the uttermost 
 impartiality we can command, on the entire 
 field of woman's ancient and traditional la- 
 bors, we find that fully three-fourths of it have 
 shrunk away for ever, and that the remaining 
 fourth still tends to shrink. 
 
 It is this great fact, so often and so com- 
 pletely overlooked, which lies as the propelling 
 force behind that vast and restless "Woman's 
 Movement" which marks our day. It is 
 this fact, whether clearly and intellectually 
 grasped, or, as is more often the case, vaguely 
 and painfully felt., which awakes in the hearts 
 of the ablest modern European women their 
 passionate, and at times it would seem almost 
 incoherent, cry for new forms of labor and 
 new fields for the exercise of their powers. 
 
 Thrown into strict logical form, our demand 
 is this: We do not ask that the wheels of 
 time should reverse themselves, or the stream 
 of life flow backward. We do not ask that 
 our ancient spinning-wheels be again resus- 
 citated and placed in our hands; we do not 
 demand that our old grindstones and hoes be 
 returned to us, or that man should again be- 
 take himself entirely to his ancient province 
 
 [64]
 
 PARASITISM 
 
 of war and the chase, leaving to us all domes- 
 tic and civil labor. We do not even demand 
 that society shall immediately so reconstruct 
 itself that every woman may be again a child- 
 bearer (deep and overmastering as lies the 
 hunger for motherhood in every virile woman's 
 heart!) ; neither do we demand that the chil- 
 dren whom we bear shall again be put ex- 
 clusively into our hands to train. This, we 
 know, cannot be. The past material condi- 
 tions of life have gone for ever ; no will of man 
 can recall them, but this is our demand: We 
 demand that, in that strange new world that 
 is arising alike upon the man and the woman, 
 where nothing is as it was, and all things are 
 assuming new shapes and relations, that in this 
 new world we also shall have our share of 
 honored and socially useful human toil, our 
 full half of the labor of the Children of 
 Woman. We demand nothing more than 
 this, and we will take nothing less. This is 
 our "WOMAN'S RIGHT!" 
 
 [65]
 
 PARASITISM 
 
 (Continued)
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 PARASITISM (continued) 
 
 Is it to be, that, in the future, machinery 
 and the captive motor-forces of nature are 
 largely to take the place of human hand and 
 foot in the labor of clothing and feeding the 
 nations; are these branches of industry to be 
 no longer domestic labors? then, we demand 
 that in the factory, the warehouse, and the field, 
 wherever machinery has usurped our ancient 
 labor-ground, we also should have our place, 
 as guiders, controllers, and possessors. Is 
 child-bearing to become the labor of but a por- 
 tion of our sex? then we demand for those 
 among us who are allowed to take no share in 
 it, compensatory and equally honorable and 
 important fields of social toil. Is the training 
 of human creatures to become a yet more and 
 more onerous and laborious occupation, their 
 education and culture to become increasingly 
 a high art, complex and scientific? if so, 
 
 [69]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 then, we demand that high and complex cul- 
 ture and training which shall fit us for in- 
 structing the race which we bring into the 
 world. Is the demand for child-bearing to 
 become so diminished that, even in the lives of 
 those among us who are child-bearers, it shall 
 fill no more than half a dozen years out of the 
 three-score-and-ten of human life? then we 
 demand that an additional outlet be ours 
 which shall fill up with dignity and value the 
 tale of the years not so employed. Is intel- 
 lectual labor to take ever and increasingly the 
 place of crude muscular exertion in the labor 
 of life? then we demand for ourselves that 
 culture and the freedom of action which alone 
 can yield us the knowledge of life and the 
 intellectual vigor and strength which will en- 
 able us to undertake the same share of mental 
 which we have borne in the past in physical 
 labors of life. Are the rulers of the race to 
 be no more its kings and queens, but the mass 
 of the peoples? then we, one-half of the 
 nations, demand our full queens' share in the 
 duties and labors of government and legisla- 
 tion. Slowly but determinately, as the old 
 
 [70]
 
 PARASITISM 
 
 fields of labor close up and are submerged be- 
 hind us, we demand entrance into the new. 
 
 We make this demand, not for our own 
 sake alone, but for the succor of the race. 
 
 A horseman, riding along on a dark night in 
 an unknown land, may chance to feel his horse 
 start beneath him; rearing, it may almost hurl 
 him to the earth : in the darkness he may curse 
 his beast, and believe its aim is simply to cast 
 him off, and free itself for ever of its burden. 
 But when the morning dawns and lights the 
 hills and valleys he has traveled, looking back- 
 ward, he may perceive that the spot where his 
 beast reared, planting its feet into the earth, 
 and where it refused to move farther on the 
 old road, was indeed the edge of a mighty 
 precipice, down which one step more would 
 have precipitated both horse and rider. And 
 he may then see that it was an instinct wiser 
 than his own which led his creature, though 
 in the dark, to leap backward, seeking a new 
 path along which both might travel. 1 
 
 In the confusion and darkness of the pres- 
 
 1 Is it not recorded that Balaam's ass on which he rode saw 
 the angel with flaming sword, but Balaam saw it not ! 
 
 [71]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 ent, it may well seem to some that woman, in 
 her desire to seek for new paths of labor and 
 employment, is guided only by an irresponsi- 
 ble impulse ; or that she seeks selfishly only her 
 own good, at the cost of that of the race, which 
 she has so long and faithfully borne onward. 
 But, when a clearer future shall have arisen 
 and the obscuring mists of the present have 
 been dissipated, may it not then be clearly 
 manifest that not for herself alone, but for her 
 entire race, has woman sought her new paths? 
 
 For let it be noted exactly what our position 
 is, who to-day, as women, are demanding new 
 fields of labor and a reconstruction of our rela- 
 tionship with life. 
 
 It is often said that the labor problem before 
 the modern woman and that before the unem- 
 ployed or partially or almost uselessly em- 
 ployed male, are absolutely identical ; and that 
 therefore, when the male labor problem of our 
 age solves itself, that of the woman will of 
 necessity have met its solution also. 
 
 This statement, with a certain specious 
 semblance of truth, is yet, we believe, radically 
 and fundamentally false. It is true that both 
 the male and the female problems of our age 
 
 [72]
 
 PARASITISM 
 
 have taken their rise largely in the same rapid 
 material changes which during the last cen- 
 turies, and more especially the last ninety 
 years, have altered the face of the human 
 world. Both men and women have been 
 robbed by those changes of their ancient re- 
 munerative fields of social work: here the re- 
 semblance stops. The male, from whom the 
 changes of modern civilization have taken his 
 ancient field of labor, has but one choice before 
 him: he must find new fields of labor, or he 
 must perish. Society will not ultimately sup- 
 port him in an absolutely quiescent and almost 
 useless condition. If he does not vigorously 
 exert himself in some direction or other (the 
 direction may even be predatory) he must 
 ultimately be annihilated. Individual drones, 
 both among the wealthiest and the poorest 
 classes (millionaires' sons, dukes, or tramps), 
 may in isolated cases be preserved, and allowed 
 to reproduce themselves without any exertion 
 or activity of mind or body, but a vast body 
 of males who, having lost their old forms of 
 social employment, should refuse in any way 
 to exert themselves or seek for new, would at 
 no great length of time become extinct. 
 
 [73]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 There never has been, and as far as can be 
 seen, there never will be, a time when the 
 majority of the males in any society will be 
 supported by the rest of the males in a condi- 
 tion of perfect mental and physical inactivity. 
 "Find labor or die" is the choice ultimately 
 put before the human male to-day, as in the 
 past; and this constitutes his labor problem. 1 
 The labor of the man may not always be 
 useful in the highest sense to his society, or it 
 may even be distinctly harmful and antisocial, 
 as in the case of the robber-barons of the 
 Middle Ages, who h'ved by capturing and de- 
 spoiling all who passed by their castles; or as 
 in the case of the share speculators, stock- 
 
 i The nearest approach to complete parasitism on the part of 
 a vast body of males occurred, perhaps, in ancient Rome at the 
 time of the decay and downfall of the Empire, when the bulk 
 of the population, male as well as female, was fed on imported 
 corn, wine, and oil, and supplied even with entertainment, al- 
 most entirely without exertion or labor of any kind; but this 
 condition was of short duration, and speedily contributed to 
 the downfall of the diseased Empire itself. Among the wealthy 
 and so-called upper classes, the males of various aristocrats 
 have frequently tended to become completely parasitic after 
 a lapse of time, but such a condition has always been met 
 by a short and sharp remedy; and the class has fallen, or be- 
 come extinct The condition of the males of the upper classes 
 in France before the Revolution affords an interesting illustra- 
 tion of this point. 
 
 [74]
 
 PARASITISM 
 
 jobbers, ring-and-corner capitalists, and mo- 
 nopolists of the present day, who feed upon 
 the productive labors of society without con- 
 tributing anything to its welfare. But even 
 males so occupied are compelled to expend a 
 vast amount of energy and even a low intel- 
 ligence in their callings; and, however injuri- 
 ous to their societies, they run no personal risk 
 of handing down effete and enervated consti- 
 tutions to their race. Whether beneficially or 
 unbeneficially, the human male must, generally 
 speaking, employ his intellect, or his muscle, 
 or die. 
 
 The position of the unemployed modern 
 female is one wholly different. The choice 
 before her, as her ancient fields of domestic 
 labor slip from her, is not generally or often 
 at the present day the choice between finding 
 new fields of labor, or death ; but one far more 
 serious in its ultimate reaction on humanity as 
 a whole it is the choice between finding new 
 forms of labor or sinking slowly into a con- 
 dition of more or less complete and passive 
 sea:- parasitism/ l 
 
 1 It is not without profound interest to note the varying 
 phenomena of sex-parasitism as they present themselves in the 
 
 [75]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 Again and again in the history of the past, 
 when among human creatures a certain stage 
 of material civilization has been reached, a 
 curious tendency has manifested itself for the 
 
 animal world, both in the male and in the female form. 
 Though among the greater number of species in the animal 
 world the female form is larger and more powerful rather than 
 the male (e.g., among birds of prey, such as eagles, falcons, 
 vultures, &c., and among fishes, insects, &c.), yet sex-parasit- 
 ism appears among both sex forms. In certain sea-creatures, 
 for example, the female carries about in the folds of her cover- 
 ing three or four minute and quite inactive males, who are en- 
 tirely passive and dependent upon her. 
 
 Among termites, on the other hand, the female has so far de- 
 generated that she has entirely lost the power of locomotion ; she 
 can no longer provide herself or her offspring with nourishment, 
 or defend or even clean herself; she has become a mere passive, 
 distended, bag of eggs, without intelligence or activity, she and 
 her offspring existing through the exertions of the slaves and 
 workers of the community. Among other insects, such, for 
 example, as certain ticks, another form of female parasitism 
 prevails, and while the male remains a complex, highly active, 
 and winged creature, the female, fastening herself by the head 
 into the flesh of some living animal and sucking its blood, has 
 lost wings and all activity, and power of locomotion, having 
 become a mere distended bladder, which when filled with eggs 
 bursts and ends a parasitic existence which has hardly been 
 life. It is not impossible, and it appears, indeed, highly prob- 
 able, that it has been this degeneration and parasitism on the 
 part of the female which has set its limitation to the evolution 
 of ants, creatures which, having reached a point of mental 
 development in some respects almost as high as that of man, 
 have yet become curiously and immovably arrested. The whole 
 question of sex-parasitism among the lower animals is one 
 
 [76]
 
 PARASITISM 
 
 human female to become more or less parasitic ; 
 social conditions tend to rob her of all forms 
 of active conscious social labor, and to reduce 
 her, like the field-bug, 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, fol- 
 lowed 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 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 civilization, that for 
 the first time sex-parasitism has become a 
 danger, more or less remote, to the mass of 
 civilized 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 
 
 throwing suggestive and instructive side-lights on human social 
 problems, but is too extensive to be here entered on. 
 
 [77]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 danger. Where the conditions of life ren- 
 dered it inevitable that all the labor of a com- 
 munity 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 labor 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 labor of feeding and 
 clothing them would in that case have de- 
 volved upon themselves! 
 
 The parasitism of the human female be- 
 comes a possibility only when a point in 
 civilization is reached (such as that which was 
 attained in the ancient civilizations of Greece, 
 Rome, Persia, Assyria, India, and such as 
 to-day exists in many of the civilizations of the 
 East, such as those of China and Turkey), 
 when, owing to the extensive employment of 
 the labor of slaves, or of subject races or 
 classes, the dominant race or class has become so 
 liberally supplied with the material goods of 
 
 [78]
 
 PARASITISM 
 
 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 be- 
 come a social danger. The males of the 
 dominant class have almost always contrived 
 to absorb to themselves the new intellectual 
 occupations, which the absence of necessity for 
 the old forms of physical toil made possible in 
 their societies; and the females of the domi- 
 nant class or race, for whose muscular labors 
 there was now also no longer any need, not 
 succeeding in grasping or attaining to these 
 new forms of labor, 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. Therein place^ of the 
 
 by 
 
 her toil, has come the effete wife, concubine 
 or prostitute, clad in fine raiment, the work 
 
 [79]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 , the 
 
 result of others* toiL waited on and tended by 
 theJahar-oi-other. The need for her physical 
 labor 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 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 per- 
 sonal 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 inter- 
 ference with more imperious duties to those 
 already born of her, or to her society, but be- 
 
 [80]
 
 PARASITISM 
 
 cause her existence of inactivity had robbed 
 her of all joy in strenuous exertion and en- 
 durance in any form. Ejnely clad, tenderly 
 hrmg^fl, lifp hppamp fnr her merely the grati- 
 fication of her own physical and sexual appe- 
 tites, and the appetites of the male, through 
 thestimulation of which she could maintain 
 
 herselJJ -Aid whether as kept wife, ^ 
 mistress, or prostitute, she contributed nothing 
 to the active and sustaining labors of her 
 society. She had attained to the full develop- 
 ment of that type which, whether in modern 
 Paris or New York or London, or in ancient 
 Greece, Assyria, or Rome, is essentially one in 
 its features, its nature, and its results. She 
 was the "fine lady," the human female para- 
 site the most deadly microbe which can make 
 its appearance on the surface of any social 
 organism. 1 
 
 i The_relation of female jBirngjttom gfn"'ti |1 y \ n ^r p^wiiiar 
 phenomenon of j>rostitution_jsjbuidamental. Prostitution can 
 never be adequately dealt with, either from the moral or the 
 scientific standpoint, unless its relation to the general phe- 
 nomenon of female parasitism be fully recognized. It is the 
 failure to do this which leaves so painful a sense of abortion 
 on the mind, after listening to most modern utterances on the 
 question, whether made from the emotional platform of the 
 moral reformer, or the intellectual platform of the would-be 
 
 [81]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 Wherever in the history of the past this type 
 has reached its full development and has com- 
 prised the bulk of the females belonging to any 
 dominant class or race, it has heralded its 
 decay. In Assyria, Greece, Rome, Persia, as 
 in Turkey to-day, the same material conditions 
 have produced the same social disease among 
 wealthy and dominant races; and again and 
 again when the nation so affected has come 
 into contact with nations more healthily con- 
 stituted, this diseased condition has contri- 
 buted to its destruction. 
 
 In ancient Greece, in its superb and virile 
 youth, its womanhood was richly and even 
 heavily endowed with duties and occupations. 
 Not the mass of the women alone, but the 
 king's wife and the prince's daughter do we 
 find going to the well to bear water, cleansing 
 the household linen in the streams, feeding and 
 doctoring their households, manufacturing the 
 clothing of their race, and performing even a 
 share of the highest social functions as priest- 
 esses and prophetesses. It was from the 
 
 scientist. We are left with a feeling that the matter has been 
 handled but not dealt with: that the knife has not reached 
 the -core.
 
 PARASITISM 
 
 bodies of such women as these that sprang 
 that race of heroes, thinkers, and artists who 
 laid the foundations of Grecian greatness. 
 These females underlay their society as the 
 solid and deeply buried foundations underlay 
 the more visible and ornate portions of a great 
 temple, making its structure and persistence 
 possible. In Greece, after a certain lapse of 
 time, these virile laboring women in the upper 
 classes were to be found no more. The ac- 
 cumulated wealth of the dominant race, gath- 
 ered through the labor of slaves and subject 
 people, had so immensely increased that there 
 was no longer a call for physical labor on the 
 part of the dominant womanhood; immured 
 within the walls of their houses as wives or 
 mistresses, waited on by slaves and depend- 
 ents, they no longer sustained by their exertion 
 either their own life or the life of their people. 
 The males absorbed the intellectual labors of 
 life; slaves and dependents the physical. For 
 a moment, at the end of the fifth and beginning 
 of the fourth century, when the womanhood 
 of Greece had already internally decayed, 
 there was indeed a brilliant intellectual efflor- 
 escence among her males, like to the gorgeous 
 
 [831
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 colors in the sunset sky when the sun is already 
 sinking; but the heart of Greece was already 
 rotting and her vigor failing. Increasingly, 
 division and dissimilarity arose between male 
 and female, as the male advanced in culture 
 and entered upon new fields of intellectual toil 
 while the female sank passively backward and 
 lower in the scale of life, and thus was made 
 ultimately a chasm which even sexual love 
 could not bridge. The abnormal institution 
 of avowed inter-male sexual relations upon 
 the highest plane was one and the most serious 
 result of this severance. The inevitable and 
 invincible desire of all highly developed 
 human natures, to blend with their sexual 
 relationships their highest intellectual inter- 
 ests and sympathies, could find no satisfaction 
 or response in the relationship between the 
 immured, comparatively ignorant, and helpless 
 females of the upper classes, in Greece, and 
 the brilliant, cultured, and many-sided males 
 who formed its dominant class in the fifth and 
 fourth centuries. Man turned towards man; 
 and parenthood, the divine gift of imparting 
 human life, was severed from the loftiest and 
 profoundest phases of human emotion: Xan- 
 
 [84]
 
 PARASITISM 
 
 thippe fretted out her ignorant and miserable 
 little life between the walls of her house, and 
 Socrates lay in the Agora, discussing philoso- 
 phy and morals with Alcibiades ; and the race 
 decayed at its core. 1 Here and there an 
 Aspasia, or earlier still a Sappho, burst 
 through the confining bonds of woman's en- 
 vironment, and with the force of irresistible 
 genius broke triumphantly into new fields of 
 action and powerful mental activity, standing 
 side by side with the male ; but their cases were 
 exceptional. Had they, or such as they, been 
 able to tread down a pathway, along which the 
 mass of Grecian women might have followed 
 them ; had it been possible for the bulk of the 
 women of the dominant race in Greece at the 
 end of the fifth century to rise from their con 
 dition of supine inaction and ignorance and 
 to have taken their share in the intellectual 
 labors and. stern activities of their race, Greece 
 would never have fallen, as she fell at the end 
 of the fourth century, instantaneously and 
 completely, as ajrotten puff-ball falls in at the 
 
 iSee Jowett's translation of Plato's "Banquet"; but for full 
 light on this important question the entire literature of Greece 
 in the fifth and fourth centuries B. c. should be studied. 
 
 [85]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 toucL-Of ^healthy finger; first, before^ the 
 briberies oiLEhilip, and then yet more com- 
 pletely before the arms of his yet more warlike 
 son, wjw was^ also the son of the fierce, 
 virile, and indomitable Olympia. 1 Nor could 
 she have been swept clean, a few hundred 
 years later, from Thessaly to Sparta, from 
 Corinth to Ephesus, her temples destroyed, 
 her effete women captured by the hordes of 
 the Goths a people less skilfully armed and 
 less civilized than the descendants of the race 
 of Pericles and Leonidas, but who were a 
 branch of that great Teutonic folk whose 
 monogamous domestic life was sound at the 
 core, and whose fearless, laboring, and resolute 
 women yet bore for the men they followed to 
 the ends of the earth, what Spartan women 
 once said they alone bore men. 
 
 In Rome, in the days of her virtue and 
 vigor, the Roman matron labored mightily, 
 
 i Like almost all men remarkable for either good or evil, 
 Alexander inherited from his mother his most notable qualities 
 his courage, his intellectual activity, and an ambition indif- 
 ferent to any means that made for his own end. Fearless in 
 her life, she fearlessly met death "with a courage worthy of her 
 rank and domineering character, when her hour of retribution 
 came"; and Alexander is incomprehensible till we recognize him 
 as rising from the womb of Olympia. 
 
 [86]
 
 PARASITISM 
 
 and bore on her shoulders her full half of the 
 social burden, though her sphere of labor and 
 influence was ever somewhat smaller than that 
 of the Teutonic sisterhood whose descendants 
 were finally to supplant her own. From the 
 vestal virgin to the matron, the Roman woman 
 in the days of the nation's health and growth 
 fulfilled lofty functions and bore the whole 
 weight of domestic toil. From the days of 
 Lucretia, the great Roman dame whom we 
 find spinning with her handmaidens deep into 
 the night, and whose personal dignity was so 
 dear to her that, violated, she sought only 
 death, to those of the mother of the Gracchi, 
 one of the last of the great line, we find every- 
 where, erect, laboring, and resolute, the Roman 
 woman who gave birth to the men who built 
 up Roman greatness. A few centuries later, 
 and Rome also had reached that dangerous 
 spot in the order of social change which 
 Greece had reached centuries before her. 
 Slave labor and the enjoyment of the un- 
 limited spoils of subject races had done away 
 forever with the demand for physical labor 
 on the part of the members of the dominant 
 race. Then came the period when the male 
 
 [87]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 still occupied himself with the duties of war 
 and government, of legislation and self -cul- 
 ture; but the Roman matron had already 
 ceased forever from her toils. Decked in 
 jewels and fine clothing, brought at the cost of 
 infinite human labor from the ends of the 
 earth, nourished on delicate victuals prepared 
 by others' hands, she sought now only with 
 amusement to pass away a life that no longer 
 offered her the excitement and joy of active 
 productive exertion. She frequented theaters 
 or baths, or reclined on her sofa, or drove in 
 her chariot; and, like, more modern counter- 
 parts, painted herself, wore patches, affected 
 an artistic walk, and a handshake with the 
 elbow raised and the fingers hanging down. 
 Her children were reared by dependents; and 
 in the intellectual labor and government of her 
 age she took small part, and was fit to take 
 none. There were not wanting writers and 
 thinkers who saw clearly the end to which the 
 enervation of the female was tending, and 
 who were not sparing in their denunciations. 
 "Time was," cries one Roman writer of that 
 age, "when the matron turned the spindle with 
 the hand and kept at the same time the pot 
 
 [88]
 
 PARASITISM 
 
 in her eye that the pottage might not be 
 singed, but now," he adds bitterly, "when the 
 wife, loaded with jewels, reposes among pil- 
 lows, or seeks the dissipation of baths and 
 theaters, all things go downward and the state 
 decays." Yet neither he nor that large body 
 of writers and thinkers who saw the condition 
 towards which the parasitism of woman was 
 tending to reduce society, preached any ade- 
 quate remedy. 1 
 
 Thoughtful men sighed over the present and 
 yearned for the past, nor seem to have per- 
 ceived that it was irrevocably gone; that the 
 Roman lady who, with a hundred servants 
 standing idle about her, should, in imitation of 
 her ancestress, have gone out with her pitcher 
 on her head to draw water from the well, while 
 in all her own court-yards pipe-led streams 
 gushed forth, would have acted the part of the 
 pretender; that had she insisted on resusci- 
 tating her loom and had she sat up all night to 
 spin, she could never have produced those 
 fabrics which alone her household demanded, 
 
 i Indeed, must not the protest and the remedy in all such 
 cases, if they are to be of any avail, take their rise within the 
 diseased class itself? 
 
 [89]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 and would have been but a puerile actor; that 
 it was not by attempting to return to the an- 
 cient and forever closed fields of toil, but by 
 entering upon new, that she could alone serve 
 her race and retain her own dignity and 
 virility. That not by bearing water and weav- 
 ing linen, but by so training and disciplining 
 herself that she should be fitted to bear her 
 share in the labor necessary to the just and 
 wise guidance of a great empire, and be cap- 
 able of training a race of men adequate to 
 exercise an enlightened, merciful, and benefi- 
 cent rule over the vast masses of subject peo- 
 ple that so, and so only, could she fulfil 
 her duty toward the new society about her, and 
 bear its burden together with man, as her an- 
 cestresses of bygone generations had borne the 
 burden of theirs. 
 
 That in this direction, and this alone, lay 
 the only possible remedy for the evils of 
 woman's condition, was a conception appar- 
 ently grasped by none; and the female sank 
 lower and lower, till the image of the parasitic 
 woman of Rome (with a rag of the old Roman 
 intensity left even in her degradation!) 
 seeking madly by pursuit of pleasure and 
 
 [90]
 
 PARASITISM 
 
 sensuality to fill the void left by the lack of 
 honorable activity ; accepting lust in the place 
 of love, ease in the place of exertion, and an 
 unlimited consumption in the place of pro- 
 duction; too enervated at last to care even to 
 produce offspring, and shrinking from every 
 form of endurance remains, even to the pres- 
 ent day, the most perfect, and therefore the 
 most appalling picture of the parasite female 
 that earth has produced a picture only less 
 terrible than it is pathetic. 
 
 We recognize that it was inevitable that 
 this womanhood born it would seem from its 
 elevation to guide and enlighten a world, and 
 in place thereof feeding on it should at last 
 have given birth to a manhood as effete as 
 itself, and that both should in the end have 
 been swept away before the march of those 
 Teutonic folk, whose women were virile and 
 could give birth to men; a folk among whom 
 the woman received on the morning of her 
 marriage, from the man who was to be her 
 companion through life, no contemptible 
 trinket to hang about her throat or limbs, but 
 a shield, a spear, a sword, and a yoke of oxen, 
 while she bestowed on him in return a suit of 
 
 [91]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 armor, in token that they two were henceforth 
 to be one in toil and in the facing of danger; 
 that she too should dare with him in war and 
 suffer with him in peace. Of this folk another 
 writer tells us that their women not only bore 
 the race and fed it at their breasts without the 
 the help of others' hands, but that they under- 
 took the whole management of house and 
 lands, leaving the males free for war and 
 chase; of them Suetonius tells us that when 
 Augustus Caesar demanded hostages from a 
 tribe, he took women, not men, because he 
 found by experience that the women were 
 more regarded than men; and of them Strabo 
 says that so highly did the Germanic races 
 value the intellect of their women that they 
 regarded them as inspired, and entered into 
 no war or great undertaking without their 
 advice and counsel. Among the Cimbrian 
 women who accompanied their husbands in the 
 invasion of Italy were certain who marched 
 barefooted in the midst of the lines, distin- 
 guished by their white hair and milk-white 
 robes, and who were regarded as inspired, and 
 of whom Florus, describing an early Roman 
 victory, says, "The conflict was not less fierce 
 
 [9*]
 
 PARASITISM 
 
 and obstinate with the wives of the van- 
 quished; in their carts and wagons they 
 formed a line of battle, and from their elevated 
 situation, as from so many turrets, annoyed 
 the Romans with their poles and lances. 1 
 Their death was as glorious as their mar- 
 tial spirit. Finding that all was lost, they 
 strangled their children, and either destroyed 
 themselves in one scene of mutual slaughter, 
 or with the sashes that bound up their hair sus- 
 pended themselves by the neck to the boughs 
 of trees or the tops of their wagons." It is 
 of these women that Valerius Maximus says 
 that, "If the gods on the day of battle had in- 
 spired the men with equal fortitude, Marius 
 would never have boasted of his Teutonic 
 victory"; and of whom Tacitus, speaking of 
 those women who accompanied their husbands 
 to war, remarks, "These are the darling wit- 
 nesses of his conduct, the applauders of his 
 valor, at once beloved and valued. The 
 wounded seek their mothers and their wives; 
 undismayed at the sight, the women count 
 each honorable scar and suck the gushing 
 
 The South African Boer woman after two thousand years 
 appears not wholly to have forgotten the ancestral tactics. 
 
 [93]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 blood. They are even hardy enough to mix 
 with the combatants, administering refresh- 
 ment and exhorting them to deeds of valor," 
 and adds moreover that, "To be contented with 
 one wife was peculiar to the Germans; while 
 the woman was contented with one husband, 
 as with one life, one mind, one body." 
 
 It was inevitable that, before the sons of 
 women such as these, the sons of the parasitic 
 Roman should be swept from existence, as 
 the offspring of the caged canary would fall 
 in conflict with the offspring of the free. 
 
 Again and again with wearisome reitera- 
 tion, the same story repeats itself. Among 
 the Jews in the days of their health and 
 growth, we find their women bearing the ma- 
 jor weight of agricultural and domestic toil, 
 full always of labor and care from Rachel, 
 whom Jacob met and loved as she watered her 
 father's flocks, to Ruth, the ancestress of a 
 line of kings and heroes, whom her Boas noted 
 laboring in the harvest-fields; from Sarah, 
 kneading and baking cakes for Abraham's 
 prophetic visitors, to Miriam, prophetess and 
 singer, and Deborah, who judged Israel from 
 beneath her palm-tree, "and the land had rest 
 
 [9*]
 
 PARASITISM 
 
 for forty years." Everywhere the ancient 
 Jewish woman appears an active sustaining 
 power among her people; and perhaps the 
 noblest picture of the laboring woman to be 
 found in any literature is contained in the 
 Jewish writings, indited possibly at the very 
 time when the laboring woman was for the 
 first time tending among a section of the Jews 
 to become a thing of the past; 1 when already 
 
 1 The picture of the laboring as opposed to the parasitic ideal 
 of womanhood appears under the heading, "The words of King 
 Lemuel; the oracle which his mother taught him." At risk of 
 presenting the reader with that with which he is already pain- 
 fully familiar, we here transcribe the passage; which, allowing 
 for differences in material and intellectual surroundings, paints 
 also the ideal of the laboring womanhood of the present and of 
 the future: 
 
 "Her price is far above rubies, 
 The heart of her husband trusteth in her, 
 And he shall have no lack of gain, 
 She doeth him good and not evil 
 All the days of her life, 
 She seeketh wool and flax, 
 And worketh willingly with her hand*, 
 Sbe is like the merchant ships; 
 She bringeth her food, from afar, 
 She riseth up while it is yet night; 
 And giveth meat to her household, 
 And their task to her maidens, 
 She considereth a tic 1.1. and buyeth it; 
 With the fruit of her hands she planteth a vineyard. 
 She yirdeth her loins with itrength, 
 
 [95]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 Solomon, with his seven hundred parasitic 
 wives and three hundred parasitic concubines, 
 loomed large on the horizon of the national 
 life, to take the place of flock-tending Rachel 
 and gleaning Ruth, and to produce amid their 
 palaces of cedar and gold, among them all, 
 
 And maketh strong Tier arms. 
 
 She perceiveth that her merchandise is profitable; 
 
 Her lamp goeth not out by night, 
 
 She layeth her hands to the distaff, 
 
 And her hands hold the spindle. 
 
 She spreadeth out her hand to the poor: 
 
 Yea, she reacheth forth her hands to the needy, 
 
 She is not afraid of the snow for her household, 
 
 For all her household are clothed with scarlet. 
 
 She maketh herself carpets of tapestry; 
 
 Her clothing is fine and purple. 
 
 Her husband is known in the gates, 
 
 When he sitteth among the elders of the land, 
 
 She maketh linen garments and selleth them, 
 
 And delivereth girdles unto the merchant. 
 
 Strength and dignity are her clothing; 
 
 And the laugheth at the time to come. 
 
 She openeth her mouth with wisdom, 
 
 And the law of kindness is on her tongue, 
 
 She looketh well to the ways of her household, 
 
 And eateth not the bread of idleness. 
 
 Her children rise up and call her blessed, 
 
 Her husband also, and he praiseth her, saying, 
 
 Many daughters have done virtuously, 
 
 But thou excellest them all, 
 
 Give her the fruit of her hand, 
 
 And let her works praise her in the gate." 
 
 [96]
 
 PARASITISM 
 
 no Joseph or David, but in the way of descen- 
 dant only a Rehoboam, under whose hand the 
 kingdom was to totter to its fall. 
 
 In the East to-day the same story has 
 wearisomely written itself : in China, where the 
 present vitality and power of the most an- 
 cient of existing civilizations may be measured 
 accurately by the length of its women's shoes; 
 in Turkish harems, where one of the noblest 
 dominant Aryan races the world has yet pro- 
 duced is being slowly suffocated in the arms 
 of a parasite womanhood, and might, indeed, 
 long ago have been obliterated, had not a cer- 
 tain virility and strength been continually re- 
 infused into it through the persons of pur- 
 chased wives, who in early childhood and 
 youth had been themselves active laboring 
 peasants. Everywhere, in the past as in the 
 present, the parasitism of the female heralds 
 the decay of a nation or class, and as invari- 
 ably indicates disease as the pustules of small- 
 pox upon the skin indicate the existence of a 
 purulent virus in the system. 
 
 We are, indeed, far from asserting that the 
 civilizations of the past which have decayed, 
 have decayed alone through the parasitism of 
 
 [971
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 their females. Vast, far-reaching social phe- 
 nomena have invariably causes and reactions 
 immeasurably too complex to be summed up 
 under one so simple a term. Behind the 
 phenomenon of female parasitism has always 
 lain another and yet larger social phenome- 
 non; it has invariably been preceded, as we 
 have seen, by the subjugation of large bodies 
 of other human creatures, either as slaves, sub- 
 ject races, or classes; and as the result of the 
 excessive labors of those classes there has al- 
 ways been an accumulation of unearned 
 wealth in the hands of the dominant class or 
 race. It has invariably been by feeding on 
 this wealth, the result of forced or ill-paid la^ 
 bor, that the female of the dominant race or 
 class, has in the past lost her activity and has 
 comeJn_exist purely through the passive j)er- 
 f ormance of her sexual functions. Without 
 slaves or subject classes to ^perform the crude 
 physical labors of life and produce superfluous 
 wealth, the parasitism of the female would, in 
 the past, have been an impossibility. 
 
 There is, therefore, a profound truth in that 
 universal saw which states that the decay of 
 the great nations and civilizations of the past 
 
 [98]
 
 PARASITISM 
 
 lias resulted from the enervation caused by 
 excessive wealth and luxury; and there is a 
 further, and if possible more profound, truth 
 underlying the statement that their destruc- 
 tion has ultimately been the result of the ener- 
 vation of the entire race, male and female. 
 
 But when we come further to inquire how, 
 exactly, this process of decay took place, we 
 shall find that the part which the parasitism 
 of the female has played has been funda- 
 mental. The mere use of any of the material 
 products of labor, which we term wealth, can 
 never in itself produce that decay, physical 
 or mental, which precedes the downfall of 
 great civilized nations. The eating of salmon 
 at ten shillings a pound can in itself no more 
 debilitate and corrupt the moral, intellectual, 
 and physical constitution of the man consum- 
 ing it, than it could enervate his naked fore- 
 fathers who speared it in their rivers for food ; 
 the fact that an individual wears a robe made 
 from the filaments of a worm can no more 
 deteriorate his spiritual or physical fiber than 
 were it made of sheep's wool; an entire race, 
 housed in marble palaces, faring delicately, 
 and clad in silks, and surrounded by the 
 
 [99]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 noblest products of literature and plastic art, 
 so those palaces, viands, garments, and prod- 
 ucts of art were the result of their own la- 
 bors, could never be enervated by them. The 
 debilitating effect of wealth sets in at that 
 point exactly (and never before) at which 
 the supply of material necessaries and com- 
 forts, and of esthetic enjoyments, clogs the 
 individuality, causing it to rest satisfied in the 
 mere passive possession of the results of the 
 labor of others, without feeling any necessity 
 or desire for further productive activity of its 
 own. 1 
 
 The exact material condition at which this 
 point will be reached will vary, not only with 
 the race and the age, but with the individual. 
 A Marcus Aurelius in a palace of gold and 
 marble was able to retain his simplicity and 
 virility as completely as though he had lived 
 in a cow-herd's hut; while, on the other hand, 
 it is quite possible for the wife of a savage 
 
 iQf the other deleterious effects of unearned wealth on the 
 individual or class possessing it, such as its power of lessening 
 human sympathy, &c., &c., we do not now speak, as while ulti- 
 mately and indirectly, undoubtedly, tending to disintegrate a 
 society, they do not necessarily and immediately enervate it, 
 which enervation is the point we are here considering. 
 
 [100]
 
 PARASITISM 
 
 chief, who has but four slaves to bring her her 
 corn and milk and spread her skins in the sun, 
 to become almost as purely parasitic as the 
 most delicately pampered female of fashion 
 in ancient Rome, or modern Paris, London, 
 or New York; while the exact amount of un- 
 earned material wealth which will emasculate 
 individuals in the same society will vary ex- 
 actly as their intellectual and moral fiber and 
 natural activity are strong or weak. 1 
 
 The debilitating effect of unlabored-for 
 wealth lies, then, not in the nature of any ma- 
 terial adjunct to life in itself, but in the 
 power it may possess of robbing the individual 
 of all incentive to exertion, thus destroying 
 the intellectual, the physical, and finally, the 
 moral fiber. 
 
 In all civilizations of the past examination 
 will show that almost invariably it has been 
 the female who has tended first to reach this 
 
 i It is not uncommon In modern societies to find women of a 
 class relatively very moderately wealthy, the wives and daugh- 
 ters of shopkeepers or professional men, who, if their male 
 relations will supply them with a very limited amount of money 
 without exertion on their part, will become as completely 
 parasitic and useless as women with untold wealth at their 
 command. 
 
 [101]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 point, and we think examination will show that 
 it has almost invariably been from the woman 
 to the man that enervation and decay have 
 spread. 
 
 Why this should be so is obvious. Firstly, 
 it is in the sphere of domestic labor that slave 
 or hired labor most easily and insidiously pen- 
 etrates. The force of blows or hireling gold 
 can far more easily supply laborers as the pre- 
 parers of food and clothing, and even as the 
 rearers of children, than it can supply laborers 
 fitted to be entrusted with the toils of war 
 and government, which have in the past been 
 the especial sphere of male toil. The Roman 
 woman had for generations been supplanted 
 in the sphere of her domestic labors and in the 
 toil of rearing and educating her offspring, 
 and had long become abjectly parasitic, be- 
 fore the Roman male had been able to sub- 
 stitute the labor of the hireling and barbarian 
 for his own, in the army, and in the drudgeries 
 of governmental toil. 
 
 Secondly, the female having one all-impor- 
 tant though passive function which cannot be 
 taken from her, and which is peculiarly con- 
 nected with her own person, in the act of 
 [102]
 
 PARASITISM 
 
 child-bearing, and her mere sexual attributes 
 being an obj-ect of desire and cupidity to the 
 male, she is liable in a peculiarly insidious and 
 gradual manner to become dependent on this 
 one sexual function alone for her support. 
 So much is this the case, that even when she 
 does not in any way perform this function 
 there is a curious tendency for the kudos of 
 the function still to hang about her, and for 
 her mere potentiality in the direction of a 
 duty which she may never fulfil to be con- 
 fused in her own estimation and that of so- 
 ciety with the actual fulfilment of that func- 
 tion. Under the mighty egis of the woman 
 who bears and rears offspring and in other 
 directions labors actively for her race, creeps 
 in gradually and unnoticed the woman who 
 does none of these things. From the mighty 
 laboring woman who bears human creatures 
 to the full extent of her power, rears her 
 offspring unaided, and performs at the same 
 time severe social labor in other directions 
 (and who is undoubtedly, wherever found, 
 the most productive toiler known to the 
 race) ; it is but one step, though a long one, 
 from this woman, to the woman who pro- 
 [103]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 duces offspring freely but does not herself 
 rear them, and performs no compensatory 
 social labor. From this woman, again, to the 
 one who bears few or no children, and 
 
 forms no productive social labor, but wHo, 
 
 whether as a wife or mistress, lives by the ex- 
 
 ercisfi_pf her sex function alone, the step is 
 
 shorJL There_i& buLone step farther to the 
 
 prostitute, who affects no form of productive 
 
 labor, and who, in place of life, is recognized 
 
 as producing disease and death, but who exists 
 
 parasitically through her sexual attribute. 
 
 /Enormous as is the distance between the 
 
 I women at the two extremes of this series, and 
 
 / sharply opposed as their relation to the world is, 
 
 / there is yet, in actual life, no sharp, clear, sud- 
 
 den-drawn line dividing the women of the one 
 
 type from those of the other. They shade off 
 
 into each other by delicate and insensible de- 
 
 grees. And it is down this inclined plane 
 
 that the women of civilized races are pecul- 
 
 iarly tempted, unconsciously, to slip from the 
 
 noble height of a condition of the most stren- 
 
 uous social activity, into a condition of com- 
 
 plete, helpless, and inactive parasitism, with- 
 
 out being clearly aware of the fact them- 
 
 [104]
 
 PARASITISM 
 
 selves, and without society's becoming so "\ 
 the woman who has ceased to rear her own } 
 offspring, or who has ceased to bear offspring / 
 at all, and who performs no other productive ( 
 social function, yet shields the fact from her I 
 own eyes by dwelling on the fact that she is a / 
 woman, in whom the capacity is at least 
 latent. 1 
 
 i There is, indeed, an interesting analogous tendency on the 
 part of the parasitic male, wherever found, to shield his true 
 condition from his own eyes and those of the world by playing 
 at the ancient ancestral forms of male labor. He is almost 
 always found talking loudly of the protection he affords to 
 helpless females and to society, though he is in truth himself 
 protected through the exertion of soldiers, policemen, magis- 
 trates, and society generally; and he is almost invariably fond 
 of dangling a sword or other weapon, and wearing a uniform, 
 for the assumption of militarism without severe toil delights 
 him. But it is in a degenerate travesty of the ancient labor 
 of hunting (where, at terrible risk to himself, and with endless 
 fatigue, his ancestors supplied the race with its meat and 
 defended it from destruction by wild beasts) that he finds his 
 greatest satisfaction; it serves to render the degradation and 
 uselessness of his existence less obvious to himself and to oth- 
 ers than if he passed his life reclining in an armchair. 
 
 On Yorkshire moors to-day may be seen walls of sod, be- 
 hind which hide certain human males, while hard-laboring 
 men are employed from early dawn in driving birds towards 
 them. As the birds are driven up to him, the hunter behind 
 his wall raises his deadly weapon, and the bird, which it had 
 taken so much human labor to rear and provide, falls dead 
 at his feet; thereby greatly to the increase of the hunter's 
 
 [105]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 These peculiarities in her condition have in 
 all civilized societies laid the female more 
 early and seriously open to the attacks of par- 
 asitism than the male. And while the ac- 
 cumulation of wealth has always been the 
 antecedent condition, and the degeneracy and 
 effeteness of the male the final and obvious 
 cause of the decay of the great dominant races 
 of the past ; yet, between these two has always 
 lain, as a great middle term, the parasitism of 
 the female, without which the first would have 
 been inoperative and the last impossible. 
 
 Not slavery, nor the most vast accumula- 
 tions of wealth, could destroy a nation by 
 
 glory, when, the toils of the chase over, he returns to his city 
 haunts to record his bag. One might almost fancy one saw 
 arise from the heathery turf the shade of some ancient Teu- 
 tonic ancestor, whose dust has long reposed there, pointing a 
 finger of scorn at his degenerate descendant, as he leers out 
 from behind the sod wall. During the later Roman empire, 
 Commodus, in the degenerate days of Rome, at great expense 
 had wild beasts brought from distant lands that he might have 
 the glory of slaying them in the Roman circus; and medals 
 representing himself as Hercules slaying the Nemean lion were 
 struck at his orders. We are not aware that any representa- 
 tion has yet been made in the region of plastic art of the hero 
 of the sod wall; but history repeats itself that also may 
 come. It is to be noted that these hunters are not youths, but 
 often ripely adult men, before whom all the lofty enjoyments 
 and employments possible to the male in modern life lie open. 
 
 [106]
 
 PARASITISM 
 
 enervation, whose women remained active, 
 virile, and laborious. 
 
 The conception which again and again ap- 
 pears to have haunted successive societies, that 
 / it was a possibility for the human male to ad- 
 vance in physical power and intellectual vigor, 
 while his companion female became stationary 
 and inactive, taking no share in the labors of 
 society beyond the passive fulfilment of sex- 
 ual functions, has always been negated. It 
 has ended as would end the experiment of a 
 man seeking to raise a breed of winning race- 
 horses out of unexercised, short-winded, 
 knock-kneed mares. No, more disastrously! 
 For while the female animal transmits herself 
 to her descendant only or mainly by means 
 of germinal inheritance, and through the in- 
 fluence she may exert over it during gestation, 
 the human female, by producing the intellect- 
 ual and moral atmosphere in which the early 
 infant years of life are passed, impresses 
 herself far more indelibly on her descendants. 
 Only an able and laboring womanhood can 
 permanently produce an able and laboring 
 manhood ; only an effete and inactive male can 
 ultimately be produced by an effete and in- 
 [107]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 active womanhood. The curled darling, 
 scented and languid, with his drawl, his deli- 
 cate apparel, his devotion to the rarity and 
 variety of his viands, whose severest labor is 
 the search after pleasure, and for whom even 
 the chase, which was for his remote ancestor 
 an invigorating and manly toil essential for 
 the meat and life of his people, becomes a lux- 
 urious and farcical amusement; this male, 
 whether found in the later Roman Empire, 
 the Turkish harem of to-day, or in our North- 
 ern civilizations, is possible only because gen- 
 erations of parasitic women have preceded him. 
 More repulsive than the parasite female her- 
 self, because a yet further product of decay, 
 it is yet only the scent of his mother's boudoir 
 that we smell in his hair. He is like to the 
 bald patches and rotten wool on the back of 
 a scabby sheep; which indeed indicate that, 
 deep beneath the surface, a parasite insect is 
 eating its way into the flesh, but which are not 
 so much the cause of disease as its final man- 
 ifestation. 
 
 As we have said, it is the power of the hu- 
 man female to impress herself on her descend- 
 ants, male and female, through germinal in- 
 
 [108]
 
 PARASITISM 
 
 heritance, through influence during the period 
 of gestation, and above all by producing the 
 mental atmosphere in which the impressionable 
 infant years of life are passed, which makes the 
 condition of the child-bearing female one of 
 paramount interest to the race. It is this fact 
 which causes even prostitution (in many re- 
 spects the most repulsive form of female para- 
 sitism which afflicts humanity) to be, prob- 
 ably, not more adverse to the advance and 
 even to the conservation of a healthy and pow- 
 erful society than the parasitism of its child- 
 bearing woman. For the prostitute^ heavily 
 as she weights society for her support, return- 
 ing diseaselflncl mental and emotional disinte- 
 gration for what she consumes, does not yet 
 so_jmmediately -affect-the- next generation as 
 the kept wife^ or kept mistress, who impresses 
 her effete image indelibly on the generations 
 succjeejding. 1 
 
 No man ever yet entered life farther than 
 
 i It cannot be too often repeated that the woman who merely 
 bears and brings a child into the world, and then leaves it to 
 be fed and reared by the hands of another, has performed very 
 much less than half of the labor of producing adult humans. 
 In such cases, it is the nurse and not the mother who is the 
 most important laborer. 
 
 [109]
 
 the length of one navel-cord from the body 
 of the woman who bore him. It is the woman 
 who is the final standard of the race, from 
 which there can be no departure for any dis- 
 tance for any length of time, in any direction : 
 as her brain weakens, weakens the man's she 
 bears; as her muscle softens, softens his; as 
 she decays, decays the people. 
 
 Other causes may, and do, lead to the ener- 
 vation and degeneration of a class or race ; the 
 parasitism of its child-bearing women must. 
 
 We, the European women of this age, stand 
 to-day where again and again, in the history 
 of the past, women of other races have stood; 
 but our condition is yet more grave, and of 
 wider import to humanity as a whole than 
 theirs ever was. Let us again consider more 
 closely why this is so. 
 
 [110]
 
 PARASITISM 
 
 (Continued)
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 PAEASITISM (continued) 
 
 WE have seen that, in the past, no such 
 thing as the parasitism of the entire body or 
 large majority of the females inhabiting any 
 territory was possible. Beneath that body of 
 women of the dominant class or race, who did 
 not labor either mentally or physically, there 
 has always been of necessity a far more vast 
 body of females who not only performed the 
 crude physical toil essential to the existence of 
 society before the introduction of mechanical 
 methods of production, but who were com- 
 pelled to labor the more intensely because there 
 was a parasite class above them to be main- 
 tained by their physical toil. The more the 
 female parasite flourished of old, in one class 
 or race, the more certainly all women of other 
 classes or races were compelled to labor only 
 too excessively; and ultimately these females 
 and their descendants were apt to supplant 
 [1131
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 the more enervated class or race. In the 
 absence of machinery and of a vast employ- 
 ment of the motor forces of nature, parasitism 
 could only threaten a comparatively small 
 section of any community, and a minute sec- 
 tion of the human race as a whole. \ Female 
 parasitism in the past resembled gout a 
 disease dangerous only to the over-fed, pam- 
 pered, 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 me- 
 chanical force for crude, physical, human 
 exertion (mechanical force being employed to- 
 day 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 civilized community to be maintained 
 without performing any of the ancient, crude, 
 physical labors of their sex, and without de- 
 pending on the slavery of, or any vast increase 
 in the labor of, other classes of females; but 
 this condition has already been reached, or is 
 tending to be reached, by that large mass of
 
 PARASITISM 
 
 women in civilized societies who form the 
 intermediate class between poor and rich. 
 During the next fifty years, so rapid will un- 
 doubtedly be the spread of the material con- 
 ditions of civilization, both in the societies at 
 present civilized and in the societies at present 
 unpermeated by our material civilization, that 
 the ancient forms of female, domestic, physical 
 labor of even the women of the poorest classes 
 will be little required, their place being taken, 
 not by other females, but by always increas- 
 ingly perfected labor-saving machinery. 
 
 Thus, fprnalp jar^sitJSm, whlV^ 1>r> **"* P a . gt 
 
 threatened only ar-ininutc section of earth's 
 women, undpr exif^mg-^ondTtrons threatens 
 vast masses, and naay r Bder future conditions, 
 threaten the entire body. 
 
 If woman is content to leave to the male all 
 labor in the new and all-important fields which 
 are rapidly opening before the human race; 
 if, as the old forms of domestic labor slip from 
 her for ever and inevitably, she does not grasp 
 the new, it is inevitable, that, ultimately, not 
 merely a class, but the whole bodies of females 
 in civilized societies, must sink into a state of 
 [115]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 more or less absolute dependence on their 
 sexual functions alone. 1 
 
 As new forms of natural force are mastered 
 and mechanical appliances perfected, it will be 
 quite possible for the male half of all civilized 
 races (and therefore ultimately of all) to 
 absorb the entire fields of intellectual and 
 highly trained manual labor; 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 
 
 i How real is this apparently very remote danger is interest- 
 ingly illustrated by a proposition gravely made a few years ago 
 by a man of 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 labor they might 
 perform, not even the passive labor of sexual reproduction be- 
 ing 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! 
 
 [116]
 
 PARASITISM 
 
 into a condition of complete and helpless sex- 
 parasitism. 
 
 Sex-parasitism, therefore, presents itself at 
 the end of the nineteenth century and begin- 
 ning of the twentieth in a guise which it has 
 never before worn. We, the women of the 
 civilization of the nineteenth and twentieth 
 centuries, stand therefore in a position the 
 gravity and importance of which was not 
 equaled by that of any of our forerunners in 
 the ancient civilization. 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 civilization. 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 ma1f Inhor qiipctirm nnd ihg - JWQman's 
 
 question of our day are completely one, and 
 
 that, would the women of the European race 
 
 [117]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 of_to-day but wait peacefully till the males 
 alone had solved their problem, they weald 
 find thatr their "wn bad J^fi-y^lvM at the same 
 time. 
 
 Were the entire male labor problem of this 
 age satisfactorily settled to-morrow; were all 
 the unemployed or uselessly emplbyea males 
 at both ends of societies, whom the changes 
 of modern civilization have robbed of their 
 ancient forms of labor, so educated and trained 
 that they were perfectly fitted for the new 
 conditions of life ; and were the material benefit 
 and intellectual possibilities, which the sub- 
 stitution of mechanical for human labor now 
 makes possible to humanity, no longer ab- 
 sorbed by the few but dispersed among the 
 whole mass of males in return for their trained 
 labor, yet the woman's problem might be 
 further from satisfactory solution than it is 
 to-day ; and, if it were affected at all, might be 
 affected for the worse. It is wholly untrue 
 that fifty pounds, or two thousand, earned by 
 the male as the result of his physical or mental 
 toil, if part of it be spent by him in supporting 
 non-laboring females, whether as prostitutes, 
 wives, or mistresses, is the same thing to the 
 [118]
 
 PARASITISM 
 
 female or to the race as though that sum had 
 been earned by her own exertion, either di- 
 rectly as wages or indirectly by toiling for the 
 man whose wages supported her. For the 
 moment, truly, the woman so tended lies softer 
 and warmer than had she been compelled to 
 exert herself; ultimately, intellectually, mor- 
 ally, and even physically, the difference in 
 the effect upon her as an individual and on 
 the race is the difference between advance and 
 degradation, between life and death. The in- 
 creased wealth of the male no more of neces- 
 sity benefits and raises the female upon whom 
 he expends it than the increased wealth of 
 his mistress necessarily benefits mentally or 
 physically a poodle because she can give him 
 
 a down cushion in place of one of feathers, and 
 
 I __,' 
 chicken in place of beef. 1 Thewealthier the 
 
 males- ^f-^r society beoohkj, the greater the 
 tempjation^ both, to themselves and to the f'e- 
 males connected with them, to ^If4&-toward 
 female parasitism./ 
 
 The readjustment of the position of the 
 male worker, if it led to a more equitable dis- 
 tribution of wealth among males, might indeed 
 diminish slightly the accompanying tendency 
 [119]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 to parasitism in the very wealthiest female 
 class ; but it would, on the other hand, open up 
 exactly those conditions which make parasitism 
 possible to millions of women to-day leading 
 healthy and active lives. 1 
 
 i The fact cannot be too often dwelt upon that parasitism is 
 not connected with any definite amount of wealth. Any awn 
 supplied to an individual which will so far satisfy him or her 
 at to enable them to live without exertion may absolutely 
 parasitize them; while vast wealth (unhealthy as its effects 
 generally tend to be) may, upon certain rare and noble natures, 
 exert hardly any enervating or deleterious influence. An amus- 
 ing illustration of the different points at which enervation is 
 reached by different females came under our own observation. 
 The wife of an American millionaire was visited by a woman, 
 the daughter and also the widow of small professional men. 
 She stated that she was in need of both food and clothing. 
 The millionaire's wife gave her a leg of mutton and two val- 
 uable dresses. The woman proceeded to whine, though in 
 vigorous health, that she had no one to carry them home for 
 her, and could not think of carrying them herself. The Amer- 
 ican, the descendant of generations of able, laboring, New 
 England, Puritan women, tucked the leg of mutton under one 
 arm and the bundle of clothes under the other and walked off 
 down the city street towards the woman's dwelling, followed 
 by the astonished pauper parasite. 
 
 The most helpless case of female degeneration we ever came 
 into contact with was that of a daughter of a poor English 
 officer on half pay, who had to exist on a few hundreds a 
 year. This woman could neither cook her own food nor make 
 her own clothes, nor was she engaged in any social, political, 
 or intellectual, or artistic labor. Though able to dance for a 
 night or play tennis for an afternoon, she was yet hardly able 
 to do her own hair or attire herself, and appeared absolutely 
 
 [120]
 
 PARASITISM 
 
 That the two problems are not identical is 
 shown, if indeed evidence were needed, by the 
 fact that those males most actively employed 
 in attempting to readjust the relations of the 
 mass of laboring males to the new conditions 
 of life, are sometimes precisely those males who 
 are most bitterly opposed to woman in her 
 attempt to readjust her own position. Not 
 by the members of those professions generally 
 regarded as the strongholds of obstructionism 
 and prejudice has a more short-sighted op- 
 position often been made to the attempts of 
 woman to enter new fields of labor, than have 
 again and again been made by male hand- 
 workers, whether as isolated individuals or in 
 their corporate capacity as trade unions. 
 They have, at least in some certain instances, 
 
 to have lost all power of compelling herself to do anything 
 which was at the moment fatiguing or displeasing, as all labor 
 is apt to be, however great its ultimate reward. In a life of 
 twenty-eight years this woman had probably not contributed one 
 hour's earnest toil to the increase of the sum total of productive 
 human labor. Surrounded with acres of cultivable land, she 
 would possibly have preferred to lie down and die of hunger 
 rather than have cultivated half an acre for food. "TJiis is an 
 extreme case; but the ultimate rffgg_2f pnr nc{fic " 1 ir nin>y 
 paralyse o f the will find an inability in compel oneself into any 
 course of action for the moment unpleasurable and exhaustive. 
 
 [121]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 endeavored to exclude women, not merely from 
 new fields of intellectual and social labor, but 
 even from those ancient fields of textile man- 
 ufacture and handicraft, which have through 
 all generations of the past been woman's. 
 The patent and undeniable fact that where the 
 male labor movement flourishes the woman's 
 movement also flourishes rises not from the 
 fact that they are identical, but that the same 
 healthy and virile condition in a race or society 
 gives rise to both. 
 
 As two streams rising from one fountain- 
 head and running a parallel course through 
 long reaches may yet remain wholly distinct, 
 one finding its way satisfactorily to the sea, 
 while the other loses itself in sand or becomes 
 a stagnant marsh, so our modern male and 
 female movements, taking their rise from the 
 same material conditions in modern civilization, 
 and presenting endless and close analogies with 
 one another in their cause of development 
 yet remain fundamentally distinct. By both 
 movements the future of the race must be 
 profoundly modified for good or evil; both 
 touch the race in a manner absolutely vital; 
 but both will have to be fought out on their 
 [122]
 
 PARASITISM 
 
 own ground, and independently, and it will 
 be only by determined, conscious, and persist- 
 ent action on the part of woman that the solu- 
 tion of her own labor problems will proceed 
 co-extensively with that of the other. 
 
 How distinct, though similar, is the under- 
 lying motive of the two movements, is mani- 
 fested most clearly by this fact, that, while 
 the male labor movement takes its rise mainly 
 among the poor and hand-laboring classes, 
 where the material pressure of the modern 
 conditions of life fall heaviest, and where the 
 danger of physical suffering and even extinc- 
 tion under that pressure is most felt; the 
 woman's labor movement has taken its rise 
 almost as exclusively among the wealthy, 
 cultured, and brain-laboring classes, where 
 alone at the present day the danger of enerva- 
 tion through non-employment, and of degen- 
 eration through dependence on the sex func- 
 tion exists. 
 
 The female labor movement is, in its 
 ultimate essence, an endeavor on the part of 
 a section of the race to save itself from in- 
 activity and degeneration, and this even at 
 the immediate cost of most heavy loss in 
 [123]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 material comfort and ease to the individuals 
 composing it. The male labor movement is, 
 directly and in the first place, material; and, 
 at least superficially, more or less self-seek- 
 ing, though its ultimate reaction on society 
 by saving the poorer members from degra- 
 dation and dependency and want is undoubt- 
 edly wholly social and absolutely essential 
 for the health and continued development 
 of the human race. [In the woman's labor 
 movement of our day, which has essentially 
 taken its rise among women of the more cul- 
 tured and wealthy classes, and which consists 
 mainly in a demand to have the doors leading 
 to professional, political, and highly skilled 
 labor thrown open to them, the ultimate end 
 can only be attained at the cost of more or 
 less intense, immediate, personal suffering and 
 renunciation, though eventually, if brought to 
 a satisfactory conclusion, it will undoubtedly 
 tend to the material and physical well-being 
 of woman herself, as well as to that of her male 
 companions and descendants. 
 
 The coming half -century will be a time of 
 peculiar strain, as mankind seeks rapidly to 
 adjust moral ideals and social relationships 
 [124]
 
 PARASITISM 
 
 and the general ordering of life to the new 
 and continually unfolding material conditions. 
 If these two great movements of our age, hav- 
 ing this as their object, can be brought into 
 close harmony and co-operation, the readjust- 
 ment will be the sooner and more painlessly 
 accomplished; but, for the moment, the two 
 movements alike in their origin and alike in 
 many of their methods of procedure, remain 
 distinct. 
 
 It is this fact, the consciousness on the 
 part of the women taking their share in the 
 woman's movement of our age, that their 
 efforts are not, and cannot be, of immediate 
 advantage to themselves, but that they almost 
 of necessity and immediately lead to loss and 
 renunciation, which gives to this movement its 
 very peculiar tone; setting it apart from the 
 large mass of economic movements, placing it 
 rather in a line with those vast religious de- 
 velopments which at the interval of ages have 
 swept across humanity, irresistibly modifying 
 and reorganizing it. 
 
 It is the perception of this fact, that, not 
 for herself, nor even for fellow women alone, 
 but for the benefit of humanity at large, she 
 [125]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 must seek to readjust herself to life, which 
 lends to the woman's most superficial and 
 seemingly trivial attempt at readjustment a 
 certain dignity and importance. 
 
 It is this profound hidden conviction which 
 removes from the sphere of the ridiculous the 
 attitude of even the feeblest woman who 
 waves her poor little "woman's rights" flag 
 on the edge of a platform, and which causes 
 us to forgive even the passionate denuncia- 
 tions, not always wisely thought out, in which 
 she would represent the evils of woman's con- 
 dition as wrongs intentionally inflicted upon 
 her, where they are merely the inevitable re- 
 sults of ages of social movement. 
 
 It is this over-shadowing consciousness of a 
 large impersonal obligation which removes 
 from the sphere of the wholly contemptible 
 and insignificant even the action of the in- 
 dividual young girl, who leaves a home of 
 comfort or luxury for a city garret, where in 
 solitude, and under that stern pressure which 
 is felt by all individuals in arms against the 
 trend of their environment, she seeks to acquire 
 the knowledge necessary for entering on a 
 new form of labor. It is this profound con- 
 [126]
 
 PARASITISM 
 
 sciousness which makes not less than heroic 
 the figure of the little half-starved student, 
 battling against gigantic odds to take her 
 place beside man in the fields of modern in- 
 tellectual toil, and which, whether she succeed 
 or fail, makes her a landmark in the course of 
 our human evolution. It is this consciousness 
 of large impersonal ends to be attained, and 
 to the attainment of which each individual is 
 bound to play her part, however small, which 
 removes from the domain of the unnecessary, 
 and raises to importance, the action of each 
 woman who resists the tyranny of fashions in 
 dress or bearing, or custom which impedes her 
 in her strife towards the new adjustment. 
 
 It is this consciousness which renders al- 
 most of solemn import the efforts of the 
 individual female after physical or mental 
 self -culture and expansion; this which fills 
 with a lofty enthusiasm the heart of the young 
 girl, who, it may be, in some solitary farm- 
 house, in some distant wild of Africa or 
 America, deep into the night bends over her 
 books with the passion and fervor with which 
 an early Christian may have bent over the 
 pages of his Scriptures; feeling that, it may 
 [1271
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 be, she fits herself by each increase of knowl- 
 edge for she knows not what duties towards 
 the world, in the years to come. 
 
 It is this consciousness of great impersonal 
 ends, to be brought, even if slowly and im- 
 perceptibly, a little nearer by her action, which 
 gives to many a woman strength for renun- 
 ciation, when she puts from her the lower 
 type of sexual relationship, even if bound up 
 with all the external honor a legal marriage 
 can confer, if it offers her only enervation and 
 parasitism. This consciousness enables her 
 often to accept poverty, toil, and sexual isola- 
 tion (an isolation more terrible to her than to 
 any male), and renunciation of motherhood, 
 that crowning beatitude of the woman's ex- 
 istence, which, and which alone, fully com- 
 pensates her for the organic sufferings of 
 womanhood in the conviction that, by so do- 
 ing, she makes more possible a fuller and 
 higher attainment of motherhood and wife- 
 hood to the women who will follow her. 
 
 It is this consciousness which makes of 
 
 solemn importance the knock of the humblest 
 
 woman at the closed door which shuts off a 
 
 new field of labor, physical or mental: she is 
 
 [128]
 
 PARASITISM 
 
 convinced that, not for herself, but in the serv- 
 ice of the whole race, she knocks. 
 
 It is this abiding consciousness of an end to 
 be attained, reaching beyond her personal life 
 and individual interests, which constitutes the 
 religious element of the woman's movement of 
 our day, and binds with the common bond of 
 an impersonal enthusiasm into one solid body 
 the women of whatsoever race, class, and na- 
 tion who are struggling after the readjust- 
 ment of woman to life. 
 
 This it is also, which in spite of defects 
 and failures on the part of individuals, yet 
 makes the body which these women compose, 
 as a whole, one of the most impressive and 
 irresistible of modern forces. The private 
 soldier of the great victorious army is not al- 
 ways an imposing object as he walks down 
 the village street, cap on side of head and 
 sword dangling between his legs, nor is he al- 
 ways impressive even when he burnishes up 
 his accoutrements or cleans his pannikins; but 
 it is of individuals such as these that the great 
 army is made, which to-morrow, when it is 
 gathered together, may shake the world with 
 its tread. 
 
 [129]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 Possibly not one woman in ten, or even one 
 woman in twenty thousand among those tak- 
 ing part in this struggle, could draw up a clear 
 and succinct account of the causes which have 
 led to the disco-ordination in woman's present 
 position, or give a full account of the benefits 
 to flow from readjustment; as probably not 
 one private soldier in an army of ten or even 
 of twenty thousand, though he is willing to 
 give his life for his land, would yet be able 
 to draw up a clear and succinct account of his 
 land's history in the past and of the conditions 
 which have made war inevitable; and almost 
 as little can he often paint an exact and de- 
 tailed picture of the benefits to flow from 
 his efforts. He knows his land has need of 
 him; he knows his own small place and 
 work. 
 
 It is possible that not one woman in ten 
 thousand has grasped with scientific exacti- 
 tude, and still less could express with verbal 
 sharpness, the great central conditions which 
 yet compel and animate her into action. 
 
 Even the great, central fact, that with each 
 generation the entire race passes through the 
 body of its womanhood as through a mold, 
 [130]
 
 PARASITISM 
 
 reappearing with the indelible marks of that 
 mold upon it, that as the os cervix of woman, 
 through which the head of the human infant 
 passes at birth, forms a ring, determining 
 for ever the size at birth of the human head, 
 a size which could only increase if in the 
 course of ages the os cervix of woman should 
 itself slowly expand; and that so exactly the 
 intellectual capacity, the physical vigor, the 
 emotional depth of woman, forms also an un- 
 transcendable circle, circumscribing with each 
 successive generation the limits of the expan- 
 sion of the human race; even this fact she 
 may not so clearly have grasped intellectually 
 as to be able to throw it into the form of a 
 logical statement. The profound truth, that 
 the continued development of the human race 
 on earth (a development which, as the old 
 myths and dreams of a narrow personal 
 heaven fade from our view, becomes increas- 
 ingly for many of us the spiritual hope by 
 light of which we continue to live), a develop- 
 ment which we hope shall make the humanity 
 of a distant future as much higher in intel- 
 lectual power and wider in social sympathy 
 than the highest human units of our day, 
 [131]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 as that is higher than the first primeval an- 
 cestor who with quivering limb strove to 
 walk upright and shape his lips to the ex- 
 pression of a word, is possible only if the male 
 and female halves of humanity progress to- 
 gether, expanding side by side in the future 
 as they have done in the past, even this truth 
 it is possible few women have exactly and 
 logically grasped as the basis of their action. 
 The truth that, as the first primitive human 
 males and females, unable to count farther 
 than their fingers, or grasp an abstract idea, 
 or feel the controlling power of social emo- 
 tion, could only develop into the Sapphos, 
 Aristotles, and Shelleys of a more expanded 
 civilization, if side by side, and line by line, 
 male and female forms have expanded to- 
 gether, if, as the convolutions of his brain 
 increased in complexity, so increased the con- 
 volutions in hers; if, as her forehead grew 
 higher, so developed his; and that, if the long 
 upward march of the future is ever to be 
 accomplished by the race, male and female 
 must march side by side, acting and reacting 
 on each other through inheritance ; or progress 
 is impossible. The truth that, as the existence 
 [132]
 
 PARASITISM 
 
 of even the male Bushman would be impos- 
 sible without the existence of the analogous 
 Bush-woman, with the same gifts, and that 
 races which can produce among their males a 
 William Kingdon Clifford, a Tolstoy, or a 
 Robert Browning, would be inconceivable and 
 impossible, unless among its females it could 
 also produce a Sophia Kovalevsky, a George 
 Eliot, or a Louise Michel, so,\ in the future, 
 that higher and more socialized human race 
 we dream of can only come into existence, be- 
 cause both the sex forms have evolved to- 
 gether, now this sex and then that, so to 
 speak, Catching up the ball of life and throw- 
 ing it back to the other, slightly if imper- 
 ceptibly enlarging and beautifying it as it 
 passes through their hands. The fact that 
 without the reaction of interevolution between 
 the sexes, there can be no real and permanent 
 human advance; without the enlarged deep- 
 thinking Eve to bear him, no enlarged Adam ; 
 without the enlarged widely sympathizing 
 Adam to beget her, no enlarged widely com- 
 prehending Eve; without an enlarged Adam 
 and an enlarged Eve, no enlarged generation 
 of mankind on earth; an arrest in one form 
 133]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 is an arrest in both, and in the upward march 
 of the whole human family^ The truth that, 
 if at the present day, woman, after her long 
 upward march side by side with man, develop- 
 ing with him through the ages by means of 
 endless exercise of the faculties of mind and 
 body, has now, at last, reached her ultimate 
 limit of growth, and can progress no farther; 
 that, then, here also, to-day, the growth of 
 the human spirit is to be stayed; that here, 
 on the spot of woman's arrest, is the stand- 
 ard of the race to be finally planted, to move 
 forward no more, forever : that, if the para- 
 site woman on her couch, "loaded with gew- 
 gaws, the plaything and amusement of man, 
 be the permanent and final manifestation of 
 female human life on the globe, then that 
 couch is also the deathbed of human evolu- 
 tion. These profound underlying truths, per- 
 haps, not one woman in twenty thousand of 
 those actively engaged in the struggle for 
 readjustment has so closely and keenly 
 grasped that she can readily throw them into 
 the form of exact language; and yet, prob- 
 ably, not the feeblest woman taking share in 
 our endeavor toward readjustment and ex- 
 [134]
 
 PARASITISM 
 
 pansion fails to be animated by a vague but 
 profound consciousness of their existence. 
 Beyond the small evils, which she seeks by her 
 immediate, personal action to remedy, lie, she 
 feels, large ills of which they form but an 
 off -shoot; beyond the small good which she 
 seeks to effect, lies, she believes, a great and 
 universal beatitude to be attained; beyond the 
 little struggle of to-day, lies the larger strug- 
 gle of the centuries, in which neither she alone 
 nor her sex alone are concerned, but all man- 
 kind. 
 
 That such should be the mental attitude of 
 the average woman taking part in the read- 
 justive sexual movement of to-day, that so 
 often on the public platform and in literature 
 she adduces merely secondary arguments, and 
 is wholly unable logically to give an account 
 of the great propelling conditions behind it, 
 is sometimes taken as an indication of the in- 
 efficiency, and probably the ultimate failure, of 
 the movement in which she takes part. But in 
 truth, that is not so. It is rather an indica- 
 tion which shows how healthy, and deeply 
 implanted in the substance of human life, are 
 the roots of this movement; and it places it in 
 [135]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 a line with all those vast controlling move- 
 ments which have in the course of the ages 
 reorganized human life. 
 
 For those great movements which have 
 permanently modified the condition of hu- 
 manity have never taken their rise amid the 
 chopped logic of schools; they have never 
 drawn their vitality from a series of purely 
 intellectual and abstract inductions. They 
 have arisen always through the action of 
 widely spread material and spiritual condi- 
 tions, creating widespread human needs; 
 which, pressing upon the isolated individuals, 
 awakens at last continuous, if often vague and 
 uncertain, social movement in a given direc- 
 tion. Mere intellectual comprehension may 
 guide, retard, or accelerate the great human 
 movements; it has never created them. It 
 may even be questioned whether those very 
 leaders, who have superficially appeared to 
 create and organize great and successful 
 social movements, have themselves, in most 
 cases, if in any, fully understood in all their 
 complexity the movements they themselves 
 have appeared to rule. They have been, 
 rather, themselves permeated by the great 
 [136]
 
 PARASITISM 
 
 common need; and being possessed of more 
 will, passion, intensity, or intellect, they have 
 been able to give voice to that which in others 
 was dumb, and conscious direction to that 
 which in others was unconscious desire; they 
 have been but the foremost crest of a great 
 wave of human necessity: they have not 
 created the wave which bears themselves, 
 and humanity, onwards. The artificial social 
 movements which have had their origin in the 
 arbitrary will of individuals, guided with how- 
 ever much determination and reason, have of 
 necessity proved ephemeral and abortive. 
 An Alexander might will to weld a Greece 
 and an Asia into one; a Napoleon might re- 
 solve to create of a diversified Europe one 
 consolidated state; and by dint of skill and 
 determination they might for a moment ap- 
 pear to be accomplishing that which they de- 
 sired; but the constraining individual will 
 being withdrawn, the object of their toils has 
 melted away, as the little heap of damp sand 
 gathered under the palm of a child's hand on 
 the sea-shore melts away, scattered by the 
 wind and washed out by the waves, the mo- 
 ment the hand that shaped it is withdrawn; 
 [137]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 while the small, soft, indefinite, watery frag- 
 ment of jelly-fish lying beside it, though 
 tossed hither and thither by water and wind, 
 yet retains its shape and grows, because its 
 particles are bound by an internal and organic 
 force. 
 
 Our woman's movement resembles strongly, 
 in this matter, the gigantic religious and in- 
 tellectual movement which for centuries con- 
 vulsed the life of Europe; and had, as its 
 ultimate outcome, the final emancipation of 
 the human intellect and the freedom of the 
 human spirit. Looked back upon from the 
 vantage-point of the present, it presents the 
 appearance of one vast, steady, persistent 
 movement, proceeding always in one ultimate 
 direction, as though guided by some control- 
 ling human intellect. But, to the mass of 
 human individuals taking part in it, it pre- 
 sented an appearance far otherwise. It was 
 fought out, now here, now there, by isolated 
 individuals and small groups, and often for 
 what appeared small and almost personal 
 ends, having sometimes, superficially, little in 
 common. Now it was a Giordano Bruno, 
 burnt in Rome in defense of abstract theory 
 [138]
 
 PARASITISM 
 
 with regard to the nature of the First Cause; 
 then an Albigense hurled from his rocks be- 
 cause he refused to part with the leaves of his 
 old Bible ; now a Dutch peasant woman, walk- 
 ing serenely to the stake because she refused 
 to bow her head before two crossed rods; then 
 a Servetus burnt by Protestant Calvin at 
 Geneva; or a Spinoza cut off from his tribe 
 and people because he could see nothing but 
 God anywhere; and then it was an exiled 
 Rousseau or Voltaire, or a persecuted Brad- 
 laugh; till, in our own day, the last sounds of 
 the long fight are dying about us, as fading 
 echoes, in the guise of a few puerile attempts 
 to enforce trivial disabilities on the ground of 
 abstract convictions. The vanguard of hu- 
 manity has won its battle for freedom of 
 thought. 
 
 But to the men and women taking part in 
 that mighty movement during the long cen- 
 turies of the past, probably nothing was quite 
 clear, in the majority of cases, but their own 
 immediate move. Not the leaders most cer- 
 tainly not good old Martin Luther, even when 
 he gave utterance to his immortal "I can no 
 otherwise" (the eternal justification of all 
 [139]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 reformers and social innovators!), understood 
 the whole breadth of the battlefield on which 
 they were engaged, or grasped with precision 
 the issues which were involved. The valiant 
 Englishman, who, as the flames shot up about 
 him, cried to his companion in death, "Play 
 the man, Master Ridley; we shall by God's 
 grace this day light such a candle in England, 
 as shall never be put out!" undoubtedly be- 
 lieved that the candle lighted was the mere 
 tallow rushlight of a small sectarian freedom 
 for England alone; nor perceived that what 
 he lighted was but one ray of the vast, uni- 
 versal aurora of intellectual and spiritual 
 liberty, whose light was ultimately to stream, 
 not only across England, but across the earth. 
 Nevertheless, undoubtedly, behind all these 
 limited efforts, for what appeared, super- 
 ficially, limited causes, lay, in the hearts of the 
 men and women concerned, through the ages, 
 a profound if vague consciousness of ends 
 larger than they clearly knew, to be sub- 
 served by their action; of a universal social 
 duty and a great necessity. 
 
 That the woman's movement of our day 
 has not taken its origin from any mere process 
 [140]
 
 PARASITISM 
 
 of theoretic argument; that it breaks out, now 
 here and now there, in forms divergent and 
 at times superficially almost irreconcilable; 
 that the majority of those taking part in it 
 are driven into action as the result of the im- 
 mediate pressure of the conditions of life, and 
 are not always able logically to state the na- 
 ture of all causes which propel them, or to 
 paint clearly all results of their action; so far 
 from removing it from the category of the 
 vast reorganizing movements of humanity, 
 places it in a line with them, showing how 
 vital, spontaneous, and wholly organic and 
 unartificial is its nature. 
 
 The fact that, at one point, it manifests 
 itself in a passionate, and at times almost 
 incoherent, cry for an accredited share in 
 public and social duties, while at another it 
 makes itself felt as a determined endeavor 
 after sel f -culture ; that in one land it em- 
 bodies itself mainly in a resolute endeavor to 
 enlarge the sphere of remunerative labor for 
 women, while in another it manifests itself 
 chiefly as an effort to reco-ordinate the per- 
 sonal relation of the sexes; that in one in- 
 dividual it manifests itself as a passionate and 
 [141]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 sometimes noisy struggle for liberty of per- 
 sonal action, while in another it is being 
 fought out silently in the depths of the in- 
 dividual consciousness that primal battle- 
 ground, in which all questions of reform and 
 human advance must ultimately be fought 
 and decided; all this diversity, and the fact 
 that the average woman is entirely concerned 
 in labor in her own little field, shows, not the 
 weakness, but the strength of the movement, 
 which, taken as a whole, is a movement steady 
 and persistent in one direction, the direction of 
 increased activity and culture, and towards 
 the negation of all possibility of parasitism 
 in the human female. Slowly, and uncon- 
 sciously, as the child is shaped in the womb, 
 this movement shapes itself in the bosom of 
 our time, taking its place beside those vast 
 human developments, of which men, noticing 
 their spontaneity and the co-ordination of 
 their parts, have said, in the phraseology of 
 old days, "This thing is not of man, but of 
 God." 
 
 He who to-day looks at some great Gothic 
 cathedral in its final form, seems to be look- 
 ing at that which might have been the incar- 
 [142]
 
 PARASITISM 
 
 nation of the dream of some single soul of 
 genius. But in truth, its origin was far 
 otherwise. Ages elapsed from the time the 
 first rough stone was laid as a foundation till 
 the last spire and pinnacle were shaped, and 
 the hand which laid the foundation-stone was 
 never the same as that which set the last stone 
 upon the coping. Generations often suc- 
 ceeded one another, laboring at gargoyle, rose- 
 window, and shaft, and died, leaving the work 
 to others ; the master-builder who drew up the 
 first rough outline passed away, and was suc- 
 ceeded by others, and the details of the work 
 as completed bore sometimes but faint re- 
 semblance to the work as he devised it ; no man 
 fully understood all that others had done or 
 were doing, but each labored in his place; and 
 the work as completed had unity ; it expressed 
 not the desire and necessity of one mind, but 
 of the human spirit of that age; and not less 
 essential to the existence of the building was 
 the labor of the workman who passed a life 
 of devotion in carving gargoyles or shaping 
 rose-windows, than that of the greatest master 
 who drew general outlines : perhaps it was yet 
 more heroic; because, for the master-builder, 
 [148]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 who, even if but vaguely, has an image of 
 what the work would be when the last stone 
 was laid and the last spire raised, it was easy 
 to labor with devotion and zeal, though well 
 he might know that the placing of that last 
 stone and the raising of that last spire would 
 not be his, and that the building in its full 
 beauty and strength he should never see; but 
 for the journeyman laborer who carried on his 
 duties and month by month toiled at carving 
 his own little gargoyle or shaping the traceries 
 in his own little oriel window, without any 
 complete vision, it was not so easy; neverthe- 
 less, it was through the conscientious labors of 
 such alone, through their heaps of chipped and 
 spoiled stones, which may have lain thick 
 about them, that at the last the pile was reared 
 in its strength and beauty. 
 
 For a Moses who could climb Pisgah, and, 
 though it were through a mist of bitter tears, 
 could see stretching before him the land of 
 the inheritance, a land which his feet should 
 never tread and whose fruit his hand should 
 never touch, it was yet, perhaps, not so hard 
 to turn round and die; for, as in a dream, he 
 had seen the land; but for the thousands who 
 [144]
 
 PARASITISM 
 
 could climb no Pisgah, who were to leave their 
 bones whitening in the desert, having even 
 from afar never seen the true outline of the 
 land; those who, on that long march, had not 
 even borne the Ark nor struck the timbrel, 
 but carried only their small household vessels 
 and possessions, for these it was perhaps not 
 so easy to lie down and perish in the desert, 
 knowing only that far ahead somewhere, lay 
 a Land of Promise. Nevertheless, it was by 
 the slow and sometimes wavering march of 
 such as these, that the land was reached by 
 the people at last. 
 
 For her whose insight enables her to see, 
 however vaguely, through the distance, those 
 large beatitudes towards which the struggles 
 and suffering of the women of to-day may 
 tend; who sees beyond the present, though in 
 a future she knows she herself will never en- 
 ter, an enlarged and strengthened womanhood 
 bearing forward with it a strengthened and 
 expanded race, it is not too hard to renounce 
 and labor with unshaken purpose; but for 
 those who have not that view, and struggle 
 on, animated at most by a vague conscious- 
 ness that somewhere ahead lies a large end, 
 [145]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 towards which their efforts tend; who labor 
 on patiently year after year at some poor little 
 gargoyle of a Franchise Bill, or the shaping 
 of some rough little foundation-stone of re- 
 form in education, or dress a stone (which 
 perhaps never quite fits the spot it was in- 
 tended for, and has to be thrown aside!) ; or 
 who carve away all their lives to produce a 
 corbel of some new and beautiful condition 
 in sexual relations, in the end to find it break 
 under the chisel; who, out of many failures 
 attain, perhaps, to no success, or but to one, 
 and that so small and set so much in the shade 
 that no eye will ever see it; for such as these, 
 it is perhaps not so easy to labor without 
 growing weary. 
 
 ^ Nevertheless, it is through the labors of 
 these myriad toilers, each working in her 
 own minute sphere, with her own small out- 
 look, and out of endless failures and miscar- 
 riages, that at last the enwidened and beauti- 
 fied relations of woman to life must rise, if 
 they are ever to come. 
 
 When a star-fish lies on the ground at the 
 bottom of a sloping rock it has to climb, it 
 seems to the onlooker as though there were 
 [146]
 
 PARASITISM 
 
 nothing which could stir the inert mass, and 
 no means for taking it to the top. Yet watch 
 it. Beneath its lower side, hidden from sight, 
 are a million fine tentacles; impulses of will 
 from the center radiate throughout the whole 
 body, and each tiny fiber, fine as a hair, slowly 
 extends itself, and seizes on the minute par- 
 ticle of rough rock nearest to it; now a small 
 tentacle slips its hold, and then it holds firmly, 
 and then slowly the whole inert mass rises to 
 the top. 
 
 It is often said of those who lead in this 
 attempt at the readaption of woman's rela- 
 tion to life, that they are "New Women" ; and 
 they are at times spoken of as though they 
 were a something portentous and unheard-of 
 in the order of human life. 
 
 But, the truth is, we are not new. We- 
 who lead in this movement to-day are of that 
 old, old Teutonic womanhood, which twenty 
 centuries ago plowed its march through 
 European forests and morasses beside its 
 male companion; which marched with the 
 Cimbri to Italy, and with the Franks across 
 [U7]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 the Rhine, with the Varagians into Russia, 
 and the Alamani into Switzerland; which 
 peopled Scandinavia, and penetrated to 
 Britain; whose priestesses had their shrines 
 in German forests, and gave out the oracle 
 for peace or war. We have in us the blood 
 of a womanhood that was never bought and 
 never sold; that wore no veil, and had no foot 
 bound; whose realized ideal of marriage was 
 sexual companionship and an equality in duty 
 and labor; who stood side by side with the 
 males they loved in peace or war, and whose 
 children, when they had borne them, sucked 
 manhood from their breasts, and even through 
 their fetal existence heard a brave heart beat 
 above them. We are women of a breed whose 
 racial ideal was no Helen of Troy, passed 
 passively from male hand to male hand, as 
 men pass gold or lead; but that Brynhild 
 whom Segurd found, clad in helm and byrnie, 
 the warrior maid, who gave him counsel, "the 
 deepest that ever yet was given to living 
 man," and "wrought on him to the perform- 
 ing of great deeds" ; who, when he died, raised 
 high the funeral pyre and lay down on it be- 
 side him, crying, "Nor shall the door swing 
 [148]
 
 PARASITISM 
 
 to at the heel of him as I go in beside him!" 
 We are of a race of women that of old knew 
 no fear, and feared no death; and if to-day 
 some of us have fallen on evil and degenerate 
 times, there moves in us yet the throb of the 
 old blood. If it be to-day on no physical 
 battlefield that we stand beside our men, and 
 on no march through an external forest or 
 morass that we have to lead; it is yet the old 
 spirit which, undimmed by two thousand 
 years, stirs within us in deeper and subtler 
 ways; it is yet the cry of the old, free North- 
 ern woman which makes the world to-day. 
 Though the battle be now for us all, in the 
 laboratory or the workshop, in the forum or 
 the study, in the assembly and in the mart, 
 with the pen and not the sword, of the head 
 and not the arm; we still stand side by side' 
 with the men we love, "to dare with them in 
 war and to suffer with them in peace," as the 
 Roman wrote of our old Northern woman- 
 hood. 
 
 Those women of whom the old writers tell 
 
 us, who, barefooted and white robed, led 
 
 their northern hosts on that long march to 
 
 Italy, were animated by the thought that they 
 
 [1*9]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 t 
 
 led their people to a land of warmer sunshine 
 and richer fruitage; we, to-day, believe we 
 have caught sight of a land bathed in a nobler 
 than any material sunlight, with a fruitage 
 richer than any which the senses only can 
 grasp. And behind us, we believe, there fol- 
 lows a longer train than any composed of our 
 own race and people; the sound of the tread 
 we hear behind us is that of all earth's women, 
 bearing within them the entire race. The 
 footpath, yet hardly perceptible, which we 
 tread down to-day, will, we believe, be life's 
 broadest and straightest road, along which 
 the children of men will pass to a higher co- 
 ordination and harmony. The banner which 
 we unfurl to-day is not new: it is the stand- 
 ard of the old, free, monogamous laboring 
 woman, which, twenty hundred years ago, 
 floated over the forests of Europe. We 
 shall bear it on, each generation as it falls 
 passing it into the hand of that which follows, 
 till we plant it so high that all nations of the 
 world shall see it; till the women of the hum- 
 blest human races shall be gathered beneath 
 its folds, and no child enter life that was not 
 born within its shade. 
 
 [150]
 
 PARASITISM 
 
 We are not new! If you would under- 
 stand us, go back two thousand years, and 
 study our descent; our breed is our explana- 
 tion. We are the daughters of our fathers 
 as well as of our mothers. In our dreams 
 we still hear the clash of the shields of our 
 forebears as they struck them together be- 
 fore battle and raised the shout of "Free- 
 dom!" In our dreams it is with us still, and 
 when we wake it breaks from our own lips! 
 We are the daughters of those men. 
 
 But, it may be said, "Are there not women 
 among you who would use the shibboleth of 
 freedom and labor merely as a means for 
 opening a door to a greater and more highly 
 flavored self-indulgence, to a more lucrative 
 and enjoyable parasitism? Are there not 
 women who, under the guise of 'work,' are 
 seeking only increased means of pleasure and 
 self-indulgence; to whom intellectual training 
 and the opening to new fields of labor side 
 by side with man, mean merely new means of 
 self-advertisement and parasitic success?" 
 
 We answer: There may be such truly; 
 among us but not of us! This at least is 
 true, that we, ourselves, are seldom deceived 
 [151]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 by them ; the sheep generally recognize the wolf 
 however carefully fitted the sheepskin under 
 which he hides, though the onlookers may not ; 
 and though the sheep may not always be able 
 to drive him from the flock! The outer world 
 may be misled; we, who stand shoulder to 
 shoulder with them, know them; they are not 
 many; neither are they new. They are one 
 of the oldest survivals, and among the most 
 primitive relics in the race. They are as old 
 as Loki among the gods, as Lucifer among 
 the Sons of the Morning, as the serpent in the 
 Garden of Eden, as pain and dislocation in 
 web of human life. 
 
 Such women are as old as that first primi- 
 tive woman who, when she went with her fel- 
 lows to gather wood for the common house- 
 hold, put grass in the center of the bundle 
 that she might appear to carry as much as 
 they, yet carry nothing; she is as old as the 
 first man who threw away his shield in battle, 
 and yet, when it was over, gathered with the 
 victors to share the spoils; as old as cowardice 
 and lust in the human and animal world; 
 only to cease from being when, perhaps, an 
 [153]
 
 PARASITISM 
 
 enlarged and expanded humanity shall have 
 cast the last slough of its primitive skin. 
 
 Every army has its camp-followers, not 
 among its accredited soldiers, but who follow 
 in its train, ready to attack and rifle the fallen 
 on either side. To lookers-on, they may ap- 
 pear soldiers; but the soldier knows who they 
 are. At the Judean supper there was one 
 Master, and to the onlooker there may have 
 seemed twelve apostles; in truth only twelve 
 were of the company, and one was not of it. 
 There has always been this thirteenth figure 
 at every sacramental gathering, since the 
 world began, wherever the upholders of a 
 great cause have broken spiritual bread; but 
 it may be questioned whether in any instance 
 this thirteenth figure has been able to destroy, 
 or even vitally to retard, any great human 
 movement. Judas could betray his Master by 
 a kiss ; but he could not silence the voice which 
 for a thousand years rang out of that Judean 
 grave. Again and again, in social, political, 
 and intellectual movements, the betrayer be- 
 trays ; and the cause marches on over the body 
 of the man. 
 
 [153]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 There are women, as there are men, whose 
 political, social, intellectual, or philanthropic 
 labors are put on, as the harlot puts on paint, 
 and for the same purpose, but they can no 
 more retard the progress of the great bulk 
 of vital and sincere womanhood, than the drift- 
 wood on the surface of a mighty river can 
 ultimately prevent its waters from reaching 
 the sea. 
 
 [154]
 
 WOMAN AND WAR
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 WOMAN AND WAS 
 
 IT may also be said, "Granting fully that 
 you are right, that, as woman's old fields of 
 labor slip from her, she must grasp new, or 
 must become wholly dependent on her sex- 
 ual function alone, all the other elements of 
 human nature in her becoming atrophied 
 and arrested through lack of exercise, and 
 granting that her evolution being arrested, 
 the evolution of the whole race will be 
 also arrested in her person; granting all this 
 to the full, and allowing that the bulk of hu- 
 man labor tends to become more and more 
 intellectual and less and less purely mechan- 
 ical as perfected machinery takes the place of 
 crude human exertion; and that therefore if 
 woman is to be saved from degeneration and 
 parasitism, and the body of humanity from 
 arrest, she must receive a training which will 
 cultivate all the intellectual and all the phys- 
 [157]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 ical faculties and be allowed freely to em- 
 ploy them; nevertheless, would it not be pos- 
 sible, and be well, that a dividing line of some 
 kind should be drawn between the occupa- 
 tions of men and of women? Would it not be 
 possible that woman should retain agricul- 
 ture, textile manufactory, trade, domestic 
 management, the education of youth, and 
 medicine, in addition to child-bearing, as her 
 exclusive fields of toil; while to the male 
 should be left the study of abstract science, 
 law and war, and statecraft; as of old, man 
 took war and the chase, and woman absorbed 
 the further labors of life? Why should there 
 not be again a fair and even division in the 
 field of social labor?" 
 
 Superficially, this suggestion appears ra- 
 tional, having at least this to recommend it, 
 that it appears to harmonize with the course 
 of human evolution in the past; but closely 
 examined, it will, we think, be found to have 
 no practical or scientific basis, and to be out 
 of harmony with the conditions of modern 
 life. In ancient and primitive societies, the 
 mere larger size and muscular strength of 
 man in certain mechanical directions, and 
 [158]
 
 WOMAN AND WAR 
 
 woman's incessant physical activity in child- 
 bearing and suckling, made almost inevita- 
 ble such a sexual division of labor in almost 
 all countries, save perhaps in ancient Egypt. 1 
 Woman naturally took the heavy agricultural 
 and domestic labors, which were yet more con- 
 sistent with the continual dependence of in- 
 fant life on her own, than those of man in 
 war and the chase. There was nothing arti- 
 ficial in such a division; it threw the heaviest 
 burden of the most wearying and unexciting 
 forms of social labor on woman, but under it 
 both sexes labored, and each transmitted to 
 the other, through inheritance, the fruit of 
 its slowly expanding and always exerted 
 powers ; and the race progressed. 
 
 Individual women might sometimes, and 
 even often, become the warriors or chiefs of 
 tribes; the King of Ashantee might train his 
 terrible regiment of females; and men might 
 now and again plant and weave for their 
 children: but in the main, and in most socie- 
 ties, the division of labor was just, natural, 
 
 1 The division of labor between the sexes in Ancient Egypt 
 and other exceptional countries, is a matter of much interest, 
 which cannot here be entered on. 
 
 [159]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 beneficial, and it was inevitable that such a 
 division should take place. Were to-day a 
 band of civilized men, women, and infants 
 thrown down absolutely naked and defense- 
 less in some desert, and cut off hopelessly 
 from all external civilized life, undoubtedly 
 very much the old division of labor would, at 
 least for a time, reassert itself. Men would 
 look about for stones and sticks with which to 
 make weapons, with which to repel wild beasts 
 and enemies, and would go a-hunting meat 
 and tend the beasts when tamed ; l women 
 would suckle their children, cook the meat 
 men brought, build, shelters, look for roots 
 and if possible cultivate them. There certainly 
 would be no parasite in the society. The 
 woman who refused to labor for her offspring, 
 and the man who refused to hunt or defend 
 society would not be supported by their fel- 
 lows, would soon be extinguished by want. 
 As wild beasts were extinguished and others 
 tamed and the materials for war improved, 
 fewer men would be needed for hunting and 
 war; then they would remain at home and aid 
 
 1 The young captured animals would probably be tamed and 
 reared by the women. 
 
 [160]
 
 WOMAN AND WAR 
 
 in building and planting; many women would 
 retire into the house to perfect domestic toil 
 and handicrafts, and on a small scale the 
 common ancient evolution of society would 
 practically repeat itself. But for the present 
 we see no such natural and spontaneous di- 
 vision of labor based on natural sexual dis- 
 tinctions in the new fields of intellectual or 
 delicately skilled manual labor, which are 
 taking the place of the old. 
 
 It is possible, though at present there is 
 nothing to give indication of such a fact, and 
 it seems highly improbable, that, in some 
 subtle manner now incomprehensible, there 
 might tend to be a subtle correlation between 
 that condition of the brain and nervous sys- 
 tem which accompanies ability in the direction 
 of certain forms of mental, social labor and 
 the particular form of reproductive function 
 possessed by an individual. It may be that, 
 inexplicable as it seems, there may ultimately 
 be found to be some connection between that 
 condition of the brain and nervous system 
 which fits the individual for the study of the 
 higher mathematics, let us say, and the nature 
 of their sex attributes. The mere fact that, of 
 [161]
 
 the handful of women who, up to the present, 
 have received training and been allowed to 
 devote themselves to abstract study, several 
 have excelled in the higher mathematics, 
 proves of necessity no pre-eminent tendency 
 on the part of the female sex in the direction 
 of mathematics, as compared to labor in the 
 fields of statesmanship, administration, or law, 
 as into these fields, there has been practically 
 no admittance for women. It is sometimes 
 stated, that as several women of genius in 
 modern times have sought to find expression 
 for their creative powers in the art of fiction, 
 there must be some inherent connection in 
 the human brain between the ovarian sex 
 function and the art of fiction. The fact is 
 that modern fiction, being merely a descrip- 
 tion of human life in any of its phases, and 
 being the only art that can be exercised with- 
 out special training or special appliances, 
 and produced in the moments stolen from 
 the multifarious, brain-destroying occupations 
 which fill the average woman's life, they have 
 been driven to find this outlet for their pow- 
 ers as the only one presenting itself. How 
 far otherwise might have been the directions 
 [162]
 
 WOMAN AND WAR 
 
 in which their genius would naturally have 
 expressed itself can be known only to the 
 women themselves; what the world has lost 
 by that compulsory expression of genius, in 
 a form which may not have been its most nat- 
 ural form of expression, or only one of its 
 forms, no one can ever know. Even in the 
 little third-rate novelist whose works cumber 
 the ground, we see often a pathetic figure when 
 we recognize that beneath that failure in a 
 complex and difficult art, may lie buried a 
 sound legislator, an able architect, an orig- 
 inal scientific investigator, or a good judge. 
 Scientifically speaking, it is as unproven that 
 there is any organic relation between the brain 
 of the female and the production of art in the 
 form of fiction, as that there is an organic re- 
 lation between the hand of woman and the 
 typewriter. Both the creative writer and the 
 typist, in their respective spheres, are merely 
 finding outlets for their powers in the direc- 
 tion of least mental resistance. The tendency 
 of women at the present day to undertake 
 certain forms of labor proves only that in the 
 crabbed, walled-in, and bound conditions sur- 
 rounding woman at the present day, these are 
 [163]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 the lines along which action is most possible 
 to her. 
 
 It may possibly be that, in future ages, 
 when the male and female forms have been 
 placed in like intellectual conditions, with like 
 stimuli, like trainings and like rewards, some 
 aptitudes may be found running parallel with 
 the line of sex function when humanity is 
 viewed as a whole. It may possibly be that, 
 when the historian of the future looks back 
 over the history of the intellectually freed and 
 active sexes for many generations, a decided 
 preference of the female intellect for mathe- 
 matics, engineering, or statecraft may be 
 made clear; and that a like marked inclina- 
 tion in the male to excel in acting, music, or as- 
 tronomy may by careful and large compar- 
 ison be shown. But, for the present, we have 
 no adequate scientific data from which to 
 draw any conclusion, and any attempt to di- 
 vide the occupations in which male and fe- 
 male intellects and wills should be employed, 
 must be to attempt a purely artificial and arbi- 
 trary division : a division not more rational and 
 scientific than an attempt to determine by the 
 color of his eyes and the shape and strength of 
 [164]
 
 WOMAN AND WAR 
 
 his legs, whether a lad should be an astronomer 
 or an engraver. 
 
 Those physical differences among mankind 
 which divide races and nations not merely 
 those differences, enormously greater as they 
 are generally, than any physical differences 
 between male and female of the same race 
 which divide the Jew and the Swede, the Jap- 
 anese and the Englishman, but even those 
 subtle physical differences which divide 
 closely allied races such as the English and 
 German often appear to be allied with subtle 
 differences in intellectual aptitudes. Yet 
 even with regard to these differences, it is al- 
 most impossible to determine scientifically in 
 how far they are the result of national tradi- 
 tions, environment, and education, and in 
 how far they run parallel with the differences 
 in physical conformation. 1 
 
 * In thinking of physical sex differences, the civilized man of 
 modern times has always to guard himself against being un- 
 consciously misled by the very exaggerated external sex differ- 
 ences which our unnatural method of sex clothing and dressing 
 the hair produces. The unclothed and natural human male 
 and female bodies are not more divided from each other than 
 those of the lion and lioness. Our remote Saxon ancestors, 
 with their great white bodies and flowing hair worn long by 
 both sexes, were but little distinguished from each other; while 
 
 [165]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 No study of the mere physical differences 
 between individuals of different races would 
 have enabled us to arrive at any knowledge 
 of their mental aptitude; nor does the fact 
 that certain individuals of a given human va- 
 riety have certain aptitudes form a rational 
 ground for compelling all individuals of that 
 variety to undertake a certain form of labor. 
 
 No analysis, however subtle, of the physical 
 conformation of the Jew could have suggested 
 a priori, and still less could have proved, 
 apart from ages of practical experience, that, 
 running parallel with any physical character- 
 istics which may distinguish him from his fel- 
 lows, was an innate and unique intellectual 
 
 among their modern descendants the short haired, darkly 
 clothed, manifestly two-legged male differs absolutely from the 
 usually long-haired, color bedizened, much skirted female. 
 Were the structural differences between male and female really 
 one-half as marked as the artificial visual differences, they 
 would be greater than those dividing, not merely any species of 
 man from each other, but as great as those which divide orders 
 in the animal world. Only a mind exceedingly alert and ana- 
 lytical can fail ultimately to be misled by habitual visual mis- 
 representation. There is not, probably, one man or woman in 
 twenty thousand who is not powerfully influenced in modern 
 life in their conception of the differences, physical and intel- 
 lectual, dividing the human male and female, by the grotesque 
 exaggerations of modern attire and artificial manners. 
 
 [166]
 
 WOMAN AND WAR 
 
 gift in the direction of religion. The fact 
 that, during three thousand years, from Moses 
 to Isaiah, through Jesus and Paul, on to 
 Spinoza, the Jewish race has produced men 
 who have given half the world its religious 
 faith and impetus, proves that, somewhere 
 and somehow, whether connected organically 
 with that physical organization that marks the 
 Jew, or as the result of his traditions and 
 training, there does go this gift in the matter 
 of religion. But, on the other hand, we find 
 millions of Jews who are totally and mark- 
 edly deficient in it, and to base any practical 
 legislation for the individual even on this 
 proven intellectual aptitude of the race as 
 a whole would be manifestly as ridiculous as 
 abortive. 
 
 Yet more markedly, with the German 
 no consideration of his physical peculiarities, 
 though it proceeded to the subtlest analysis 
 of nerve, bone, and muscle, could in the pres- 
 ent stage of our knowledge have proved to 
 us what generations of experience appear to 
 have proved, that, with that organization 
 which constitutes the German, goes a unique 
 aptitude for music. There is always the 
 [167]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 possibility of mistaking the result of train- 
 ing and external circumstance for inherent 
 tendency, but when we consider the passion 
 for music which the German has shown, and 
 when we consider that the greatest musicians 
 the world has seen, from Bach, Beethoven, 
 and Mozart to Wagner, have been of that 
 race, it appears highly probable that such a 
 correlation between the German organization 
 and the intellectual gift of music does exist. 
 Similar intellectual peculiarities seem to be 
 connoted by the external differences which 
 mark off other races from each other. Nev- 
 ertheless, if persons of all of these nation- 
 alities gathered in one colony, any attempt to 
 legislate for their restriction to certain forms 
 of intellectual labor on the ground of their 
 apparently proved national aptitudes or dis- 
 abilities, would be regarded as insane. To 
 insist that all Jews, and none but Jews, should 
 lead and instruct in religious matters; that 
 all Englishmen, and none but Englishmen, 
 should engage in trade; that each German 
 should make his living by music, and none but 
 a German allowed to practise it, would drive 
 to despair the unfortunate individual Eng- 
 [168]
 
 WOMAN AND WAR 
 
 lishman, whose most marked deficiency might 
 be in the direction of finance and bartering 
 trade power; the Jew, whose religious in- 
 stincts might be entirely rudimentary; or the 
 German, who could not distinguish one note 
 from another ; and the society as a whole would 
 be an irremediable loser, in one of the heaviest 
 of all forms of social loss the loss of the full 
 use of the highest capacities of all its mem- 
 bers. 
 
 It may be that with sexes as with races, the 
 subtlest physical differences between them may 
 have their mental correlatives ; but no abstract 
 consideration of the human body in relation to 
 its functions of sex can, in the present state 
 of our knowledge, show us what intellectual 
 capacities tend to vary with sexual structure, 
 and nothing in the present or past condition of 
 male or female gives us more than the very 
 faintest possible indication of the relation of 
 their intellectual aptitudes and their sexual 
 functions. And even if it were proved by cen- 
 turies of experiment that with the possession 
 of the uterine function of sex tends to go ex- 
 ceptional intellectual capacity in the direction 
 of mathematics rather than natural history, 
 [169]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 or an inclination for statecraft rather than 
 for mechanical invention; were it proved that, 
 generally speaking and as a whole, out of 
 twenty thousand women devoting themselves 
 to law and twenty thousand to medicine, they 
 tended to achieve relatively more in the field of 
 law than of medicine, there would yet be no 
 possible healthy or rational ground for restrict- 
 ing the activities of the individual female to 
 that line in which the average female ap- 
 peared rather more frequently to excel. 1 
 
 That even one individual in a society should 
 be debarred from undertaking that form of 
 social toil for which it is most fitted, makes an 
 unnecessary deficit in the general social as- 
 sets. That one male Froebel should be pro- 
 hibited or hampered in his labor as an edu- 
 cator of infancy, on the ground that infantile 
 instruction was the field of the female; that 
 
 i Minds not keenly analytical are always apt to mistake mere 
 correlation of appearance with causative sequence. We have 
 heard it gravely asserted that between potatoes, pigs, mud 
 cabins, and Irishmen there was an organic connection: but we 
 who have lived in Colonies know that within two generations 
 the pure-bred descendant of the mud cabin becomes often the 
 successful politician, wealthy financier, or great judge; and 
 shows no more predilection for potatoes, pigs, and mud cabins 
 than men of any other race. 
 
 [170]
 
 WOMAN AND WAR 
 
 one female with gifts in the direction of state 
 administration, should be compelled to in- 
 struct an infants' school, perhaps without any 
 gift for so doing, is a running to waste of 
 social lifeblood. 
 
 Free trade in labor and equality of train- 
 ing, intellectual or physical, is essential if the 
 organic aptitudes of a sex or class are to be 
 determined. And our demand to-day is that 
 natural conditions, inexorably, but benefi- 
 cently, may determine the labors of each indi- 
 vidual, and not artificial restrictions. 
 
 As there is no need to legislate that Hindus, 
 being generally supposed to have a natural 
 incapacity for field sports, shall not betake 
 themselves to them for, if they have no ca- 
 pacity, they will fail; and, as in spite of the 
 Hindus' supposed general incapacity for 
 sport, it is possible for an individual Hindu 
 to become the noted batsman of his age; so, 
 there is no need to legislate that women should 
 be restricted in her choice of fields of labor; 
 for the organic incapacity of the individual, 
 if it exist, will legislate far more strongly 
 than any artificial, legal, or social obstruction 
 can do; and it may be that the one individual 
 [171]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 in ten thousand who selects a field not gen- 
 erally sought by their fellows will enrich 
 humanity by the result of an especial genius. 
 Allowing all to start from the one point in 
 the world of intellectual culture and labor, 
 with our ancient Mother Nature sitting as 
 umpire, distributing the prizes and scratching 
 from the lists the incompetent, is all we 
 demand, but we demand it determinedly. 
 Throw the puppy into the water: if it swims, 
 well; if it sinks, well; but do not tie a rope 
 round its throat and weight it with a brick, 
 and then assert its incapacity to keep afloat. 
 
 For the present, we take all labor for our 
 province! 
 
 From the judge's seat to the legislator's 
 chair; from the statesman's closet to the mer- 
 chant's office; from the chemist's laboratory 
 to the astronomer's tower, there is no post or 
 form of toil for which it is not our intention 
 to attempt to fit ourselves; and there is no 
 closed door we do not intend to force open; 
 and there is no fruit in the garden of knowl- 
 edge it is not our determination to eat. Act- 
 ing in us, and through us, nature will merci- 
 lessly expose to us our deficiencies in the field 
 [172]
 
 WOMAN AND WAR 
 
 of human toil and reveal to us our powers. 
 And, for to-day, we take att labor for our 
 province! 
 
 But, it may be said: "What then of war, 
 that struggle of the human creature to attain 
 its ends by physical force and at the price of 
 the life of others: will you take part in that 
 also?" We reply: Yes; more particularly in 
 that field we intend to play our part. We 
 have always borne part of the weight of war, 
 and the major part. It is not that in prim- 
 itive times we suffered from the destruction 
 of the fields we tilled and the houses we built ; 
 it is not that later as domestic laborers and 
 producers, though unwaged, we, in taxes and 
 material loss and additional labor, paid as 
 much as our male towards the cost of war; 
 it is not that in a comparatively insignificant 
 manner, as nurses of the wounded in modern 
 times, or now and again as warrior chieftain- 
 esses and leaders in primitive and other so- 
 cieties, we have borne our part; nor is it even 
 because the spirit of resolution in its women, 
 and their willingness to endure, has in all ages, 
 again and again largely determined the fate 
 of a race that goes to war, that we demand 
 [173]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 our controlling right where war is concerned. 
 Our relation to war is far more intimate, per- 
 sonal, and indissoluble than this. Men have 
 made boomerangs, bows, swords, or guns with 
 which to destroy one another; we have made 
 the men who destroyed and were destroyed! 
 We have in all ages produced, at an enormous 
 cost, the primal munition of war, without which 
 no other would exist. There is no battlefield 
 on earth, nor ever has been, howsoever covered 
 with slain, which it has not cost the women of 
 the race more in actual bloodshed and anguish 
 to supply, than it has cost the men who lie 
 there. We pay the first cost on all human 
 life. 
 
 In supplying the men for the carnage of a 
 battlefield, women have not merely lost actu- 
 ally more blood, and gone through a more 
 acute anguish and weariness, in the long 
 months of bearing and in the final agony of 
 child-birth, than has been experienced by the 
 men who cover it; but, in the long months of 
 rearing that follow, the women of the race go 
 through a long, patiently endured strain which 
 no knapsacked soldier on his longest march 
 has ever more than equalled; while, even in the 
 [174]
 
 WOMAN AND WAR 
 
 matter of death, in all civilized societies, the 
 probability that the average woman will die in 
 child-birth is immeasurably greater than the 
 probability that the average male will die in 
 battle. 
 
 There is, perhaps, no woman, whether she 
 have borne children, or be merely potentially 
 a child-bearer, who could look down upon a 
 battlefield covered with slain, but the thought 
 would rise in her, "So many mothers' sons I 
 So many young bodies brought into the world 
 to lie there! So many months of weariness 
 and pain while bones and muscles were shaped 
 within I So many hours of anguish and strug- 
 gle that breath might be! So many baby 
 mouths drawing life at women's breasts; all 
 this, that men might lie with glazed eyeballs, 
 and swollen faces, and fixed, blue, unclosed 
 mouths, and great limbs tossed this, that an 
 acre of ground might be manured with human 
 flesh, that next year's grass or poppies or 
 karoo bushes may spring up greener and 
 redder, where they have lain, or that the sand 
 of a plain may have a glint of white bones!" 
 And we cry, "Without an inexorable cause, 
 this must not be!" No woman who is a 
 [175]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 woman says of a human body, "It is noth- 
 ing!" 
 
 On that day when the woman takes her 
 place beside the man in the governance and ar- 
 rangement of external affairs of her race will 
 also be that day that heralds the death of war 
 as a means of arranging human differences. 
 No tinsel of trumpets and flags will ultimately 
 seduce women into the insanity of recklessly 
 destroying life, or gild the willful taking of 
 life with any other name than that of murder, 
 whether it be the slaughter of the million or of 
 one by one. And this will be, not because with 
 the sexual function of maternity necessarily 
 goes in the human creature a deeper moral in- 
 sight, or a loftier type of social instinct than 
 that which accompanies the paternal. Men 
 have in all ages led as nobly as women in many 
 paths of heroic virtue, and toward the higher 
 social sympathies; in certain ages, being freer 
 and more widely cultured, they have led 
 further and better. The fact that woman has 
 no inherent all-round moral superiority over 
 her male companion, or naturally on all points 
 any higher social instinct, is perhaps most 
 clearly exemplified by one curious very small 
 [176]
 
 WOMAN AND WAR 
 
 fact: the two terms signifying intimate human 
 relationships which in almost all human lan- 
 guages bear the most sinister and antisocial 
 significance are both terms which have as their 
 root the term "mother," and denote feminine 
 relationships the words "mother-in-law" and 
 "step-mother." 
 
 In general humanity, in the sense of social 
 solidarity, and in magnanimity, the male has 
 continually proved himself at least the equal of 
 the female. 
 
 Nor will women shrink from war because 
 they lack courage. Earth's women of every 
 generation have faced suffering and death with 
 an equanimity that no soldier on a battlefield 
 has ever surpassed and few have equalled ; and 
 where war has been to preserve life, or land, or 
 freedom, rather than for aggrandisement and 
 power, unparasitised and laboring women have 
 in all ages known how to bear an active part, 
 and die. 
 
 Nor will woman's influence militate against 
 war because in the future woman will not be 
 able physically to bear her part in it. The 
 smaller size of her muscle, which might 
 severely have disadvantaged her when war was 
 [177]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 conducted with a battle-axe or sword and hand 
 to hand, would now little or not at all affect 
 her. If intent on training for war, she might 
 acquire the skill for guiding a Maxim or shoot- 
 ing down a foe with a Lee-Metford at four 
 thousand yards as ably as any male; and un- 
 doubtedly, it has not been only the peasant girl 
 of France, who has carried latent and hid in 
 her person the gifts that would make the great 
 general. If our European nations should con- 
 tinue in their present semi-civilized condition 
 a few generations longer, it is highly probable 
 that as financiers, as managers of the commis- 
 sariat department, as inspectors of provisions 
 and clothing for the army, women may prob- 
 ably play a very leading part ; and that the na- 
 tion which is the first to employ women may 
 be placed at a vast advantage over its fellows 
 in time of war. It is not because of woman's 
 cowardice, incapacity, nor, above all, because 
 of her general superior virtue, that she will end 
 war when her voice is fully and clearly heard 
 in the governance of states it is because, on 
 this one point, and on this point almost alone, 
 the knowledge of woman, simply as woman, is 
 [178]
 
 WOMAN AND WAR 
 
 superior to that of man ; she knows the history 
 of human flesh; she knows its cost; he does 
 not. 1 
 
 In a besieged city, it might well happen that 
 men in the streets might seize upon statues 
 and marble carvings from public buildings and 
 galleries and hurl them in to stop the breaches 
 made in their ramparts by the enemy, uncon- 
 sideringly and merely because they came first 
 to hand, not valuing them more than had they 
 been paving-stones. One man, however, could 
 not do this the sculptor. He, who, though 
 there might be no work of his own chisel among 
 them, yet knew what each of these works of art 
 had cost, knew by experience the long years of 
 struggle and study and the infinitude of toil 
 which had gone to the shaping of even one 
 limb, to the carving of even one perfected out- 
 line, he could never so use them without 
 thought or care. Instinctively he would seek 
 
 * It is noteworthy that even Catherine of Russia, a ruler and 
 statesman of a virile and uncompromising type, and not usually 
 troubled with moral scruples, yet refused with indignation the 
 offer of Frederick of Prussia to pay her heavily for a small 
 number of Russian recruits in an age when the hiring out of 
 soldiers was common among the sovereigns of Europe. 
 
 [179]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 to throw in household goods, even gold and 
 silver, all the city held, before he sacrificed its 
 works of art! 
 
 Men's bodies are our woman's works of art. 
 Given to us power to control, we will never 
 carelessly throw them in to fill up the gaps in 
 human relationships made by international 
 ambitions and greeds. The thought would 
 never come to us as women, "Cast in men's 
 bodies; settle the thing sol" Arbitration and 
 compensation would as naturally occur to her 
 as cheaper and simpler methods of bridging 
 the gaps in national relationships, as to the 
 sculptor it would occur to throw in anything 
 rather than statuary, though he might be 
 driven to that at last ! 
 
 This is one of those phases of human life, 
 not very numerous, but very important, to- 
 wards which the man as man, and the woman 
 as woman, on the mere ground of their differ- 
 ent sexual function with regard to reproduc- 
 tion, stand, and must stand, at a somewhat dif- 
 fering angle. The physical creation of human 
 life, which, in as far as the male is concerned, 
 consists in a few moments of physical pleasure, 
 to the female must always signify months of 
 [180]
 
 WOMAN AND WAR 
 
 pressure and physical endurance, crowned with 
 danger to life. To the male, the giving of life 
 is a laugh; to the female, blood, anguish, and 
 sometimes death. Here we touch one of the 
 few yet important differences between man 
 and woman as such. 
 
 The twenty thousand men prematurely slain 
 on a field of battle, mean, to the women of their 
 race, twenty thousand human creatures to be 
 borne within them for months, given birth to 
 in anguish, fed from their breasts and reared 
 with toil, if the numbers of the tribe and the 
 strength of the nation are to be maintained. 
 In nations continually at war, incessant and 
 unbroken child-bearing is by war imposed on 
 all women if the state is to survive ; and when- 
 ever war occurs, if numbers are to be main- 
 tained, there must be an increased child-bear- 
 ing and rearing. This throws upon woman as 
 woman a war tax, compared with which all 
 that the male expends in military preparations 
 is comparatively light. 
 
 The relations of the female towards the pro- 
 duction of human life influence undoubtedly 
 even her relation towards animal and all life. 
 "It is a fine day, let us go out and kill some- 
 [181]
 
 thing!" cries the typical male of certain races, 
 instinctively; "There is a living thing, it will 
 die if it is not cared for," says the average 
 woman, almost equally instinctively. It is 
 true that the woman will sacrifice as merci- 
 lessly, as cruelly, the life of a hated rival or an 
 enemy, as any male; but she always knows 
 what she is doing , and the value of the life she 
 takes! There is no light-hearted, careless en- 
 joyment in the sacrifice of life to the normal 
 woman; her instinct, instructed by experience, 
 steps in to prevent it. She always knows what 
 life costs; and that it is more easy to destroy 
 than create it. 
 
 It is also true, that, from the loftiest stand- 
 point, the condemnation of war which has 
 arisen in the human spirit, is in no sense related 
 to any particular form of sex function. The 
 man and the woman alike, who with Isaiah on 
 the hills of Palestine, or the Indian Buddha 
 under his bo-tree, have seen the essential unity 
 of all sentient life; and who therefore see in 
 war but a symptom of that crude disco-ordina- 
 tion of life on earth, not yet at one with itself, 
 which affects humanity in these early stages of 
 its growth; and who are compelled to regard 
 [18*]
 
 WOMAN AND WAR 
 
 as the ultimate goal of the race, though yet 
 perhaps far distant across the ridges of in- 
 numerable coming ages, that harmony between 
 all forms of conscious life, metaphorically pre- 
 figured by the ancient Hebrew, when he cried, 
 "The wolf shall dwell with the lamb; and the 
 leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the 
 calf and the young lion and the fatling to- 
 gether, and a little child shall lead them!" 
 to the individual, whether man or woman, who 
 has reached this standpoint, there is no need 
 for enlightenment from the instincts of tne 
 child-bearers of society as such; their con- 
 demnation of war, rising not so much from 
 the fact that it is a wasteful destruction of 
 human flesh, as that it is an indication of the 
 non-existence of that co-ordination, the har- 
 mony which is summed up in the cry, "My lit- 
 tle children, love one another." 
 
 But for the vast bulk of humanity, probably 
 for generations to come, the instinctive antag- 
 onism of the human child-bearer to reckless 
 destruction of that which she has at so much 
 cost produced will probably be necessary to 
 educate the race to any clear conception of the 
 bestiality and insanity of war. 
 [183]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 War will pass when intellectual culture and 
 activity have made possible to the female an 
 equal share in the control and governance of 
 modern national life; it will probably not pass 
 away much sooner; its extinction will not be 
 delayed much longer. 
 
 It is especially in the domain of war that we, 
 the bearers of men's bodies, who supply its 
 most valuable munition, who, not amid the 
 clamor and ardor of battle, but singly, and 
 alone, with a three-in-the-morning courage, 
 shed our blood and face death that the battle- 
 field might have its food, a food more precious 
 to us than our heart's blood ; it is we especially 
 who, in the domain of war, have our word to 
 say, a word no man can say for us. It is our 
 intention to enter into the domain of war and 
 to labor there till in the course of generations 
 we have extinguished it. 
 
 If to-day we claim all labor for our province, 
 yet more especially do we claim those fields in 
 which the difference in the reproductive func- 
 tion between man and woman may place male 
 and female at a slightly different angle with 
 regard to certain facts of human life. 
 
 [184]
 
 SEX DIFFERENCES
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 SEX DIFFERENCES 
 
 IF we examine the physical phenomenon of 
 sex as it manifests itself in the human creature, 
 we find, in the first stages of the individual's 
 existence, no difference discernible, by any 
 means we have at present at our command, be- 
 tween those germs which are ultimately to be- 
 come male or female. Later, in the fetal life, 
 at birth, and through infancy, though the 
 organs of sex serve to distinguish the male 
 from the female, there is in the general struc- 
 ture and working of the organism little or 
 nothing to divide the sexes. 
 
 Even when puberty is reached, with its 
 enormous development of sexual and repro- 
 ductive activity modifying those parts of the 
 organism with which it is concerned, and pro- 
 ducing certain secondary sexual characteristics, 
 there yet remains a major extent of the human 
 body and of physical function little, or not at 
 [187]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 all, affected by sex modification. The eye, the 
 ear, the sense of touch, the general organs of 
 nutrition and respiration and volition are in 
 the main identical, and often differ far more 
 in persons of the same sex than in those of op- 
 posite sexes; even on the dissecting-table the 
 tissues of the male and female are often 
 wholly indistinguishable. 
 
 It is when we consider the reproductive 
 organs themselves and their forms of activity, 
 and such parts of the organism modified di- 
 rectly in relation to them, that a real and im- 
 portant difference is found to exist, radical 
 though absolutely complemental. It is exactly 
 as we approach the reproductive functions that 
 the male and female bodies differ; exactly as 
 we recede from them that they become more 
 and more similar, and even absolutely identical. 
 Taking the eye, perhaps the most highly de- 
 veloped, complex organ in the body, and, if an 
 organ may be allowed the term, the most in- 
 tellectual organ of sense, we find it remains 
 the same in male and female in structure, in 
 appearance, and in function throughout life; 
 while the breast, closely connected with repro- 
 duction, though absolutely identical in both 
 [188]
 
 SEX DIFFERENCES 
 
 forms in infancy, assumes a widely different 
 organization when reproductive activity is 
 actually concerned. 
 
 When we turn to the psychic phase of- 
 human life, an exactly analogous phenomenon 
 presents itself. The intelligence, emotions, 
 and desires of the human infant at birth differ 
 not at all perceptibly, as its sex may be male 
 or female; and such psychic differences as ap- 
 pear to exist in later childhood are undoubtedly 
 very largely the result of artificial training, 
 forcing on the appearance of psychic sexual 
 divergencies long before they would tend spon- 
 taneously to appear; as where sports and oc- 
 cupations are interdicted to young children on 
 the ground of their supposed sexual unfitness ; 
 as when an infant female is forcibly prevented 
 from climbing or shouting, and the infant male 
 from amusing himself with needle and thread 
 or dolls. Even in the fully adult human, and 
 in spite of difference of training, the psychic 
 activities over a large extent of life appear to 
 be absolutely identical. The male and female 
 brains acquire languages, solve mathematical 
 problems, and master scientific detail in a man- 
 ner wholly indistinguishable; as illustrated by 
 [189]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 the fact that in modern universities the papers 
 sent in by male and female candidates are as 
 a rule identical in type. 
 
 Placed in like external conditions, their 
 tastes and emotions, over a vast part of the 
 surface of life, are identical; and, in an im- 
 mense number of those cases where psychic 
 sex differences appear to exist, subject to 
 rigid analysis they are found to be artificial 
 creations, for, when other races or classes are 
 studied, they are found non-existent as sexual 
 characteristics. The female is supposed by 
 ignorant persons in modern European societies 
 to have an inherent love for bright colors and 
 ornaments, not shared by the male; while ex- 
 perience of other societies and past social con- 
 ditions proves that it is as often the male who 
 has been even more desirous of attiring himself 
 in bright raiment and adorning himself with 
 brilliant jewels; or as when, among certain 
 tribes of savages, the use of tobacco is sup- 
 posed to be a peculiarly female prerogative, 
 while, in some modern societies, it is supposed 
 
 to have some relation to masculinity. 1 
 
 i 
 
 i The savage male of to-day when attired in his paint, feath- 
 ers, cats' tails, and necklaces is an immeasurably more orna~ 
 
 [190]
 
 SEX DIFFERENCES 
 
 But there remain certain psychic differ- 
 ences in attitude, on the part of male and fe- 
 male as such, which are inherent and not 
 artificial: and, in the psychic human world, 
 it is exactly as we approach the sphere of 
 
 merited and imposing figure than his female, even when fully 
 attired for a dance in beads and bangles: the Oriental male 
 has sometimes scarcely been able to walk under the weight 
 of his ornaments; and the males of Europe a couple of cen- 
 turies ago, with their powdered wigs, lace ruffles and cuffs, 
 paste buckles, feathered cocked hats, and patches were quite 
 as ridiculous in their excess of adornment as the comple- 
 mentary females of their own day, or the most parasitic females 
 of this. 
 
 Both in the class and the individual, whether male or fe- 
 male, an intense love of dress and meretricious external adorn- 
 ment is almost invariably the concomitant and outcome of 
 parasitism. Were the parasite female class in our own socie- 
 ties to pass away, French fashions with their easeless and 
 grotesque variations (shaped not for use or beauty, but the 
 attracting of attention) would die out. And the extent to 
 which any woman to-day, not herself belonging to the parasite 
 class and still laboring, attempts to follow afar off the fash- 
 ions of the parasite, may be taken generally as an almost cer- 
 tain indication of the ease with which she would accept 
 parasitism were its conditions offered her. 
 
 The tendency of the cultured and intellectually laboring 
 woman of to-day to adopt a more rational type of attire, less 
 shaped to attract attention to the individual than to confer com- 
 fort and abstain from impeding activity, is often spoken of aa 
 an attempt on the part of woman slavishly to imitate man. 
 What is really taking place is, that like causes are producing 
 like effects on human creatures with common characteristics. 
 
 [191]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 sexual and reproductive activity, with those 
 emotions and instincts connected with sex and 
 the reproduction of the race, that a difference 
 does appear. 
 
 In the animal world all forms of psychic 
 variations are found allying themselves now 
 with the male sex form, and then with the 
 female. In the insect and fish worlds, where 
 the female forms are generally larger and 
 stronger than the male, the female is gen- 
 erally more pugnacious and predatory than 
 the male. Among birds-of-prey, where the 
 female form is larger and stronger than the 
 male, the psychic differences seem very small. 
 Among eagles and other allied forms, which 
 are strictly monogamous, the affection of the 
 female for the male is so great that she is said 
 never to mate again if the male dies, and both 
 watch over and care for the young with ex- 
 treme solicitude. The ostrich male form, 
 though perhaps larger than the female, shares 
 with her the labor of hatching the eggs, re- 
 lieving the hen at a fixed hour daily: and his 
 care for the young when hatched is as tender 
 as hers. Among song-birds, in which the male 
 and female forms are so alike as sometimes 
 [192]
 
 SEX DIFFERENCES 
 
 to be indistinguishable, and which are also 
 monogamous, the male and female forms not 
 only exhibit the same passionate affection for 
 each other (in the case of the South African 
 cock-o-veet, they have one answering love-song 
 between them ; the male sounding two or three 
 notes and the female completing it with two or 
 three more), but they build the nest together 
 and rear the young with an equal care. In 
 the case of the little kapok bird of the Cape, 
 a beautiful white fluffy nest is made by both 
 of the white down of a certain plant, and im- 
 mediately below the entrance to the cavity 
 in which the little female sits on the eggs is a 
 small shelf or basket, in which the tiny male 
 sits to watch over and guard them. It is 
 among certain orders of birds that sex mani- 
 festations appear to assume their most har- 
 monious and poetical forms on earth. Among 
 gallinaceous birds, on the other hand, where 
 the cock is much larger and more pugnacious 
 than the female, and which are polygamous, 
 the cock does not court the female by song, 
 but seizes her by force, and shows little or no 
 interest in his offspring, neither sharing in the 
 brooding nor feeding of the young; and even 
 [193]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 at times seizing any tempting morsel which 
 the young or the hen may have discovered. 
 
 Among mammals, the male form tends to be 
 slightly larger than the female, though not al- 
 ways (the female whale, for instance, being 
 larger than the male) ; the male also tends to be 
 more pugnacious and less careful of the young; 
 though to this rule also there are exceptions. 
 In the case of the South African mierkat, for 
 instance, the female is generally more com- 
 bative and more difficult to tame than the 
 male; and it is the males who from the mo- 
 ment of birth watch over the young with the 
 most passionate and tender solicitude, keeping 
 them warm under their persons, carrying them 
 to places of safety in their mouths, and feed- 
 ing them till full grown; and this they do not 
 only to their own young, but to any young 
 who may be brought in contact with them. 
 We have known a male mierkat so assiduous 
 in feeding young that were quite unrelated to 
 himself, taking to them every morsel of food 
 given him, that we have been compelled to 
 shut him up in a room alone when feeding 
 him, to prevent his starving himself to death: 
 the male mierkat thus exhibiting exactly those 
 [194]
 
 SEX DIFFERENCES 
 
 psychic qualities which are generally regarded 
 as peculiarly feminine; the females, on the 
 other hand, being far more pugnacious to- 
 wards each other than are the males. 
 
 Among mammals generally, except the tend- 
 ency to greater pugnacity shown by the male 
 towards other males, and the greater solicitude 
 for the young shown generally by the female 
 form, but not always, the psychic differences 
 between the two sex forms are not great. Be- 
 tween the male and female pointer as puppies, 
 there is as little difference in mental activity 
 as in physical; and even when adult, on the 
 hunting-ground, that great non-sexual field 
 in which their highest mental and physical 
 activities are displayed, there is little or noth- 
 ing which distinguishes materially between the 
 male and female; in method, manner, and 
 quickness they are alike; in devotion to man, 
 they are psychically identical. 1 It is at the 
 moment when the reproductive element comes 
 fully into play that similarity and identity 
 cease. In the intensity of initial sex instinct 
 
 i It is often said the female dog is more intelligent than the 
 male; but I am almost inclined to doubt this, after long and 
 close study of both forms. 
 
 [195]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 they are alike; the female will leap from win- 
 dows, climb walls, and almost endanger her life 
 to reach the male who waits for her, as readily 
 as he will to gain her. It is when the bitch 
 lies with her six young drawing life from her 
 breast, and gazing with wistful and anguished 
 solicitude at every hand stretched out to touch 
 them, a world of emotion concentrated on the 
 sightless creatures, and a whole body of new 
 mental aptitudes brought into play in caring 
 for them, it is then that between her and the 
 male who begot them, but cares nothing for 
 them, there does rise a psychic difference that 
 is real and wide. Alike in the sports of pup- 
 pydom and the non-sexual activities of adult 
 age; alike in the possession of the initial in- 
 stinct which draws the sex to the sex, the mo- 
 ment active sexual reproduction is concerned, 
 there is opened to the female a world of sen- 
 sations and experiences, from which her male 
 companion is forever excluded. 
 
 So also is our human world: alike in the 
 sports, and joys, and sorrows of infancy; alike 
 in the non-sexual labors of life; alike even in 
 the possession of that initial instinct which 
 draws sex to sex, and which, differing slightly 
 [196]
 
 SEX DIFFERENCES 
 
 in its forms of manifestation, is of equal in- 
 tensity in both; the moment actual reproduc- 
 tion begins to take place, the man and the 
 woman enter spheres of sensation, perception, 
 emotion, desire, and knowledge which are not, 
 and cannot be, absolutely identical. Between 
 the man who, in an instant of light-hearted 
 enjoyment, begets the infant (who may even 
 beget it in a state of half -drunken unconscious- 
 ness, and may easily know nothing of its ex- 
 istence for months or years after it is born, 
 or even never at all ; and who under no circum- 
 stances can have any direct sensational knowl- 
 edge of its relation to himself) and the woman 
 who bears it continuously for months within 
 her body, and who gives birth to it in pain, 
 and who, if it is to live, is compelled, or was 
 in primitive times, to nourish it for months 
 from the blood of her own being between 
 these, there exists of necessity, towards a lim- 
 ited but all-important body of human interests 
 and phenomena, a distinct psychic attitude. 
 At this one point, the two great halves of hu- 
 manity stand confronting certain great ele- 
 ments in human existence, from angles that are 
 not identical. From the moment the universal 
 [197]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 initial attraction of sex to sex becomes incar- 
 nate in the first concrete sexual act till the 
 developed offspring attains maturity, no step 
 in the reproductive journey, or in their rela- 
 tion to their offspring, has been quite iden- 
 tical for the man and the woman. And this 
 divergence of experiences in human relations 
 must react on their attitude towards that par- 
 ticular body of human concerns which directly 
 is connected with the sexual reproduction of 
 the race, and it is exactly in these fields of 
 human activity, where sex as sex is concerned, 
 that woman as woman has a part to play which 
 she cannot resign into the hands of others. 
 
 It may be truly said that in the laboratory, 
 the designing-room, the factory, the mart, the 
 mathematician's study, and in all fields of 
 purely abstract and impersonal labor, while 
 the entrance of woman would add to the net 
 result of human labor in those fields, and 
 though a grave injustice is done to the indi- 
 vidual woman excluded from perhaps the only 
 field she is fitted to excel in, yet woman as 
 woman has probably little or nothing to con- 
 tribute in those fields that is radically distinct 
 from that which man might supply; there 
 [198]
 
 SEX DIFFERENCES 
 
 would be a difference in quality but probably 
 none in kind, in the work done for the race. 
 
 But in those spheres of social activity deal- 
 ing especially with certain relations between 
 human creatures because of their diverse if 
 complementary relation to the production of 
 human life, the sexes as sexes have often each 
 a part to play which the other cannot play 
 for them, have each a knowledge gained from 
 phases of human experience, which the other 
 cannot supply; here woman as woman has 
 something radically distinct to contribute to 
 the sum-total of human knowledge, and her 
 activity is of importance, not merely indi- 
 vidually, but collectively, and as a class. 
 
 That demand, which to-day in all demo- 
 cratic self-governing countries is being made 
 by women, to be accorded their share in the 
 electoral and ultimately in the legislative and 
 executive duties of government, is based on 
 two grounds : the wider, that they find nothing 
 in the nature of their sex-function which ex- 
 onerates them, as human beings, from their 
 obligation to take part in the labors of guid- 
 ance and government in their state; the nar- 
 rower, but yet important ground, that, in as 
 [199]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 far as in one direction, i. e., in the special form 
 of their sex function, they do differ from the 
 male, they, in so far, form a class and are 
 bound to represent the interests of, and to give 
 the state the benefit of, the insight of their 
 class, in certain directions. Those persons 
 who imagine that the balance of great political 
 parties in almost any society would be seri- 
 ously changed by the admission of its women 
 in public functions are undoubtedly wholly 
 wrong. 
 
 The fundamental division of humans into 
 those inclined to hold by the past and defend 
 whatever is, and those hopeful of the future 
 and inclined to introduce change, would prob- 
 ably be found to exist in much the same pro- 
 portion were the males or the females of any 
 given society compared: and females of each 
 class will in the main share the faults, the vir- 
 tues, and the prejudices of their class. The 
 individual may lose by being excluded on the 
 ground of sex from a share of public labor, 
 and by being robbed of a portion of their 
 lawful individual weight in their own society; 
 and the society as a whole may lose by having 
 a smaller number to select her chosen laborers 
 [200]
 
 SEX DIFFERENCES 
 
 from; yet, undoubtedly, on the mass of social, 
 political, and international questions, the con- 
 clusions arrived at by one sex would be ex- 
 actly those arrived at by the other. 
 
 Were a body elected to adjudicate upon 
 Greek accents, or to pass a decision on the 
 relative fineness of woolens and linens, the 
 form of sex of the persons composing it would 
 probably have no bearing on the result; there 
 is no rational ground for supposing that, on 
 a question of Greek accents or the thickness 
 of cloths, equally instructed males and females 
 would differ. Here sex plays no part. The 
 experience and instructedness of the individ- 
 uals would tell: their sexual attributes would 
 be indifferent. 
 
 But there are points, comparatively small, 
 even very small, in number, yet of vital im- 
 portance to human life, in which sex does play 
 a part. 
 
 It is not a matter of indifference whether the 
 body called to adjudicate upon the question: 
 whether the temporary sale of the female body 
 for sexual purposes shall or shall not be a form 
 of traffic encouraged and recognized by the 
 state; or whether one law shall exist for the 
 [201]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 licentious human female and another for the 
 licentious human male; whether the claim of 
 the female to the offspring she bears shall or 
 shall not equal that of the male who begets 
 it; whether an act of infidelity on the part of 
 the male shall or shall not terminate the con- 
 tract which binds his female companion to him 
 as completely as an act of infidelity on her part 
 would terminate her claim on him; it is not a 
 matter of indifference whether a body elected 
 to adjudicate on such points as these consists of 
 males solely, or females solely, or of both com- 
 bined. As it consists of one, or the other, or 
 of both, so not only will the answers vary, but, 
 in some cases, will they be completely diverse. 
 Here we come into the narrow, but important, 
 region where sex as sex manifestly plays its 
 part; where the male as male and the female 
 as female have each their body of perceptions 
 and experiences, which they do not hold in 
 common; here one sex cannot adequately rep- 
 resent the other. It is here that each sexual 
 part of the race has something radically dis- 
 tinct to contribute to the wisdom of the race. 
 We, to-day, take all labor for our province 1 
 We seek to enter the non-sexual fields of in- 
 [202]
 
 SEX DIFFERENCES 
 
 tellectual or physical toil, because we are un- 
 able to see to-day, with regard to them, any 
 dividing wall raised by sex which excludes us 
 from them. We are yet equally determined 
 to enter those in which sex does play its part, 
 because it is here that woman, the bearer of 
 the race, must stand side by side with man, 
 the begetter; if a completed human wisdom, 
 an insight that misses no aspect of human life, 
 and an activity that is in harmony with the en- 
 tire knowledge and the entire instinct of the 
 human race, is to exist. It is here that the 
 man cannot act for the woman nor the woman 
 for the man; but both must interact. It is 
 here that each sexual half of the race, so closely 
 and indistinguishably blended elsewhere, has 
 its own distinct contribution to make to the 
 sum total of human knowledge and human 
 wisdom. Neither is the woman without the 
 man, nor the man without the woman, the 
 completed human intelligence. 
 
 We claim, to-day, all labor for our province! 
 Those large fields in which it would appear 
 sex plays no part, and equally those in which 
 it plays a part. 
 
 [203]
 
 CERTAIN OBJECTIONS
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 CERTAIN OBJECTIONS 
 
 IT has been stated sometimes, though more 
 often implicitly than in any direct or logical 
 form, (this statement being' one it is not easy to 
 make definitely without its reducing itself 
 to nullity!) that woman should seek no fields 
 of labor in the new world of social conditions 
 that is arising about us, as she has her function 
 as child-bearer: a labor which, by her own 
 showing, is arduous and dangerous, though she 
 may love it as a soldier loves his battle field; 
 that woman should perform her sex functions 
 only, allowing man or the state to support her, 
 even when she is only potentially a child-bearer 
 and bears no children. 1 
 
 * Such a scheme, as has before been stated, was actually put 
 forward by a literary man in England some years ago: but he 
 had the sense to state that it should apply only to women of the 
 upper classes; the mass of laboring women, who form the vast 
 bulk of the English women of the present day, being left to 
 their ill-paid drudgery and their child-bearing as well ! 
 
 [207]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 There is some difficulty in replying to a 
 theorist so wholly delusive. Not only is he to 
 be met by all the arguments against parasitism 
 of class or race; but, at the present day, when 
 probably much more than half the world's most 
 laborious and ill-paid labor is still performed 
 by women, from tea pickers and cocoa tenders 
 in India and the islands, to the washerwomen, 
 cooks, and drudging laboring men's wives, 
 who, in addition to the sternest and most un- 
 ending toil, throw in their child-bearing as a lit- 
 tle addition: and when in some civilized coun- 
 tries women exceed the males in numbers by 
 one million, so that there would still be one mil- 
 lion females for whom there was no legitimate 
 sexual outlet, though each male in the nation 
 supported a female, it is somewhat difficult to 
 reply with gravity to the assertion, "Let 
 Woman be content to be the 'Divine Child- 
 bearer/ and ask no more." 
 
 Were it worth replying gravely to so idle a 
 theorist, we might answer: Through all the 
 ages of the past, when, with heavy womb and 
 hard labor-worn hands, we physically toiled 
 beside man, bearing up by the labor of our 
 bodies the world about us, it was never sug- 
 [208]
 
 CERTAIN OBJECTIONS 
 
 gested to us, "You, the child-bearers of the 
 race, have in that one function a labor that 
 equals all others combined; therefore, toil no 
 more in other directions, we pray of you. 
 Neither plant, nor build, nor bend over the 
 grindstone, nor far into the night, while we 
 sleep, sit weaving the clothing we and our 
 children are to wear ! Leave it to us, to plant, 
 to reap, to weave, to work, to toil for you, O 
 sacred child-bearer! Work no more; every 
 man of the race will work for you!" This cry 
 iii all the grim ages of our past toil we never 
 heard. 
 
 And to-day the lofty theorist, who to-night 
 stands before the drawing-room fire in spot- 
 less shirt-front and perfectly fitting clothes, 
 and declaims upon the amplitude of woman's 
 work in life as child-bearer, and the mighty 
 value of that labor which exceeds all other, 
 making it unnecessary for her to share man's 
 grosser and lower toils : does he always remem- 
 ber his theory? When waking to-morrow 
 morning, he finds that the elderly house 
 drudge, who rises at dawn while he yet sleeps, 
 to make his tea and clean his boots, has brought 
 his tea late, and polished his boots ill ; may he 
 [209]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 not even sharply condemn her, and assure her 
 she will have to leave unless she works harder 
 and rises earlier? He does not exclaim to her, 
 "Divine child-bearer! Potential mother of the 
 race! Why should you clean my boots or 
 bring up my tea, while I lie warm in bed? Is 
 it not enough you should have the holy and 
 mysterious power of bringing the race to life? 
 Let that content you. Henceforth I shall get 
 up at dawn and make my own tea and clean 
 my own boots, and pay you just the same!" 
 Nor, should his landlady, now about to give 
 birth to her ninth child, send him up a poorly- 
 cooked dinner or forget to bring up his scut- 
 tle of coal, does he send for her and thus 
 apostrophize the astonished matron: "Child- 
 bearer of the race! Producer of men! Can- 
 not you be contented with so noble and lofty 
 a function in life without toiling and moiling? 
 Why carry up heavy coal-scuttles from the 
 cellar and bend over hot fires, wearing out 
 nerve and muscle that should be reserved for 
 higher duties? We, we men of the race, will 
 perform its mean, its sordid, its grinding toil! 
 For woman is beauty, peace, repose! Your 
 function is to give life, not to support it by 
 [210]
 
 CERTAIN OBJECTIONS 
 
 labor. The Mother, the Mother ! How won- 
 derful it sounds! Toil no more! Rest is for 
 you; labor and drudgery for us!" Would he 
 not rather assure her that, unless she labored 
 more assiduously and sternly, she would lose 
 his custom and so be unable to pay her month's 
 rent, and perhaps so, with children and an in- 
 valid or drunken husband whom she supports, 
 be turned out into the streets? For it is re- 
 markable, that, with theorists of this class, it 
 is not toil, or the amount of toil, crushing alike 
 to brain and body, which the female under- 
 takes that he objects to; it is the form and the 
 amount of the reward. It is not the hand- 
 laboring woman, even in his own society, worn 
 out and prematurely aged at forty with grind- 
 ing domestic toil that has no beginning and 
 knows no end 
 
 "Man's work is from sun to sun, 
 But woman's work is never done" 
 
 it is not the haggard, work-worn woman and 
 mother who irons his shirts, or the potential 
 mother who destroys health and youth in the 
 sweater's den where she sews the garments in 
 [211]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 which he appears so radiantly in the drawing- 
 room who disturbs him. 
 
 It is the thought of the woman-doctor with 
 an income of some hundreds a year, who 
 drives round in her carriage to see her patients, 
 or receives them in her consulting-rooms, and 
 who spends the evening smoking and reading 
 before her study fire or receiving her guests; 
 it is the thought of the woman who, as legis- 
 lator, may loll for perhaps six hours on the 
 padded seat of legislative bench, relieving the 
 tedium now and then by a turn in the billiard- 
 or refreshment-room, when she is not needed 
 to vote or speak; it is the woman as Greek 
 professor, with three or four hundred a year, 
 who gives half a dozen lectures a week, and 
 has leisure to enjoy the society of her hus- 
 band and children, and to devote to her own 
 study and life of thought ; it is she who wrings 
 his heart. It is not the woman, who, on hands 
 and knees, at tenpence a day, scrubs the floors 
 of the public buildings, or private dwellings, 
 that fills him with anguish for womanhood: 
 that somewhat quadrupedal posture is for him 
 truly feminine, and does not interfere with the 
 ideal of the mother and child-bearer. That,
 
 CERTAIN OBJECTIONS 
 
 in some other man's house, or perhaps his own, 
 while he and the wife he keeps for his pleas- 
 ure are visiting concert or entertainment, some 
 weary woman paces till far into the night 
 bearing with aching back and tired head the 
 fretful teething child he brought into the 
 world, for a pittance of twenty or thirty 
 pounds a year, does not distress him. But 
 that the same woman by work in an office 
 should earn one hundred and fifty pounds, 
 be able to have a comfortable home of her own 
 and her evening free for study or pleasure, 
 distresses him deeply. [It is not the labor, or 
 the amount of labor, so much as the amount of 
 reward that interferes with his ideal of the 
 eternal womanly ; he is as a rule contented that 
 the women of the race should labor for him, 
 whether as tea-pickers or washerwoman, or 
 toilers for the children he brings into the world, 
 provided the reward they receive is not large, 
 nor in such fields as he might himself desire to 
 enter. 
 
 When master and ass, drawing a heavy 
 
 burden between them, should have climbed a 
 
 steep mountain range together; clambering 
 
 over sharp rocks and across sliding gravel 
 
 [213]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 where no water is, and herbage is scant; if, 
 when they were come out on the top of the 
 mountain and before them stretch broad, green 
 lands, and through wide half -open gates they 
 caught the glimpse of trees waving, and there 
 came the sound of running waters, if then the 
 master should say to his ass, "Good beast of 
 mine, lie down! I can push the whole bur- 
 den myself now: lie down here; lie down my 
 creature; you have toiled enough; I will go 
 on alone!" then it might be even the beast 
 would whisper (with that glimpse through the 
 swinging gates of the green fields beyond) 
 "Good master, we two have climbed this 
 mighty mountain together, and the stones have 
 cut my hoofs as they cut your feet. Perhaps, 
 if when we were at the foot you had found out 
 that the burden was too heavy for me, and had 
 then said to me, 'Lie down, my beastie; I will 
 carry on the burden alone ; lie down and rest !' 
 I might then have listened. But now, just 
 here, where I see the gates swinging open, a 
 smooth road, and green fields before us, I 
 think I shall go on a little farther. We two 
 have climbed together; maybe we shall go on 
 yet, side by side." 
 
 [!*]
 
 CERTAIN OBJECTIONS 
 
 For the heart of laboring womanhood cries 
 out to-day to the man who would suggest she 
 need not seek new fields of labor, that child- 
 bearing is enough for her share in life's labor, 
 "Do you dare say to us now, that we are fit 
 to do nothing but child-bear, that when that 
 is performed our powers are exhausted? To 
 us, who yet through all the ages of the past, 
 when child-bearing was persistent and inces- 
 sant, regarded it hardly as a toil, but rather as 
 the reward of labor; has our right hand lost 
 its cunning and our heart its strength, that 
 to-day, when human labor is easier and hu- 
 manity's work grows fairer, you say to us, 
 'You can do nothing now but child-bear.' Do 
 you dare to say this, to us, when the upward 
 path of the race has been watered by the sweat 
 of our brow, and the sides of the road by which 
 humanity has climbed are whitened on either 
 hand by the bones of the womanhood that has 
 fallen there, toiling beside man ? Do you dare 
 say this, to us, when even to-day the food you 
 eat, the clothes you wear, the comfort you en- 
 joy, is largely given you by the unending 
 muscular toil of woman?" 
 
 As the women of old planted and reaped 
 [215]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 and ground the grain that the children they 
 bore might eat, as the maidens of old spun 
 that they might make linen for their house- 
 holds and obtain the right to bear men; so, 
 though we bend no more over grindstones, or 
 labor in the fields, or weave by hand, it is our 
 intention to enter all the new fields of labor, 
 that we also may have the power and right 
 to bring men into the world. It is our faith 
 that the day comes in which not only shall 
 no man dare to say, "It is enough portion 
 for a woman in life that she bear a child," 
 but when it will rather be said, "What noble 
 labor has that woman performed, that she 
 should have the privilege of bringing a man 
 or woman child into the world?" 
 
 But, it may be objected, "What if the fe- 
 male half of humanity, though able, in addi- 
 tion to the exercise of its reproductive func- 
 tions, to bear its share in the new fields of social 
 labor as it did in the old, be yet in certain 
 directions a less productive laborer than the 
 male? What if, in the main, the result of the 
 labor of the two halves should not be found 
 to be exactly equal?" 
 
 To this it may be answered that it is within 
 [216]
 
 the range of possibility that, mysteriously co- 
 ordinated with the male reproductive function 
 in the human, there may also be in many di- 
 rections a tendency to possess gifts useful 
 and beneficial to the race, in the stage of 
 growth it has now reached, in excess of those 
 possessed by the female. We see no reason 
 why this should be so, and, in the present 
 state of our knowledge, this is a point on 
 which no sane person would dogmatize; but 
 it is possible! It may, on the other hand, be 
 that, taken in the bulk, when all the branches 
 of productive labor be considered, the value of 
 the labor of the two halves of humanity will 
 be found so identical and so closely to balance 
 that no superiority can possibly be asserted of 
 either, as the result of the closest analysis. 
 This also is possible. 
 
 But, it may also be that, when the bulk and 
 sum-total of human activities is surveyed in 
 future ages, it will be found that the value of 
 the labor of the female in the world that is 
 rising about us has exceeded in quality or in 
 quantity that of the male. We see no reason 
 either why this should be; there is nothing in 
 the nature of the reproductive function in the 
 [217]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 female human which of necessity implies such 
 superiority. 
 
 Yet it may be that, with the smaller general 
 bulk and the muscular fineness and the prepon- 
 derance of brain and nervous system in net 
 bulk over the fleshy and osseous parts of the 
 organism, which generally, though by no 
 means always, characterizes the female as dis- 
 tinguished from the male of the human species, 
 go mental qualities which will peculiarly fit 
 her for the labor of the future. It may be 
 that her lesser possession of the muscular and 
 osseous strength, which were the elements of 
 primary importance to humanity and which 
 gave dominance in one stage of human growth, 
 and which placed woman at a social disad- 
 vantage as compared with her companion, 
 will, under new conditions of life, in which the 
 value of crude mechanical strength as distin- 
 guished from high vitality and strong nervous 
 activity is passing away, prove as largely to 
 her advantage, as his muscular bulk and 
 strength in the past proved to the male. It is 
 quite possible, in the new world which is aris- 
 ing about us, that the type of human most 
 useful to society and best fitted for its future 
 [218]
 
 CERTAIN OBJECTIONS 
 
 conditions, and who will excel in the most 
 numerous forms of activity, will be, not the 
 muscularly powerful and bulky, but the highly 
 versatile, active, vital, adaptive, sensitive, 
 physically fine-drawn type: and, as that type, 
 though, like the muscularly heavy and power- 
 ful, by no means peculiar to and confined to 
 one sex, is yet rather more commonly found 
 in conjunction with a female organism, it is 
 quite possible that, taken in the bulk and on 
 the whole, the female half of humanity may, 
 by virtue of its structural adaptions, be found 
 most fitted for the bulk of human labors in 
 the future! 
 
 As with individuals and races, so also with 
 sexes, changed social conditions may render 
 exactly those subtle qualities, which in one 
 social state were a disadvantage, of the high- 
 est social advantage in another. 
 
 The skilled diplomatist or politician, so 
 powerful in his own element, on board ship 
 during a storm becomes at once of less social 
 value or consideration than the meanest sailor 
 who can reef a sail or guide a wheel; and, if 
 we were to be reduced again suddenly to a 
 state of nature, a company of highly civilized 
 [219]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 men and women would at once, as we have 
 before remarked, find their social value com- 
 pletely inverted. Landed on a desert shore, 
 unarmed and naked, to encounter wild beasts 
 and savages, and to combat nature for food, 
 the primitive scale of human values would at 
 once reassert itself. It would not then be the 
 mighty financier, the learned judge, or great 
 poet and scholar who would be sought after, 
 but the thickest-headed navvy who could throw 
 a stone so exactly that he brought down a bird, 
 and who could in a day raise a wall which 
 would shelter the group, and the man so 
 powerful that he could surely strike an enemy 
 or wild beast dead with his club, would at once 
 be objects of social regard and attain in- 
 dividual eminence, and perhaps dominance. 
 It would not be the skilled dancer, who in one 
 night in a civilized state earns her hundreds, 
 nor the fragile, clinging beauty, but the girl of 
 the broad back and the strong limb, who could 
 collect wood and carry water, who would be 
 the much considered and much sought after 
 female in such a community. 
 
 Even in the animal world, there is the same 
 inversion in values, according as the external 
 [220]
 
 CERTAIN OBJECTIONS 
 
 conditions vary. The lion, while ruling over 
 every other creature in his primitive wilds, by 
 right of his untamable ferocity, size, and ra- 
 pacity, is yet bound to become a prey to de- 
 struction and extermination when he comes 
 into contact with the new condition brought 
 by man; while the wild dog, so immeasurably 
 his inferior in size, " and ferocity, is tamed, 
 survives and multiplies, exactly because he 
 has been driven by his smaller structure and 
 lesser physical force to develop those social in- 
 stincts and those forms of intelligence which 
 make him amenable to the new condition of 
 life and valuable in them. 
 
 The same inversion in the value of quali- 
 ties may be traced in the history of human 
 species. The Jews, whose history has been 
 one long story of oppression at the hands of 
 more muscular, physically powerful, and pu- 
 gilistic peoples; whom we find first making 
 bricks under the lash of the Egyptian, and 
 later hanging his harp as an exile among the 
 willow-trees of Babylon; who, for eighteen 
 hundred years, has been trampled, tortured, 
 and despised beneath the feet of the more 
 physically powerful and pugilistic, but not 
 [221]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 more vital, keen, intelligent, or persistent 
 races of Europe ; has, to-day, by the slow turn- 
 ing of the wheel of life, come uppermost. 
 The Egyptian taskmaster and warrior have 
 passed; what the Babylonian was we know no 
 more, save for a few mud tablets and rock 
 inscriptions recording the martial victories; 
 but the once captive Jew we see to-day in 
 every city and every street; until, at last, the 
 descendants of those men who spat when they 
 spoke his name, and forcibly drew his teeth 
 to extract his money from him, wait patiently 
 behind each other for admission to his offices 
 and palaces; while nobles solicit his daughters 
 in marriage and kings are proud to be sum- 
 moned to his table in hope of golden crumbs, 
 and great questions of peace and war are 
 often held balanced in the hand of one little 
 asthmatic Jew. After long ages of disgrace 
 and pariahism, the time has come, whether for 
 good or for evil, when just those qualities 
 which the Jew possesses and which subtilely 
 distinguish him from others, are in demand; 
 while those he has not are sinking into disuse. 
 Exactly that domination of the reflective fac- 
 ulties over the combative, which once made
 
 CERTAIN OBJECTIONS 
 
 him slave, also saved him from becoming ex- 
 tinct in wars; and the intellectual quickness, 
 the far-sighted keenness, the persistent men- 
 tal activity and self-control, which could not 
 in those ages save him from degradation or 
 compensate for his lack of bone and muscle 
 and combative instinct, are the very qualities 
 the modern world demands and crowns. The 
 day of Goliath with his club and his oaths is 
 fast passing, and the day of David with his 
 harp and skillfully constructed sling is coming 
 near and yet nearer. 
 
 The qualities which give an animal, a race, 
 an individual, a higher utility or social domi- 
 nance must always be influenced by any change 
 in the environment. As the wheel of life 
 slowly revolves, that which was lowest comes 
 continually uppermost, and that which was 
 dominant becomes subservient. 
 
 It is possible that women, after countless 
 ages, during which that smaller relative de- 
 velopment in weight and muscularity which is 
 incident to almost all females which suckle 
 their young, and that lesser desire for pugilism 
 inherent in almost all females who bear their 
 young alive, rendered her lacking in the two 
 [223]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 qualities which made for individual dominance 
 in her societies, may yet, in the future, discover 
 that those changes in human conditions, which 
 have done away with the primary necessity for 
 muscular force and pugilistic arts, have also 
 inverted her place in the scale of social values. 
 It is possible that the human female, like 
 the Jew, the male of that type farthest re- 
 moved from the dominant male type of the 
 past, may find that, so far from those qualities 
 which, in an earlier condition, lessened her 
 social value and power of labor, continuing to 
 do so, they will increase it. That the delicacy 
 of hand, lightness of structure, which were 
 fatal when the dominant labor of life was to 
 hurl a battle-axe or move a weight, may be 
 no restraint but even an assistance in the in- 
 tellectual and more delicate mechanical fields 
 of labor, that the preponderance of nervous 
 and cerebral over muscular material, and the 
 tendency towards preservative and creative 
 activity over pugilistic and destructive, so far 
 from shutting her off from the most important 
 fields of human toil, may increase her fitness 
 for them ! We have no certain proof that it is 
 so at present; but, if woman's long years of 
 [224]
 
 CERTAIN OBJECTIONS 
 
 servitude and physical subjection, and her ex- 
 perience as child-bearer and protector of in- 
 fancy, should, in any way, be found in the 
 future to have endowed her, as a kind of sec- 
 ondary sexual characteristic, with any addi- 
 tional strength of social instinct, with any ex- 
 ceptional width of human sympathy and any 
 instinctive comprehension; then, it is not 
 merely possible, but certain, that, in the ages 
 that are coming, in which the labor of the 
 human race will be not mainly destructive but 
 conservative, in which the building up and 
 consolidating of humanity, and not continually 
 the inter-destruction of part by part, will be 
 the dominant activity of the race, that woman 
 as woman, and by right of that wherein she 
 differs from the male, will have an all-impor- 
 tant part to play in the activity of the race. 
 
 The matter is one of curious and subtle in- 
 terest, but what practically concerns the human 
 race is, not which of the two sexual halves 
 which must always co-exist is best fitted to 
 excel in certain human labors in this or that 
 direction, nor even which has most to con- 
 tribute to the sum-total of human activities; 
 but it is this, that every individual unit hu- 
 [225]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 manity contains, irrespective of race, sex, or 
 type, should find exactly that field of labor 
 which may most contribute to its development, 
 happiness, and health, and in which its pe- 
 culiar faculties and gifts shall be most effec- 
 tively and beneficially exerted for its fellows. 
 It matters nothing, and less than nothing, to 
 us as women, whether, of those children we 
 bring into the world, our sons should excel in 
 virtue, intelligence, and activity, our daugh- 
 ters, or our daughters our sons ; so that, in each 
 child we bring to life, not one potentiality shall 
 be lost, nor squandered on a lesser when it 
 might have been expended on a higher and 
 more beneficent task. So that not one desirable 
 faculty of the marvelous creatures we bring 
 into existence be left uncultivated, to us as 
 women, it matters nothing and less than noth- 
 ing, which sex type excels in action, in knowl- 
 edge, or in virtue, so both attain their best. 
 There is one thing only on earth as precious 
 to woman as the daughter who springs from 
 her body it is the son. There is one thing 
 only dearer to the woman than herself it is 
 the man. As no sane human concerns him- 
 self as to whether the right or left ventricle 
 [226]
 
 CERTAIN OBJECTIONS 
 
 of his heart works most satisfactorily, or is 
 most essential to his well-being, so both be 
 perfect in health and activity; as no sane 
 woman distresses herself lest her right breast 
 should not excel the left in beauty and use; 
 so no sane man or woman questions over the 
 relative perfections of male and female. In 
 love there is no first nor last. What we re- 
 quest of life is that the tools should be given 
 to his hand or hers who can handle them; that 
 the least efficient should not be forced into 
 the place of the more efficient, and that an 
 artificially drawn line should never repress the 
 activities of the individual creature which we 
 as women bring into the world. 
 
 But it may also be said to us, "What, and 
 if all your dreams and hopes for woman and 
 the future of the race be based on air? What 
 if, desirable as it is that woman should not 
 become practically dependent on her sexual 
 function alone, and should play at least as 
 great a part in the productive labor of the race 
 in the future as she played in that of the past 
 what if woman cannot take the same vast 
 share in the complex and largely mental labor 
 fields of the future as in the largely physical 
 [227]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 fields of the past? What if, in spite of all 
 her effort and sacrifice to attain this end, ex- 
 actly now when the labor of civilized societies 
 becomes mental rather than mechanical, woman 
 be found wanting?" 
 
 In Swiss valleys to-day the traveller comes 
 sometimes on the figure of a solitary woman 
 climbing the mountain-side, on her broad 
 shoulders a mighty burden of fodder or ma- 
 nure she is bearing up for the cattle, or to the 
 patch of cultivated land. Steady, unshrink- 
 ing eyes look out at you from beneath the 
 deeply seamed forehead, and a strand of hair, 
 perhaps almost as white as the mountain snows 
 on the peaks above, escapes from under the 
 edge of the binding handkerchief. The face 
 is seamed and seared with the stern marks of 
 toil and endurance, as the mountain-side is with 
 marks of storm and avalanche. It is the face 
 of one who has brought men into the world 
 in labor and sorrow, and toiled mightily to 
 sustain them; and dead must be the mind to 
 the phases of human existence, who does not 
 see in that toilworn figure one of the mighty 
 pillars which have in the long ages of the past 
 sustained the life of humanity on earth and
 
 CERTAIN OBJECTIONS 
 
 made possible its later developments ; and much 
 must the tinsel of life have dazzled him, who 
 fails to mark it with reverence and, metaphor- 
 ically, to bow his head before it the type of 
 the mighty laboring woman who has built up 
 life. 
 
 But, it may be said, what if, in the ages 
 to come, it should never again be possible for 
 any man to stand bowed with the same respect 
 in the presence of any other of earth's mighty 
 toilers, who shall also be mother and woman? 
 What if she, who could combine motherhood 
 with the most unending muscular toil, will fall 
 flaccid and helpless where the labor becomes 
 mental? What if, struggle as she will, she can 
 become nothing in the future but the pet pug- 
 dog of the race, lying on its sofa, or the Italian 
 greyhound, shivering in its silken coat ? What 
 if woman, in spite of her most earnest aspira- 
 tions and determined struggles, be destined to 
 failure in the new world that is rising because 
 of inherent incapacity? 
 
 There are many replies which may be made 
 
 to such a suggestion. It is often said with 
 
 truth that the ordinary occupations of woman 
 
 in the past and present, and in all classes of 
 
 [229]
 
 society in which she is not parasitic, do de- 
 mand, and have always demanded a very high 
 versatility and mental activity, as well as phys- 
 ical, j The medieval baron's wife who guided 
 her large household probably had to expend 
 far more pure intellect in doing so than the 
 baron in his hunting and fighting. The wife 
 of the city accountant probably expends to- 
 day more reason, imagination, forethought, 
 and memory on the management of her small 
 household, than he in his simpler, monotonous 
 arithmetical toil. As there is no cause for 
 supposing that the tailor or shoemaker needs 
 less intellect in his calling than the soldier or 
 prize-fighter, so there is nothing to suggest 
 that, in the past, woman has not expended as 
 much pure intellect in the mass of her callings 
 as the man in his. 
 
 As for those highly specialized intellectual 
 occupations, in which long and uninterrupted 
 training tending to one point is necessary, 
 such as the liberal professions and arts, al- 
 though woman has practically been excluded 
 from the requisite training, and the freedom 
 to place herself in the positions in which they 
 can be pursued, yet, by force of innate genius 
 [230]
 
 CERTAIN OBJECTIONS 
 
 and gifts in such directions, she has contin- 
 ually broken through the seemingly insuper- 
 able obstacles, and again and again taken her 
 place beside man in those fields of labor ; show- 
 ing thereby not merely aptitude but passion- 
 ate and determined inclination in those direc- 
 tions. 
 
 With equal truth, it is often remarked that, 
 when as an independent hereditary sovereign, 
 woman has been placed in the only position 
 in which she has been able freely and fully 
 to express her own individuality, and though 
 selected at random by fate from the mass of 
 women, by the accident of birth or marriage, 
 she has shown in a large percentage of cases 
 that the female has the power to command, 
 organize, and succeed in one of the most exact- 
 ing and complex of human employments, the 
 government of nations. From the days of 
 Amalasontha to Isabella of Spain, Elizabeth 
 of England, and Catherine of Russia, women 
 have not failed to grasp the large impersonal 
 aspects of life, and successfully and power- 
 fully to control them, when placed in a posi- 
 tion in which it was demanded. 
 
 It may also be stated, and is sometimes, 
 [231]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 with so much iteration as to become almost 
 wearisome, that women's adequacy in the 
 modern fields of intellectual or skilled manual 
 labor is no more to-day an open matter for 
 debate, than the number of modern women 
 who, as senior wranglers, doctors, etc., have 
 already successfully entered the new fields, 
 and the high standard attained by women in 
 all university examinations to which they are 
 admitted, and their universal success in the 
 administration of parochial matters, wherever 
 they have been allowed to share it, proves their 
 intellectual and moral fitness for the new forms 
 of labor. 
 
 All these statements are certainly interest- 
 ing, and may be unanswerable. And yet if 
 the truth be told, it is not ultimately on these 
 grounds that many of us base our hope and our 
 certitude with regard to the future of woman. 
 Our conviction as to the plenitude of her 
 powers for the adequate performance of lofty 
 labors in these new fields springs not at all 
 from a categorical enumeration of the attain- 
 ments or performances of individual women or 
 bodies of women in the past or present ; it has 
 another source. 
 
 [232]
 
 CERTAIN OBJECTIONS 
 
 There was a bird's egg once, picked up by 
 chance upon the ground, and those who found 
 it bore it home and placed it under a barn- 
 door fowl. And in time the chick bred out, 
 and those who had found it chained it by the 
 leg to a log, lest it should stray and be lost. 
 And by and by they gathered round it, and 
 speculated as to what the bird might be. One 
 said, "It is surely a waterfowl, a duck, or it 
 may be a goose; if we took it to the water it 
 would swim and gabble." But another said, 
 "It has no webs to its feet; it is a barn-yard 
 fowl; should you let it loose it will scratch 
 and cackle with the others on the dung-heap." 
 But a third speculated, "Look now at its 
 curved beak; no doubt it is a parrot, and can 
 crack nuts !" But a fourth said, "No, but look 
 at its wings; perhaps it is a bird of great 
 flight." But several cried, "Nonsense I No 
 one has ever seen it fly! Why should it fly? 
 Can you suppose that a thing can do a thing 
 which no one has ever seen it do?" And the 
 bird, with its leg chained close to the log, 
 preened its wings. So they sat about it, spec- 
 ulating, and discussing it: and one said this, 
 and another that. And all the while as they 
 [233]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 talked the bird sat motionless, with its gaze 
 fixed on the clear, blue sky above it. And one 
 said, "Suppose we let the creature loose to see 
 what it will do?" and the bird shivered. But 
 the others cried, "It is too valuable; it might 
 get lost. If it were to try to fly it might fall 
 down and break its neck." And the bird, 
 with its foot chained to the log, sat looking 
 upward into the clear sky; the sky, in which 
 it had never been for the bird the bird, 
 knew what it would do because it was an 
 eaglet! 
 
 There is one woman known to many of us, 
 as each human creature knows but one on 
 earth; and it is upon our knowledge of that 
 woman that we base our certitude. 
 
 For those who do not know her, and have 
 not this ground, it is probably profitable and 
 necessary that they painfully collect isolated 
 facts and then speculate upon them, and base 
 whatever views they should form upon these 
 collections. It might even be profitable that 
 they should form no definite opinions at all but 
 wait till the ages of practical experience have 
 put doubt to rest. For those of us who have a 
 ground of knowledge which we cannot trans- 
 [234.]
 
 CERTAIN OBJECTIONS 
 
 mit to outsiders, it is perhaps more profitable 
 to act fearlessly than to argue. 
 
 Finally, it may be objected to the entrance 
 of woman to the new fields of labor, and in 
 effect it is often said "What if all you have 
 sought be granted you if it be fully agreed 
 that woman's ancient fields of toil are slip- 
 ping from her, and that, if she do not find 
 new, she must fall into a state of sexual para- 
 sitism, dependent on her reproductive func- 
 tions alone; and granted, that, doing this, she 
 must degenerate, and that from her degenera- 
 tion must arise the degeneration and arrest of 
 development of the males as well as of the 
 females of her race; and granting also, fully, 
 that in the past woman has borne one full half, 
 and often more than one half, of the weight 
 of the productive labors of her societies, in ad- 
 dition to child-bearing; and allowing more 
 fqlly that she may be as well able to sustain 
 her share in the intellectual labors of the future 
 as in the more mechanical labors of the past; 
 granting all this, may there not be one aspect 
 of the question left out of consideration which 
 may reverse all conclusions as to the desira- 
 [235]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 bility, and the human good to be attained by 
 woman's enlarged freedom and her entering 
 into the new fields of toil? What if the in- 
 creased 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 
 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 
 labors of the past have never affected her at- 
 tractiveness for the male of her own society, 
 nor his for her, yet the performance by woman 
 of intellectual labors, or complex and interest- 
 ing manual labor, and her increased intelli- 
 gence and width, should render the male 
 objectionable to her, and the woman unde- 
 sirable to the male ; so that the very race itself 
 might become extinct through the dearth of 
 sexual affection? What 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 
 [236]
 
 CERTAIN OBJECTIONS 
 
 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 
 labor as nobly and successfully under the new 
 conditions of life as the old, should yet con- 
 sciously, and deliberately, with her eyes open, 
 sink into a state of pure intellectual parasitism, 
 with all its attendant evils, rather than face the 
 more irreparable loss which her development 
 and the exercise of her powers 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 expan- 
 sion 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 be- 
 ing severed? If the race is to decay and be- 
 come extinct on earth, might it not as well be 
 through the parasitism and decay of woman, as 
 through the decay of sex 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 inversion of the deepest of those elements 
 
 [237]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 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 recurs, now in a more 
 rational and then in a more irrational form; 
 constituting sometimes an objection, in even 
 moderately intelligent minds, to the entrance 
 of woman into the new fields of labor. 
 
 It must be at once frankly admitted that, 
 were there the smallest danger in this direction, 
 the sooner woman laid aside all endeavor in the 
 direction of increased knowledge and the at- 
 tainment of new fields of activity, the better 
 -for herself and for the race. 
 
 When one considers the part which sexual 
 attraction plays in the order of sentient life 
 on the globe, from the almost unconscious at- 
 tractions which draw ameboid globule to 
 ameboid globule, on through the endless pro- 
 gressive forms of lif e ; till in monogamous birds 
 it expresses itself in song and complex court- 
 ship and the life-long conjugal affection of 
 mates; and which, in the human race itself, 
 passing through various forms, from the im- 
 perative but almost purely physical attraction 
 [238]
 
 of savage male and female for each other, till 
 in the highly developed male and female it 
 assumes its esthetic and intellectual but not less 
 imperative form, couching itself in the songs 
 of the poet and the deathless fidelity of fully 
 developed man and woman to each other, 
 we find it not only everywhere forming the 
 groundwork on which is based sentient exis- 
 tence, never eradicable, though infinitely varied 
 in its external forms of expression. When we 
 consider that in the human world, from the 
 battles and dances of savages to the intrigues 
 and entertainments of modern courts and 
 palaces, the attraction of man and woman for 
 each other has played an unending part; and 
 that the most fierce ascetic religious enthusi- 
 asm through the ages, the flagellations and 
 starvations in endless nunneries and monas- 
 steries, have never been able to extirpate nor 
 seriously to weaken for a moment the master 
 dominance of this emotion ; that the lowest and 
 most brutal ignorance, and the highest intel- 
 lectual culture leave mankind, equally, though 
 in different forms, amenable to its mastery; 
 that, whether in the brutal guffaw of sex 
 laughter which rings across the drinking bars 
 [239]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 of our modern cities, and rises from the com- 
 fortable armchairs in fashionable clubs; or in 
 the poet's dreams, and the noblest conjugal 
 affection of men and women linked together 
 for life, it plays still to-day on earth the part it 
 played when hoary monsters plowed through 
 Silurian slime, and that still it forms as ever 
 the warp on which in the loom of human life 
 the web is woven, and runs as a thread never 
 absent through every design and pattern which 
 constitutes an individual existence on earth: 
 not only does sexual attraction appear ineradi- 
 cable, but it is ridiculous to suppose that that 
 attraction of sex towards sex, which, with 
 hunger and thirst, lie, as the triune instincts, 
 at the base of animal life, should ever be ex- 
 terminable or in any way modifiable by the 
 comparatively superficial changes resulting 
 from the performance of this or that form 
 of labor, or the little more or less of knowl- 
 edge in one direction or another. 
 
 That the female who runs steam-driven 
 looms, producing scores of yards of linen in a 
 day, should therefore desire less the fellowship 
 of her corresponding male than had she toiled 
 at a spinning-wheel with hand and foot to pro- 
 [240]
 
 CERTAIN OBJECTIONS 
 
 duce one yard ; that the male should desire less 
 of the companionship of the woman who 
 spends the morning in doctoring babies in her 
 consulting-room, according to the formularies 
 of the pharmacopoeia, than she who of old 
 spent it on the hillside collecting simples for 
 remedies ; that the woman who paints a modern 
 picture or designs a modern vase should be less 
 lovable by man than her ancestor who shaped 
 the first primitive pot and ornamented it with 
 zigzag patterns was to the man of her day and 
 age; that the woman who contributes to the 
 support of her family by giving legal opinions 
 will less desire motherhood and wifehood than 
 she who in the past contributed to the support 
 of her household by bending on hands and 
 knees over her grindstone, or scrubbing floors, 
 and that the former should be less valued by 
 man than the latter these are suppositions 
 which it is difficult to regard as consonant 
 with any knowledge of human nature and the 
 laws by which it is dominated. 
 
 On the other hand, if it be supposed that the 
 
 possession of wealth or the means of earning 
 
 it makes the human female objectionable to 
 
 the male, all history and all daily experience 
 
 [241]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 negate it. The eager hunt for heiresses, in all 
 ages and social conditions, makes it obvious 
 that the human male has a strong tendency to 
 value the female who can contribute to the 
 family expenditure; and the case is yet, we 
 believe, unrecorded of a male who, attracted 
 to a female, becomes averse to her on finding 
 she has material good. The female doctor 
 or lawyer earning a thousand a year will al- 
 ways, and to-day certainly does, find more 
 suitors than had she remained a governess or 
 cook, laboring as hard, earning thirty pounds. 
 While if the statement that the female en- 
 tering on new fields of labor will cease to be 
 lovable to the male be based on the fact that 
 she will then be free, all history and all human 
 
 experience yet more negate its truth< The 
 
 study of all races in all ages proves that the 
 greater the freedom of woman, the higher the 
 sexual value put upon her by the males of 
 that society. / The three squaws who walk be- 
 hind the Indian, whom he has captured in 
 battle or bought for a few axes or lengths 
 of tobacco, and over whom he exercises the 
 right of life and death, are probably all three 
 of infinitesimal value in his eyes, compared 
 [242]
 
 CERTAIN OBJECTIONS 
 
 with the value of his single, free wife to one of 
 our ancient, monogamous German ancestors; 
 while the hundred wives and concubines pur- 
 chased by a Turkish pasha have probably not 
 even an approximate value in his eyes, when 
 compared with the value thousands of modern 
 European males set upon the one compara- 
 tively free woman, whom they have won, often 
 only after a long and tedious courtship. 
 
 So axiomatic is the statement that the value 
 of the female to the male varies as her freedom, 
 that, given an account of any human society 
 in which the individual female is highly valued, 
 it will be perfectly safe to infer the compara- 
 tive social freedom of woman; and, given a 
 statement as to the high degree of freedom of 
 woman in any society, it will be safe to infer 
 the great sexual value of the individual woman 
 to man. 
 
 Finally, if the suggestion, that men and 
 women will cease to be attractive to one an- 
 other if women enter modern fields of labor, 
 be based on the fact that her doing so may 
 increase her intelligence and enlarge her intel- 
 lectual horizon, it must be replied that the 
 whole trend of human history absolutely ne- 
 [243]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 gates the supposition. There is no ground for 
 the assumption that increased intelligence and 
 intellectual power diminish sexual emotion in 
 the human creature of either sex. The igno- 
 rant savage, whether in ancient or modern 
 societies, who violates and then clubs a female 
 into submission, may be dominated, and is, by 
 sex emotions of a certain class; but not less 
 dominated have been the most cultured and 
 powerful and highly differentiated male intel- 
 ligences that the race has produced. A Milll 
 a Shelley, a Goethe, a Schiller, a Pericles,^ 
 have not been more noted for vast intellectual 
 powers, than for the depth and intensity of 
 their sexual emotions. And, if possible, with 
 the human female, the relation between in- 
 tensity of sexual emotion and highly intel- 
 lectual gifts has been yet closer. The life of 
 a Sophia Kovalevsky, a George Eliot, an 
 Elizabeth Browning has not been more 
 marked by a rare development of the intellect 
 than by deep passionate sexual emotions. Nor 
 throughout the history of the race has high in- 
 telligence and intellectual power ever tended to 
 make either male or female unattractive to 
 those of the opposite sex. 
 
 [244]
 
 CERTAIN OBJECTIONS 
 
 The merely brilliantly attired and unin- 
 telligent woman probably never awakened the 
 same intensity of profound sex emotion, even 
 among the men of her own type, which fol- 
 lowed a George Sand, who attracted to herself \ 
 with deathless force some of the most noted men > 
 of her generation, even when, nearing middle 
 age, stout, and attired in rusty and inartistic 
 black, she was to be found rolling her cigarettes 
 in a dingy office, scorning all the external 
 adornments with which feebler females seek 
 to supply a hidden deficiency. Probably no 
 more hopeless mistake could be made by an 
 ascetic seeking to extirpate sex emotion and 
 the attraction of the sexes for one another, than 
 were he to imagine that in increasing virility, 
 intelligence, and knowledge this end could be 
 attained. He might thereby differentiate and 
 greatly concentrate the emotions, but they 
 would be intensified; as a widely spread, shal- 
 low, sluggish stream would not be annihilated 
 but increased in force and activity by being 
 turned into a sharply defined, clear-cut course. 
 
 And if, further, we turn to those secondary 
 manifestations of sexual emotion, which ex- 
 press themselves in the relations of human 
 [245]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 progenitors to their offspring, we shall find, 
 if possible more markedly, that increase of in- 
 telligence and virility does not diminish but 
 increases the strength of the affections. As 
 the primitive, ignorant male, often willingly 
 selling his offspring or exposing his female 
 infants to death, often develops, with increase 
 of culture and intelligence, into the often ex- 
 tremely devoted and self-sacrificing male 
 progenitor of civilized societies; so, yet even 
 more markedly, does the female relation with 
 her offspring become intensified and perma- 
 nent, as culture and intelligence and virility in- 
 crease. 
 
 The Bushwoman, like the lowest female bar- 
 barians in our own societies, will often readily 
 dispose of her infant son for a bottle of spirits 
 or a little coin; and even among somewhat 
 more mentally developed females, strong as 
 is the affection of the average female for her 
 newborn offspring, the closeness of the rela- 
 tion between mother and child tends rapidly 
 to shrink as time passes, so that by the time of 
 adolescence the relation between mother and 
 son becomes little more than a remembrance of 
 a close inter-union which once existed. It is, 
 [246]
 
 CERTAIN OBJECTIONS 
 
 perhaps, seldom, till the very highest point of 
 intellectual culture and mental virility has been 
 reached by the human female, that her relation 
 with her male offspring becomes a permanent 
 and active and dominant factor in the lives of 
 both. 
 
 The concentrated and all-absorbing affec- 
 tion and fellowship which existed between 
 the greatest female intellect France has pro- 
 duced and the son she bore, dominating both 
 lives to the end, the fellowship of the English 
 historian with his mother, who remained his 
 chosen companion and the sharer of all his la- 
 bors through life, the relation of St. Augustine 
 to his mother, and countless others, are rela- 
 tions almost inconceivable where the woman is 
 not of commanding and active intelligence, and 
 where the passion of mere physical instinct is 
 not completed by the passion of the intellect 
 and spirit. 
 
 There appears, then, from the study of 
 human nature in the past, no ground for sup- 
 posing that if, as a result of woman's adopting 
 new forms of labor, she should become more 
 free, more wealthy, or more actively intelli- 
 gent, that this could in any way diminish her 
 [247]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 need of the physical and mental comrade- 
 ship of man, nor his need of her; nor that it 
 would affect their secondary sexual relations 
 as progenitors, save by deepening, concentrat- 
 ing, and extending throughout life the parental 
 emotions. The conception that man's and 
 woman's need of each other could be touched, 
 or the emotions binding the sexes obliterated, 
 by any mere change in the form of labor per- 
 formed by the woman of the race, is as gro- 
 tesque in its impossibility as the suggestion 
 that the replacing of a shell on the seashore this 
 way or that might destroy the action of the 
 earth's great tidal wave. 
 
 But, it may be objected, "If there be ab- 
 solutely no ground for the formation of such 
 an opinion, how comes it that, in one form or 
 another, it is so often expressed by persons 
 who object to the entrance of woman into new 
 or intellectual fields of labor? Where there 
 is smoke there must also be fire." To which 
 it may be replied, "Without fire, no smoke; 
 but very often the appearance of smoke where 
 neither smoke nor fire exist!" 
 
 The fact that a statement is frequently made 
 or a view held forms no presumptive ground 
 [24-8]
 
 CERTAIN OBJECTIONS 
 
 of its truth; but it is undoubtedly a ground for 
 supposing that there is an appearance or sem- 
 blance which makes it appear truth, and 
 which suggests it. The universally enter- 
 tained conception that the sun moved round the 
 world was not merely false, but the reverse of 
 the truth; all that was required for its incep- 
 tion was a fallacious appearance suggesting it. 
 
 When we examine narrowly the statement, 
 that the entrance of woman into the new fields 
 of labor, with its probably resulting greater 
 freedom of action, economic independence and 
 wider culture, may result in a severance be- 
 tween the sexes, it becomes clear what that 
 fallacious appearance is, which suggests this. 
 
 The entrance of a woman into new fields of 
 labor, though bringing her increased freedom 
 and economic independence, and necessitating 
 increased mental training and wider knowl- 
 edge, could not extinguish the primordial phys- 
 ical instinct which draws sex to sex through- 
 out all the orders of sentient life ; and still less 
 could it annihilate that subtler mental need, 
 which, as humanity develops, draws sex to sex 
 for emotional fellowship and close intercourse ; 
 but, it might, and undoubtedly would, power- 
 [249]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 fully react; and readjust the relations of cer- 
 tain men with certain women! 
 
 While the attraction, physical and intellec- 
 tual, which binds sex to sex would remain the 
 same in volume and intensity, the forms in 
 which it would express itself, and, above all, 
 the relative power of individuals to command 
 the gratification of their instincts and desires, 
 would be fundamentally altered, and in many 
 cases inverted. 
 
 In the barbarian state of societies, where 
 physical force dominates, it is the most muscu- 
 lar and pugilistically and brutally and animally 
 successful male who captures and possesses the 
 largest number of females; and no doubt he 
 would be justified in regarding any social 
 change which gave to woman a larger free- 
 dom of choice, and which would so perhaps 
 give to the less brutal but perhaps more intelli- 
 gent male whom the woman might select, an 
 equal opportunity for the gratification of his 
 sexual wishes and for the producing of off- 
 spring, as a serious loss. And, from the 
 purely personal standpoint, he would un- 
 doubtedly be right in dreading anything which 
 tended to free woman. But he would mani- 
 [250]
 
 CERTAIN OBJECTIONS 
 
 festly not have been justified in asserting that 
 woman's increased freedom of choice, or the 
 fact that the other men would share his ad- 
 vantage in the matter of obtaining female com- 
 panionship, would in any way lessen the 
 amount of sexual emotion or the tenderness of 
 relation between the two halves of humanity. 
 He would not by brute force possess himself 
 of so many females nor have so large a circle 
 of choice, under the new conditions; but what 
 he lost, others would gain; and the intensity 
 of the sex emotions and the nearness and pas- 
 sion of the relation between the sexes be in 
 no way touched. 
 
 In our civilized societies, as they exist to- 
 day, woman possesses (more often perhaps in 
 appearance than reality!) a somewhat greater 
 freedom of sexual selection; in modern so- 
 cieties she is no longer captured by muscular 
 force, but there are still conditions entirely un- 
 connected with sex attractions and affections, 
 which yet largely dominate the sex relations. 
 
 It is not the man of the strong arm, but the 
 man of the long purse, who unduly and arti- 
 ficially dominates in the sexual world to-day. 
 Practically, wherever in the modern world 
 [251]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 woman is wholly or partially dependent for her 
 means of support on the existence of her sexual 
 functions, she is dependent more or less on 
 the male's power to support her in their exer- 
 cise, and her freedom of choice is practically 
 so far limited. Probably three-fourths of the 
 sexual unions in our modern European so- 
 cieties, whether in the illegal or recognized legal 
 forms, are dominated by or largely influenced 
 by the sex purchasing power of the male. 
 With regard to the large and savage insti- 
 tution of prostitution, which still lies as a can- 
 cer embedded in the heart of all our modern 
 civilized societies, this is obviously and nakedly 
 the case; the wealth of the male as compared 
 to the female being, with hideous obtrusiveness, 
 its foundation and source of life. But the 
 purchasing power of the male as compared with 
 the poverty of the female is not less painfully, 
 if a little less obtrusively, displayed in those 
 layers of society lying nearer the surface. 
 From the fair, effete young girl of the wealthier 
 classes in her city boudoir, who weeps copiously 
 as she tells you she cannot marry the man she 
 loves, because he has only two hundred a year 
 and cannot afford to keep her, to the father
 
 who demands frankly of his daughter's suitor 
 how much he can settle on her before consent- 
 ing to his acceptance, the fact remains, that, 
 under existing conditions, not the amount of 
 sex affection and attraction, but the extraneous 
 question of the material possessions of the male, 
 determines to a large extent the relation of the 
 sexes. The parasitic, helpless youth who has 
 failed in his studies, who possesses neither viril- 
 ity, nor charm of person, nor strength of mind, 
 but who possesses wealth, has a far greater 
 chance of securing the life companionship of 
 the fairest maid, than her brother's tutor, who 
 may be possessed of every manly and physical 
 grace and mental gift; and the ancient liber- 
 tine, possessed of material good, has, especially 
 among the so-called upper classes of our socie- 
 ties, a far greater chance of securing the sex 
 companionship of any woman he desires as 
 wife, mistress, or prostitute, than the most 
 physically attractive and mentally developed 
 male, who may have nothing to offer to the 
 dependent female but affection and sexual 
 companionship. 
 
 To the male, whenever and wherever he ex- 
 ists in our societies, who depends mainly for 
 [253]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 his power for procuring the sex relation he 
 desires, not on his power of winning and re- 
 taining personal affection, but on the purchas- 
 ing power of his possessions as compared to 
 the poverty of the females of his society, the 
 personal loss would be seriously and at once 
 felt, of any social change which gave to the 
 woman a larger economic independence and 
 therefore greater freedom of sexual choice. 
 It is not an imaginary danger which the young 
 dude of that type which sits in the front row 
 of the stalls in a theater, with sloping fore- 
 head and feeble jaw, sucking at intervals the 
 top of his gilt-headed cane, and watching the 
 unhappy women who dance for gold sees 
 looming before him, as he lisps out his deep dis- 
 approval of increased knowledge and the free- 
 dom of obtaining the means of subsistence in 
 intellectual fields by woman, and expresses his 
 vast preference for the uncultured ballet-girl 
 over all types of cultured and productive, 
 laboring womanhood in the universe. A sub- 
 tle and profound instinct warns him, that, 
 with the increased intelligence and economic 
 freedom of woman, he, and such as he, might 
 ultimately be left sexually companionless ; 
 [254]
 
 CERTAIN OBJECTIONS 
 
 the undesirable, the residuary, male old-maids 
 of the human race. 
 
 On the other hand, there is undoubtedly a 
 certain body of females who would lose, or im- 
 agine they would lose, heavily by the advance 
 of woman as a whole to a condition of free 
 labor and economic independence. That fe- 
 male, willfully or organically belonging to the 
 parasite class, having neither the vigor of in- 
 tellect nor the vitality of body to undertake 
 any form of productive labor, and desiring to 
 be dependent only upon the passive perform- 
 ance of sex function merely, would, whether 
 as prostitute or wife, undoubtedly lose heavily 
 by any social change which demanded of 
 woman increased knowledge and activity. 1 
 
 It is exactly by these two classes of persons 
 that the objection is raised that the entrance 
 of woman into the new fields of labor and her 
 increased freedom and intelligence will dislo- 
 cate the relations of the sexes ; and while, from 
 the purely personal standpoint, they are un- 
 doubtedly right, viewing human society as a 
 
 i She would lose in two directions: by the social disappro- 
 bation which, as the new conditions became general, would rest 
 on her; and yet more by the competition of the more devel- 
 oped forms. She would practically become non-existent. 
 
 [255]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 whole they are fundamentally wrong. The 
 loss of a small and unhealthy section will be the 
 gain of human society as a whole. 
 
 In the male voluptuary of feeble intellect 
 and unattractive individuality, who depends 
 for the gratification of his sexual instincts, not 
 on his power of winning and retaining the per- 
 sonal affection and admiration of woman, but 
 on her purchasable condition, either in the 
 blatantly barbarous field of sex traffic that 
 lies beyond the pale of legal marriage, or the 
 not less barbarous though more veiled traffic 
 within that pale, the entrance of woman into 
 the new fields of labor, with an increased in- 
 tellectual culture and economic freedom, means 
 little less than social extinction. But, to those 
 males who, even at the present day, constitute 
 the majority in our societies, and who desire 
 the affection and fellowship of woman rather 
 than a mere material possession; for the male 
 who has the attributes and gifts of mind or 
 body, which, apart from any weight of material 
 advantage, would fit him to hold the affection 
 of woman, however great her freedom of choice, 
 the gain will be correspondingly great. Given 
 [256]
 
 CERTAIN OBJECTIONS 
 
 a society in which the majority of women 
 should be so far self-supporting, that, having 
 their free share open to them in the modern 
 fields of labor, and reaping the full economic 
 rewards of their labor, marriage or some form 
 of sexual sale was no more a matter of neces- 
 sity to them; so far from this condition caus- 
 ing a diminution in the number of permanent 
 sex unions, one of the heaviest bars to them 
 would be removed. It is universally allowed 
 that one of the disease spots in our modern 
 social condition is the increasing difficulty 
 which bars conscientious men from entering on 
 marriage and rearing families, if limited means 
 would in the case of their death or disablement 
 throw the woman and their common offspring 
 comparatively helpless into the fierce stream of 
 our modern economic life. If the woman could 
 justifiably be looked to, in case of the man's 
 disablement or death, to take his place as an 
 earner, thousands of valuable marriages which 
 cannot now be contracted could be entered on ; 
 and the serious social evil, which arises from 
 the fact that while the self-indulgent and selfish 
 freely marry and produce large families, the re- 
 [257]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 strained and conscientious are often unable to 
 do so, would be removed. For the first time 
 in the history of the modern world, prostitu- 
 tion, using that term in its broadest sense to 
 cover all sexual relationships based, not on 
 the spontaneous affection of the woman for the 
 man, but on the necessitous acceptance by 
 woman of material good in exchange for the 
 exercise of her sexual functions, would be ex- 
 tinct; and the relation between men and 
 women become a co-partnership between free- 
 men. 
 
 So far from the economic freedom and social 
 independence of the woman exterminating 
 sexual love between man and woman, it would 
 for the first time fully enfranchise it. The 
 element of physical force and capture which 
 dominated the most primitive sex relations, the 
 more degrading element of seduction and pur- 
 chase by means of wealth or material good of- 
 fered to woman in our modern societies, would 
 then give place to the untrammeled action of 
 attraction and affection alone between the 
 sexes, and sexual love, after its long pilgrimage 
 in the deserts, would be enabled to return at 
 last, a king crowned. 
 
 [258]
 
 CERTAIN OBJECTIONS 
 
 But, apart from the two classes of persons 
 whose objection to the entrance of woman to 
 new fields of labor is based more or less in- 
 stinctively on the fear of personal loss, there 
 is undoubtedly a small, very small, number of 
 sincere persons whose fear as to severance be- 
 tween the sexes to result from woman's en- 
 trance into the new field, is based upon a more 
 abstract and impersonal ground. 
 
 It is not easy to do full justice in an exact 
 statement to views held generally rather neb- 
 ulously and vaguely, but we believe we should 
 not mistake this view, by saying that there 
 is a certain class of perfectly sincere and even 
 moderately intelligent folk who hold a view 
 which, expressed exactly, would come to some- 
 thing like this that the entrance of woman 
 into new fields would necessitate so large a 
 mental culture and such a development of ac- 
 tivity, mental and physical, in the woman, that 
 she might ultimately develop into a being so su- 
 perior to the male or so widely different from 
 the man, that the bond of sympathy between 
 the sexes might ultimately be broken and the 
 man cease to be an object of affection and at- 
 traction to the woman, and the woman to the 
 [259]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 man through mere dissimilarity. The future 
 these persons seem to see, more or less vaguely, 
 is of a social condition, in which, the males of 
 the race remaining precisely as they are, the 
 corresponding females shall have advanced to 
 undreamed-of heights of culture and intelli- 
 gence; a condition in which the hand-worker 
 and the ordinary official and small farmer 
 shall be confronted with the female astronomer 
 or Greek professor of astonishing learning and 
 gifts as his only possible complementary sex 
 companion. The vision naturally awakens 
 certain misgivings as to sympathy between and 
 suitability for each other, of these two widely 
 dissimilar parts of humanity. 
 
 It must of course at once be admitted that, 
 were the two sexual halves of humanity dis- 
 tinct species, which, having once entered on a 
 course of evolution and differentiation, might 
 continue to develop along those distinct lines 
 for countless ages or even for a number of 
 generations, without reacting through inher- 
 itance on each other, the consequences of such 
 development might ultimately almost com- 
 pletely sever them. 
 
 The development of distinct branches of 
 [260]
 
 CERTAIN OBJECTIONS 
 
 humanity has already brought about such a 
 severance between races and classes which are 
 in totally distinct stages of evolution. So 
 wide is the hiatus between them often, that the 
 lowest form of sex attraction can hardly cross 
 it; and the more highly developed mental and 
 emotional sex passion cannot possibly bridge 
 it. In the world of sex, kind seeks kind, and 
 too wide a dissimilarity completely bars the 
 existence of the highest forms of sex emotion, 
 and often even the lower and more purely 
 animal. 
 
 Were it possible to place a company of the 
 most highly evolved human females George 
 Sands, Sophia Kovalevskys, or even the aver- 
 age cultured females of a highly evolved race 
 on an island where the only males were sav- 
 ages of the Fuegan type, who should meet 
 them on the shores with matted hair and prog- 
 nathous jaws, and with wild shouts, brandish- 
 ing their implements of death, to greet and 
 welcome them, it is an undoubted fact that, 
 so great would be the horror felt by the fe- 
 males towards them, that not only would the 
 race become extinct, but if it depended for its 
 continuance on any approach to sex affection 
 [261]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 on the part of the women, death would cer- 
 tainly be accepted by all, as the lesser of two 
 evils. Hardly less marked would be the sex- 
 ual division if, in place of cultured and de- 
 veloped females, we imagine males of the same 
 highly evolved class thrown into contact with 
 the lowest form of primitive females. A Dar- 
 win, a Schiller, a Keats, though all men capa- 
 ble of the strongest sex emotion and of the most 
 durable sex affections, would probably be un- 
 touched by any emotion but horror, cast into the 
 company of a circle of Bushmen females with 
 greased bodies and twinkling eyes, devouring 
 the raw entrails of slaughtered beasts. 
 
 But leaving out even such extreme instances 
 of diversity, the mere division in culture and 
 mental habits, dividing individuals of the same 
 race but of different classes, tends largely to 
 exclude the possibility of at least the nobler 
 and more enduring forms of sex emotion. The 
 highly cultured denizen of a modern society, 
 though he may enter into passing and tem- 
 porary and animal relations with the uncul- 
 tured peasant or woman of the street, seldom 
 finds awakened within him in such cases the 
 depth of emotion and sympathy which is nec- 
 [262]
 
 CERTAIN OBJECTIONS 
 
 essary for the closer tie of conjugal life; and it 
 may be doubted whether the highest, most per- 
 manent, and intimate forms of sexual affection 
 ever exist except among humans very largely 
 identical in tastes, habits of thought, and moral 
 and physical education. 1 
 
 Were it possible that the entrance of womair- 
 into the new fields of labor should produce 
 any increased divergence between man and 
 woman in ideals, culture, or tastes, there would 
 undoubtedly be a dangerous responsibility in- 
 curred by any who fostered such a movement. 
 But the most superficial study of human life 
 and the relation of the sexes negates such a 
 conception. 
 
 The two sexes are not distinct species but 
 the two halves of one whole, always acting and 
 interacting on each other and reproducing each 
 other and blending with each other in each 
 generation. The human female is bound or- 
 ganically in two ways to the males of her so- 
 ciety : collaterally they are her companions and 
 
 i In Greece at a certain period (as we have before noted) 
 there does appear to have been a temporary advance of the 
 male, so far in advance of the female as to make the differ- 
 ence between them almost immeasurable; but he quickly fell 
 back to the level of the woman. 
 
 [263]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 the co-progenitors with her of the race ; but she 
 is also the mother of the males of each suc- 
 ceeding generation, bearing, shaping, and im- 
 pressing her personality upon them. The 
 males and females of each human society re- 
 semble two oxen tethered to one yoke: for a 
 moment one may move slightly forward and 
 the other remain stationary ; but they can never 
 move farther from each other than the length 
 of the yoke that binds them; and they must 
 ultimately remain stationary or move forward 
 together. That which the women of one gen- 
 eration are mentally or physically, that by in- 
 heritance and education the males of the next 
 tend to be: there can be no movement or change 
 in one sex which will not instantly have its co- 
 ordinating effect upon the other; the males of 
 to-morrow are being cast in the mold of the 
 women of to-day. If new ideals, new moral 
 conceptions, new methods of action are found 
 permeating the minds of the women of one 
 generation, they will reappear in the ideals, 
 moral conceptions, methods of action of the 
 men of thirty years hence; and the idea that 
 the males of a society can ever become per- 
 manently farther removed from its females 
 
 [264]
 
 CERTAIN OBJECTIONS 
 
 than the individual man is from the mother 
 who bore and reared him, is at variance with 
 every law of human inheritance. 
 
 If, further, we turn from an abstract con- 
 sideration of this supposition, and examine 
 practically in the modern world men and 
 women as they exist to-day, the irrationality of 
 the supposition is yet more evident. 
 
 Not merely is the woman's movement of our 
 age not a sporadic and abnormal growth, like 
 a cancer bearing no organic relation to the de- 
 velopment of the rest of the social organism, 
 but it is essentially but one important phase 
 of a general modification which the whole of 
 modern life is undergoing. Further, careful 
 study of the movement will show that, not only 
 is it not a movement on the part of woman 
 leading to severance and separation between 
 the woman and the man, but that it is essen- 
 tially a movement of the woman toward the 
 man, of the sexes towards closer union. 
 
 Much is said at the present day on the sub- 
 ject of the "New Woman'* (who, as we have 
 seen, is essentially but the old non-parasitic 
 woman of the remote past, preparing to draw 
 on her new twentieth-century garb) : and it 
 [266]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 cannot truly be said that her attitude finds a 
 lack of social attention. On every hand she 
 is examined, praised, blamed, mistaken for her 
 counterfeit, ridiculed or deified but nowhere 
 can it be said, that the phenomenon of her ex- 
 istence is overlooked. 
 
 But there exists at the present day another 
 body of social phenomena, quite as important, 
 as radical, and if possible more far-reaching 
 in its effects on the present and future, which 
 yet attracts little conscious attention or animad- 
 version, though it makes itself everywhere felt ; 
 as the shade of a growing tree may be sat under 
 year after year by persons who never remark 
 its silent growth. 
 
 Side by side with the "New Woman," cor- 
 responding to her, as the two sides of a coin 
 cast in one mold, though differing from each 
 other in superficial detail, are yet of one metal, 
 one size, and one value, old in the sense in 
 which she is old, being merely the reincarna- 
 tion under the pressure of new conditions of 
 the ancient forms of his race; new in the sense 
 in which she is new, in that he is an adaptation 
 to material and social conditions which have 
 no exact counterpart in the past ; more diverse 
 [266]
 
 CERTAIN OBJECTIONS 
 
 from his immediate progenitors than even the 
 woman is from hers, side by side with her to- 
 day in every society and in every class in which 
 she is found, stands the New Man! 
 
 If he be asked, How comes it to pass, if, 
 under the pressure of social conditions, man 
 shows an analogous change of attitude toward 
 life, that the change in woman should attract 
 universal attention, while the corresponding 
 change in the man of her society passes almost 
 unnoticed? it would seem that the explana- 
 tion lies in the fact that, owing to woman's less 
 independence of action in the past, any attempt 
 at change or readaptation on her part has had 
 to overcome great resistance, and it is the noise 
 and friction of resistance, more than the 
 amount of actual change which has taken place, 
 which attracts attention. So, when an Alpine 
 stream, after a long winter frost, breaks the 
 ice, and with a crash and roar sweeps away the 
 obstructions which have gathered in its bed, all 
 men's attention is attracted to it, though when 
 later a much larger body of water forces its 
 way down, no man observes it. (An interest- 
 ing practical illustration of this fact is found 
 in the vast attention and uproar created when 
 [267]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 the first three women in England, some twenty 
 odd years ago, sought to enter the medical 
 profession. At the present day scores of 
 women prepare to enter it yearly without at- 
 tracting any general attention; not that the 
 change which is going on is not far more in 
 volume and social importance, but that, having 
 overcome the first obstruction, it is now noise- 
 less.) 
 
 Between the Emilias and Sophy Westerns 
 of a bygone generation and the most typical 
 of modern women, there exists no greater gap 
 (probably not so great a one) as that which 
 exists between the Tom Joneses and Squire 
 Westerns of that day and the most typical of 
 entirely modern men. 
 
 The sexual and social ideals which dominated 
 the fox-hunting, hard-drinking, high-playing, 
 recklessly loose-living country squire, clergy- 
 man, lawyer, and politician who headed the 
 social organism of the past, are at least as dis- 
 tinct from the ideals which dominate thousands 
 of their male descendants holding correspond- 
 ing positions in the societies of to-day, as are 
 the ideals of her great-great-grandmother's re- 
 
 [268]
 
 CERTAIN OBJECTIONS 
 
 mote from those dominating the most modern 
 of New Women. 
 
 That which most forces itself upon us as the 
 result of a close personal study of those sec- 
 tions of modern European societies in which 
 change and adaptation to the new conditions 
 of life are now most rapidly progressing, is, 
 not merely that equally large bodies of men 
 and women are being rapidly modified as to 
 their sexual and social ideals and as to their 
 mode of life, but that this change is strictly 
 complementary. 
 
 If the ideal of the modern woman becomes 
 increasingly one inconsistent with the passive 
 existence of woman on the remuneration which 
 her sexual attributes may win from man, and 
 marriage becomes for her increasingly a fellow- 
 ship of comrades, rather than the relationship 
 of the owner and the bought, the keeper and 
 the kept; the ideal of the typically modern 
 man departs quite as strongly from that of 
 his forefathers in the direction of finding in 
 woman active companionship and co-operation 
 rather than passive submission. If the New 
 Woman's conception of parenthood differs 
 [269]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 from the old in the greater sense of the gravity 
 and obligation resting on those who are re- 
 sponsible for the production of the individual 
 life, making her attitude toward the produc- 
 tion of her race widely unlike the reckless, 
 unreasoning, maternal reproduction of the 
 woman of the past, the most typical male 
 tends to feel in at least the same degree the 
 moral and social obligation entailed by awak- 
 ening lifehood: if the ideal which the New 
 Woman shapes for herself of a male com- 
 panion excludes the hard-drinking, hard- 
 swearing, licentious, even if materially wealthy 
 gallant of the past, the most typically modern 
 male's ideal for himself excludes at least 
 equally this type. 
 
 The brothel, the race-course, the gaming- 
 table, and habits of physical excess among 
 men are still with us; but the most superficial 
 study of our societies will show that these 
 have fallen into a new place in the scale of 
 social institutions and manners. The politi- 
 cian, the clergyman, or the lawyer does not im- 
 prove his social or public standing by violent 
 addictions in these directions ; to drink his com- 
 panions under the table, to be known to have 
 [270]
 
 CERTAIN OBJECTIONS 
 
 the largest number of illicit sex relations, to 
 be recognized as an habitual visitant of the 
 gambling saloon, does not, even in the case of 
 a crowned head, much enhance his reputation, 
 and may ultimately prove a bar to all success. 
 
 If the New Woman's conception of love be- 
 tween the sexes is one more largely psychic and 
 intellectual than crudely and purely physical, 
 and wholly of an affection between equals ; the 
 new man's conception, as expressed in the 
 most typical literature and art, produced by 
 typically modern males, gives voice with a 
 force no woman has surpassed to the same new 
 ideal. If to the typical modern woman the 
 lifelong companionship of a Tom Jones or 
 Squire Western would be more intolerable than 
 death or the most complete celibacy, not less 
 would the most typical of modern men shrink 
 from the prospect of a lifelong fetterment to 
 the companionship of an always fainting and 
 weeping Emilia or a Sophia of a bygone epoch. 
 
 If anywhere on earth exists the perfect ideal 
 of that which the modern woman desires to 
 be of a laboring and virile womanhood, free, 
 strong, fearless and tender it will probably 
 be found imaged deeply in the heart of the 
 [271]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 New Man; engendered there by his own high- 
 est needs and aspirations; and nowhere would 
 the most highly developed modern male find 
 a clearer image of that which forms his ideal 
 of the most fully developed manhood, than in 
 the ideal of man which haunts the heart of the 
 New Woman. 
 
 Those have strangely overlooked some of the 
 most important phenomena of our modern 
 world, who see in the woman's movement of 
 our day a movement of the female against the 
 male, of the woman away from the man. 
 
 We have called the woman's movement of 
 our age an endeavor on the part of women 
 among modern civilized races to find new fields 
 of labor as the old slip from them, as an at- 
 tempt to escape from parasitism and an inac- 
 tive dependence upon sex function alone ; but, 
 viewed from another side, the woman's move- 
 ment might not less justly be called a part of 
 a great movement of the sexes towards each 
 other, a movement towards common occupa- 
 tions, common interests, common ideals, and an 
 emotional tenderness and sympathy between 
 the sexes more deeply founded and more inde- 
 structible than any the world has yet seen.
 
 CERTAIN OBJECTIONS 
 
 It may be suggested, and the perception of 
 a certain profound truth underlies this sug- 
 gestion : How is it, if there be this close reci- 
 procity between the lines along which the ad- 
 vanced and typical modern males and females 
 are developing, that there does exist in our 
 modern societies, and often among the very 
 classes forming our typically advanced sec- 
 tions, so much of pain, unrest, and sexual disco- 
 ordination at the present day? 
 
 The reply to this pertinent suggestion is, 
 that the disco-ordination, struggle, and con- 
 sequent suffering which undoubtedly do exist 
 when we regard the world of sexual relation- 
 ships and ideals in our modern societies, do 
 not arise in any way from a disco-ordination 
 between the sexes as such, but from the con- 
 flict between old ideals and new; a struggle 
 which is going on in every branch of human 
 life in our modern societies, and in which the 
 determining element is not sex, but the point 
 of evolution which the individual has reached. 
 
 It cannot be too often repeated, even at the 
 risk of the most wearisome reiteration, that our 
 societies are societies in a state of rapid evo- 
 lution and change. The continually changing 
 [273]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 material conditions of life, with their reaction 
 on the intellectual, emotional, and moral aspect 
 of human affairs, render our societies the most 
 complex and probably the most mobile and un- 
 settled which the world has ever seen. As the 
 result of this rapidity of change and complex- 
 ity, there must exist a large amount of disco- 
 ordination, and, consequently, of suffering. 
 
 In a stationary society where generation has 
 succeeded generation for hundreds, or it may 
 be for thousands, of years, with little or no 
 change in the material conditions of life, the 
 desires, institutions, and moral principles of 
 men, their religious, political, domestic, and 
 sexual institutions, have gradually shaped 
 themselves in accordance with these conditions ; 
 and a certain harmony, and homogeneity, and 
 tranquillity, pervades the society. 
 
 In societies in the rapid state of change in 
 which our modern societies find themselves, 
 where not merely each decade, but each year, 
 and almost day, brings new forces and condi- 
 tions to bear on life, not only is the amount 
 of suffering and social rupture, which all 
 rapid, excessive, and sudden change entails 
 on an organism, inevitable; but, the new con- 
 [274]
 
 CERTAIN OBJECTIONS 
 
 ditions, acting at different angles of inten- 
 sity on the different individuals composing the 
 society, according to their positions and vary- 
 ing intelligence, and producing a society of 
 such marvelous complexity and dissimilarity in 
 the different parts, the intensest rupture and 
 disco-ordination between individuals is inevita- 
 ble; and sexual ideals and relationships must 
 share in the universal condition. 
 
 In a primitive society (if a somewhat prolix 
 illustration may be allowed) where for count- 
 less generations the conditions of life had re- 
 mained absolutely unchanged; where for ages 
 it had been necessary that all males should em- 
 ploy themselves in subduing wild beasts and 
 meeting dangerous foes, polygamy might uni- 
 versally have been a necessity, if the race was to 
 exist and its numbers be kept up, and, society 
 recognizing this, polygamy would be an insti- 
 tution universally approved and submitted to, 
 however much suffering it entailed. If food 
 were scarce, the destruction of superfluous in- 
 fants and of the aged might also always have 
 been necessary for the good of the individuals 
 themselves as well as of society, and the whole 
 society would acquiesce in it without any moral 
 [275]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 doubt. If an eclipse of the sun had once oc- 
 curred in connection with the appearance of a 
 certain insect, they might universally regard 
 that insect as a god causing it ; and ages might 
 pass without anything arising to disprove their 
 belief. There would be no social or religious 
 problem; and the view of one man would be 
 the view of all men; and all would be more or 
 less in harmony with the established institution 
 and customs. 
 
 But, supposing the sudden arrival of stran- 
 gers armed with superior weapons and knowl- 
 edge, who should exterminate all wild beasts 
 and render war and the consequent loss of 
 male life a thing of the past; not only would 
 the male be driven to encroach on the female's 
 domain of domestic agriculture and labor gen- 
 erally, but the males, not being so largely 
 destroyed, would soon equal and surpass in 
 numbers the females; and not only would it 
 then become a moot matter, "a problem/' 
 which labors were or were not to be performed 
 by man and which by woman, but very soon, 
 not the woman alone nor the man alone, but 
 both, would be driven to speculate as to the 
 desirability or necessity of polygamy, which, 
 
 [276]
 
 CERTAIN OBJECTIONS 
 
 were men as numerous as women, would leave 
 many males without sex companions. The 
 more intelligent and progressive individuals in 
 the community would almost at once arrive at 
 the conclusion that polygamy was objection- 
 able; the most fearless would seek to carry 
 their theory into action ; the most ignorant and 
 unprogressive would determinately stick to the 
 old institutions as inherited from the past, 
 without reason or question. Differences of 
 ideal would cause conflict and dissension in all 
 parts of the body social, and suffering would 
 ensue, where all before was fixed and deter- 
 minate. So also if the strangers introduced 
 new and improved methods of agriculture, and 
 food became abundant, it would then at once 
 strike the most far-seeing and readily adapta- 
 ble members of the community, both male and 
 female, that there was no necessity for the de- 
 struction of their offspring. Old men and 
 women would begin seriously to object to be- 
 ing hastened to death when they realized that 
 starvation did not necessarily stare them in 
 the face if they survived to an extreme old 
 age. The most stupid and hide-bound mem- 
 bers of the community would still continue to 
 [277]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 sacrifice parents and offspring long after the 
 necessity had ceased, under the influence of 
 traditional bias; many persons would be in a 
 state of much moral doubt as to which course 
 of action to pursue, the old or the new; and 
 bitter conflict might rage in the community 
 on all these points. Were the strangers to 
 bring with them telescopes, looking through 
 which it might at once clearly be seen that an 
 eclipse of the sun was caused merely by the 
 moon's passing over its face, the more intel- 
 ligent members of the community would at 
 once come to the conclusion that the insect was 
 not the cause of eclipses, would cease to re- 
 gard it as a god, and might even kill it. The 
 more stupid and immobile section of the com- 
 munity might refuse to look through the 
 telescope, or looking might refuse to see that 
 it was the moon which caused the eclipse, and 
 their deep-seated reverence for the insect, 
 which was the growth of ages, would lead 
 them to regard as impious those individuals 
 who denied its godhead, and might even lead 
 to the physical destruction of the first unbe- 
 lievers. The society, once so homogeneous 
 and co-ordinated in all its parts, would become 
 [278]
 
 CERTAIN OBJECTIONS 
 
 at once a society rent by moral and social 
 problems; and endless suffering must come to 
 individuals in the attempt to co-ordinate the 
 ideals, manners, and institutions of the society 
 to the new conditions! There might be im- 
 mense gain in many directions ; lives otherwise 
 sacrificed would be spared, a higher and more 
 satisfactory stage of existence might be en- 
 tered on; but the disco-ordination and strug- 
 gle would be inevitable until the society had 
 established an equilibrium between its knowl- 
 edge, its material conditions, and its social, 
 sexual, and religious ideals and institutions. 
 
 An analogous condition, but of a far more 
 complex kind, exists at the present day in our 
 own societies. Our material environment 
 differs in every respect from that of our grand- 
 parents, and bears little or no resemblance to 
 that of a few centuries ago. Here and there, 
 even in our civilized societies in remote agri- 
 cultural districts, the old social conditions may 
 remain undisturbed ; but throughout the bulk of 
 our societies the substitution of mechanical 
 for hand-labor, the wide diffusion of knowl- 
 edge through the always increasing cheap 
 printing-press, the rapidly increasing gather- 
 [279]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 ing of human creatures into vast cities, where 
 not merely thousands but millions of indi- 
 viduals are gathered together under physical 
 and mental conditions of life which invert every 
 social condition of the past; the increasingly 
 rapid means of locomotion; the increasing in- 
 tercourse between races and lands, brought 
 about by rapid means of intercommunication, 
 widening and changing in every direction the 
 human horizon all these produce a society, 
 so complex and so rapidly altering that social 
 co-ordination between all its parts is impos- 
 sible; and social unrest, and the strife of ideals, 
 of faiths, of institutions, and consequent hu- 
 man suffering, is inevitable. 
 
 If the ancient guns and agricultural im- 
 plements which our fathers taught us to use 
 are valueless in the hands of their descendants, 
 if the samplers our mothers worked and the 
 stockings they knitted are become superfluous 
 through the action of the modern loom, yet 
 more are their social institutions, faiths, and 
 manners of life become daily and increasingly 
 unfitted to our use ; and friction and suffering 
 inevitable, especially for the most advanced 
 and modified individuals in our societies. This 
 [280]
 
 CERTAIN OBJECTIONS 
 
 suffering, if we analyze it closely, rises from 
 three causes: 
 
 Firstly, it is caused by the fact that mere 
 excessive rapidity of change tends always 
 easily to become painful, by rupturing vio- 
 lently already formed habits and modes of 
 thought, as a very rapidly growing tree rup- 
 tures its bark and exudes its internal juices. 
 
 Secondly, it arises from the fact that indi- 
 viduals of the same human society, not adapt- 
 ing themselves at the same rate to the new 
 conditions, or being exposed to them in differ- 
 ent degrees, a wide and almost unparalleled 
 dissimilarity has to-day arisen between the 
 different individuals composing our societies. 
 Side by side with men and women who have 
 so rapidly adapted or are so successfully seek- 
 ing to adapt themselves to the new conditions 
 of knowledge and new conditions of life, 
 that, were they to reappear in future ages in 
 more co-ordinated societies, they might hardly 
 appear wholly antiquated, are to be found 
 men and women whose social, religious, and 
 moral ideals would not constitute them out 
 of harmony if they returned to the primitive 
 camps of the remote forbears of the human 
 [281]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 race; while, between these extreme classes, 
 lies that large mass of persons in an inter- 
 mediate state of development. This diversity 
 is bound to cause friction and suffering in 
 the interactions of the members of our so- 
 cieties ; more especially as the individuals com- 
 posing each type are not sorted out into 
 classes and families, but are found scattered 
 through all classes and grades in our societies. 1 
 Persons bound by the closest ties of blood or 
 social contiguity and compelled to a continual 
 intercourse are often those most widely dis- 
 severed in their amount of adaptation to the 
 new conditions of life. The amount of social 
 friction and consequent human suffering aris- 
 ing from this fact is so subtle and almost in- 
 calculable, that perhaps it is impossible ade- 
 quately to portray it in dry didactic language. 
 It is perhaps only describable in the medium 
 of art, where actual concrete individuals are 
 shown acting and reacting on each other as 
 in the novel or the drama. We are like a 
 
 i One of the women holding the most advanced and modern 
 view of the relation of woman to life whom we have met was 
 the wife of a Northamptonshire shoemaker; herself engaged 
 in making her living by the sewing of the uppers of men's 
 boots. 
 
 [282]
 
 CERTAIN OBJECTIONS 
 
 company of chess-men, not sorted out in kinds, 
 pawns together, kings and queens together, 
 and knights and rooks together, but simply 
 thrown at haphazard into a box, and jumbled 
 side by side. In the stationary societies, 
 where all individuals were permeated by the 
 same political, religious, moral, and social 
 ideas; and where each class had its own 
 hereditary and fixed traditions of action and 
 manners, this cause of friction and suffering 
 had of necessity no existence ; individual differ- 
 ences and discord might be occasioned by per- 
 sonal greeds, ambitions, and selfishnesses, but 
 not by conflicting conceptions of right and 
 wrong, of the desirable and undesirable, in all 
 branches of human life. 1 
 
 Thirdly, the unrest and suffering peculiar to 
 
 i Only those who have been thrown into contact with a sta- 
 tionary and homogeneous society such as that of primitive 
 African tribes before coming in contact with Europeans; or 
 such as the up-country Boers of South Africa were twenty 
 years ago, can realize adequately how wholly free from moral 
 and social problems and social friction such a society can be. 
 It is in studying such societies that the truth is vividly forced 
 on one, that the key to half, and more than half, of the phe- 
 nomena in our own social condition, can be found only in our 
 rapidly changing conditions necessitating equally rapid change 
 In our conceptions, ideals, and institutions. 
 
 [283]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 our age is caused by conflict going on within 
 the individual himself. So intensely rapid is 
 the change which is taking place in our envi- 
 ronment and knowledge that in the course of a 
 single life a man may pass through half a 
 dozen phases of growth. Born and reared in 
 possession of certain ideas and manners of ac- 
 tion, he or she may, before middle life is 
 reached, have had occasion repeatedly to mod- 
 ify, enlarge, and alter, or completely throw 
 aside those traditions. Within the individ- 
 uality itself of such persons goes on, in an 
 intensified form, that very struggle, conflict, 
 and disco-ordination which is going on in so- 
 ciety at large between its different members 
 and sections; and agonizing moments must 
 arise, when the individual, seeing the neces- 
 sity for adopting new courses of action, or 
 for accepting new truths, or conforming to 
 new conditions, will yet be tortured by the hold 
 of traditional convictions; and the men or 
 women who attempt to adapt their life to the 
 new material conditions and to harmony with 
 new knowledge are almost bound at some time 
 to rupture the continuity of their own psy- 
 chological existence. 
 
 [284]
 
 CERTAIN OBJECTIONS 
 
 It is these conditions which give rise to the 
 fact so often noticed, that the art of our age 
 tends persistently to deal with subtle psycho- 
 logical problems, religious, political, and sex- 
 ual, to which the art of the past holds no par- 
 allel; and it is so inevitably, because the artist 
 who would obey the artistic instinct to portray 
 faithfully the world about him, must portray 
 that which lies at the core of its life. The 
 "problem" play, novel, and poem are as in- 
 evitable in this age, as it was that the artist of 
 the eleventh century should portray tourna- 
 ments, physical battles, and chivalry, because 
 they were the dominant element in the life 
 about him. 
 
 It is also inevitable that this suffering and 
 conflict must make itself felt in its acutest 
 form in the person of the most advanced in- 
 dividual of our societies. It is the swimmer 
 who first leaps into the frozen stream who is 
 cut sharpest by the ice; those who follow him 
 find it broken, and the last find it gone. It 
 is the men or women who first tread down 
 the path which the bulk of humanity will ul- 
 timately follow, who must find themselves at 
 last in solitudes where the silence is deadly. 
 [285]
 
 The fact that any course of human action lead- 
 ing to adjustment leads also to immediate 
 suffering is no argument against it; that suf- 
 fering is the crown of thorns which marks the 
 kingship of earth's Messiahs : it is the mark of 
 the leader. 
 
 Thus social disco-ordination, and subjective 
 conflict and suffering, pervade the life of our 
 age, making themselves felt in every division 
 of human life, religious, political, and domes- 
 tic. 
 
 *** 
 
 If they are more noticeable, and make 
 themselves more keenly felt in the region of 
 sex than in any other, even the religious, it is 
 because when we enter the region of sex we 
 touch, as it were, the spinal cord of the human 
 existence, its great nerve center, where sensa- 
 tion is most acute, and pain and pleasure most 
 keenly felt. It is not sex disco-ordination 
 that is at the root of our social unrest; it is the 
 universal disco-ordination which affects even 
 the world of sex phenomena. 
 
 Also it is necessary to note that the line 
 which divides the progressive sections of our 
 communities, seeking to co-ordinate themselves 
 to the new conditions of life, from the retro- 
 [286]
 
 CERTAIN OBJECTIONS 
 
 gressive is not a line running coincidentally 
 with that of sex. A George Sand and a 
 Henrick Ibsen belong more essentially to the 
 same class in the order of modern development, 
 than either belongs to any class composed en- 
 tirely of their own sex. If we divide humanity 
 into classes according to type, in each division 
 will be found the male with his complementary 
 female. Side by side with the old harlot at 
 the street corner anxious to sell herself, stands 
 the old aboriginal male, whether covered or 
 not with a veneer of civilization, eager and de- 
 siring to buy. Side by side with the parasitic 
 woman, seeking only increased pleasure and 
 luxury from her relations with man, stands 
 the male seeking only pleasure and self-in- 
 dulgence from his relations with her. Side by 
 side with the New Woman, anxious for labor 
 and seeking from man only such love and fel- 
 lowship as she gives, stands the New Man, 
 anxious to possess her only on the terms she 
 offers. If the social movement, through 
 which the most advanced women of eur day 
 are attempting to bring themselves into co- 
 ordination with the new conditions of life, 
 removes them immeasurably from certain 
 [287]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 types of the primitive male; the same move- 
 ment equally removes the new male from the 
 old female. The sexual tragedy of modern 
 life lies, not in the fact that woman as such is 
 tending to differ fundamentally from man as 
 such; but that, in the unassorted confusion of 
 our modern life, it is continually the modified 
 type of man or woman who is thrown into the 
 closest personal relations with the antiquated 
 type of the opposite sex; that between father 
 and daughter, mother and son, brother and sis- 
 ter, husband and wife, may sometimes be found 
 to intervene not merely years, but even cen- 
 turies of social evolution. 
 
 It is not man as man who opposes the at- 
 tempt of woman to readjust herself to the 
 new conditions of life: that opposition arises, 
 perhaps more often, from the retrogressive 
 members of her own sex. And it is a fact 
 which will surprise no one who has studied 
 the conditions of modern life, that among the 
 works of literature in all European languages 
 which most powerfully advocate the entrance 
 of woman into the new fields of labor, which 
 most uncompromisingly demand for her the 
 widest training and freedom of action, and 
 [288]
 
 CERTAIN OBJECTIONS 
 
 which most passionately seek for the breaking 
 down of all artificial lines which sever the 
 woman from the man, many of the ablest and 
 most uncompromising are the works of men. 
 
 The New Man and Woman do not resemble 
 two people, who, standing on a level plain, set 
 out on two roads, which, diverging at differ- 
 ent angles and continued in straight lines, 
 must continue to take them farther and farther 
 from each other the longer they proceed in 
 them; rather, they resemble two persons who 
 start to climb a spur of the same mountain 
 from opposite sides; where, the higher they 
 climb, the nearer they come to each other, be- 
 ing bound ultimately to meet at the top. 
 
 Even that opposition often made by males 
 to the entrance of woman into the new fields 
 of labor, of which they at present hold the 
 monopoly, is not fundamentally sexual in its 
 nature. The male who opposes the entrance 
 of woman into the trade or profession in which 
 he holds more or less a monopoly, would op- 
 pose with equal, and perhaps even greater 
 bitterness, the opening of its doors to num- 
 bers of his own sex who had before been ex- 
 cluded, and who would limit his gains and 
 [289]
 
 share his privileges. It is the primitive brute 
 instinct to retain as much as possible for the 
 ego, irrespective of justice or humanity, which 
 dominates all the lower moral types of human- 
 ity, both male and female, which acts here. 
 The lawyer or physician who objects to the 
 entrance of women to his highly fenced pro- 
 fessional enclosure, would probably object 
 yet more strenuously if it were proposed to 
 throw down the barriers of restraint and 
 monetary charges which would result in the 
 flooding of his profession by other males : while 
 the mechanic, who resists the entrance of 
 woman into his especial field, is invariably 
 found even more persistently to oppose any 
 attempt at entrance on the part of other males, 
 when he finds it possible to do so. 
 
 This opposition of the smaller type of male, 
 to the entrance of woman into the callings 
 hitherto apportioned to himself, is sometimes 
 taken as implying the impossibility of fellow- 
 ship and affection existing between the men 
 and women employed in common labor; it 
 is said sometimes that the professional jeal- 
 ousy of the man must necessitate his feel- 
 ing a hatred and antagonism towards the 
 [290]
 
 CERTAIN OBJECTIONS 
 
 woman who shares his fields of labor. But the 
 most superficial study of human life negates 
 such a supposition. Among men, in spite of 
 the occasional existence of the petty profes- 
 sional jealousies and antagonism, we find, 
 viewing society as a whole, that common in- 
 terests, and above all common labors, are the 
 most potent means of bringing them into close 
 and friendly relations, and, in fact, they seem 
 generally essential for the formation of the 
 closest and most permanent human friend- 
 ships. In every walk of human life, whether 
 trade or profession, we find men associating 
 by choice mainly with, and entertaining often 
 the profoundest and most permanent friend- 
 ship for, men engaged in their own callings. 
 The inner circle of a barrister's friendships 
 almost always consists of his fellow-barristers ; 
 the broker, who is free to select his society 
 where he will, will be oftenest found in com- 
 pany with his fellow-man-of -business ; the 
 medical man's closest friendship is, in a large 
 number of cases, for some man who was once 
 his fellow-student and has passed through the 
 different stages of his professional life with 
 him; the friends and chosen companions of 
 [291]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 the actor are commonly actors; of the savant, 
 savants; of the farmer, farmers; of the sailor, 
 sailors. So generally is this the case that it 
 would almost attract attention and cause 
 amusement were the boon companion of the 
 sea captain a leading politician, and the in- 
 timate friend of the clergyman an actor, or 
 the dearest friend of the farmer an astronomer. 
 Kind seeks kind. The majority of men by 
 choice frequent clubs where those of their own 
 calling are found, and especially as life ad- 
 vances and men sink deeper into their pro- 
 fessional grooves, they are found to seek 
 fellowship mainly among their fellow-workers. 
 That this should be so is inevitable; common 
 amusements may create a certain bond be- 
 tween the young, but the performance of com- 
 mon labors, necessitating identical knowledge, 
 identical habits, and modes of thought, forms 
 a far stronger bond, drawing men far more 
 powerfully towards social intercourse and per- 
 sonal friendship, than the centrifugal force of 
 professional jealousies can divide them. 
 
 That the same condition would prevail 
 where women became fellow-workers with men 
 might be inferred on abstract grounds: but
 
 CERTAIN OBJECTIONS 
 
 practical experience confirms this. The actor 
 of tenest marries the actress ; the male musician 
 the female; the reception-room of the literary 
 woman or female painter is found continually 
 frequented by men of her own calling; the 
 woman-doctor associates continually with and 
 often marries one of her own confreres; and 
 as women in increasing numbers share the 
 modern fields of labor with men, which have 
 hitherto been apportioned to them alone, the 
 nature and strength of the sympathy arising 
 from common labors will be increasingly clear. 
 The sharing by men and women of common 
 labors, necessitating a common culture and 
 therefore common habits of thought and in- 
 terests, would tend to fill that painful hiatus 
 which arises so continually in modern con- 
 jugal life, dividing the man and woman as 
 soon as the first sheen of physical sexual at- 
 traction which glints only over the unknown 
 begins to fade, and from which springs so 
 large a part of the tragedy of modern con- 
 jugal relations. The primitive male might 
 discuss with her his success in hunting and 
 her success in finding roots; as the primi- 
 tive peasant may discuss to-day with his wife 
 [293]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 the crops and cows in which both are equally 
 interested and which both understand; there is 
 nothing in their order of life to produce al- 
 ways increasingly divergent habits of thought 
 and interest. 
 
 In modern civilized life, in many sections, 
 the lack of any common labor and interests 
 and the wide dissimilarity of the life led by the 
 man and the woman, tend continually to pro- 
 duce increasing divergence, so that, long be- 
 fore middle life is reached, they are left with- 
 out any bond of cohesion but that of habit. 
 The comradeship and continual stimulation, 
 rising from intercourse with those sharing our 
 closest interests and regarding life from the 
 same standpoint, the man tends to seek in his 
 club and among his male companions, and 
 the woman accepts solitude, or seeks dissipa- 
 tions which tend yet further to disrupt the 
 common conjugal life. A certain mental 
 camaraderie and community of impersonal 
 interests is imperative in conjugal life in ad- 
 dition to a purely sexual relation, if the union 
 is to remain a living and growing reality. 
 It is more especially because the sharing by 
 woman of the labors of man will tend to 
 [29*]
 
 CERTAIN OBJECTIONS 
 
 promote camaraderie and the existence of 
 common, impersonal interests and like habits 
 of thought and life, that the entrance of 
 women into the fields shared by men, and not 
 into others peculiarly reserved for her, is so 
 desirable. 1 
 
 i The reply given once by the wife of a leading barrister, 
 when reference was made to the fact that she and her husband 
 were seldom found in each other's society, throws a painful but 
 true light on certain aspects of modern life, against which the 
 entire woman's movement of our age is a rebellion. "My hus- 
 band," she said, "is always increasingly absorbed in his legal 
 duties, of which I understand nothing, and which so do not in- 
 terest me. My children are all growing up and at school. I 
 have servants enough to attend to my house. When he comes 
 home in the evening, if I try to amuse him by telling him of 
 the things I have been doing during the day, of the bazaars 
 I am working for, the shopping I have done, the visits I have 
 paid, he is bored. He is anxious to get away to his study, 
 his books, and his men friends, and I am left utterly alone. 
 If it were not for the society of women and other men with 
 whom I have more in common, I could not bear my life. 
 When we first met as boy and girl, and fell in love, we danced 
 and rode together and seemed to have everything in common; 
 now we have nothing. I respect him and I believe he respects 
 me, but that is all!" It is, perhaps, only in close confidences 
 between man and man and woman and woman that this open 
 sore, rising from the divergence in training, habits of life, and 
 occupation between men and women is spoken of; but it lies 
 as a tragic element at the core of millions of modern conjugal 
 relations, beneath the smooth superficial surface of our modern 
 life; breaking out to the surface only occasionally in the revela- 
 tions of our divorce courts. 
 
 [295]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 It is a gracious fact, to which every woman 
 who has achieved success or accomplished good 
 work in any of the fields generally appor- 
 tioned to men will bear witness, whether that 
 work be in the field of literature, of science, 
 or the organized professions, that the hands 
 which have been most eagerly stretched out to 
 welcome her have been those of men; that the 
 voices which have most generously acclaimed 
 her success have been those of male fellow- 
 workers in the fields into which she has en- 
 tered. 
 
 There is no door at which the hand of 
 woman has knocked for admission into a new 
 field of toil but there have been found on the 
 other side the hands of strong and generous 
 men eager to turn it for her almost before she 
 knocks. 
 
 To those of us who, at the beginning of a 
 new century, stand with shaded eyes, gazing 
 into the future, striving to descry the outlines 
 of the shadowy figures which loom before us 
 in the distance, nothing seems of so gracious 
 a promise as the outline we seem to discern 
 of a condition of human life in which a closer 
 [296]
 
 CERTAIN OBJECTIONS 
 
 union than the world has yet seen shall exist 
 between the man and the woman: where the 
 Walhalla of our old Northern ancestors shall 
 find its realization in a concrete reality, and the 
 Walkurie and her hero feast together at one 
 board in a brave fellowship. 
 
 Always in our dreams we hear the turn of 
 the key that shall close the door of the last 
 brothel; the clink of the last coin that pays 
 for the body and soul of a woman ; the falling 
 of the last wall that encloses artificially the 
 activity of woman and divides her from man; 
 always we picture the love of the sexes as once 
 a dull, slow, creeping worm; then a torpid, 
 earthy chrysalis ; at last the full- winged insect, 
 glorious in the sunshine of the future. 
 
 To-day, as we row hard against the stream 
 of life, is it only a blindness in our eyes, which 
 have been too long strained, which makes us 
 see, far up the river where it fades into the 
 distance, through all the mists that rise from 
 the river-banks, a clear, a golden light? Is it 
 only a delusion of the eyes which makes us 
 grasp our oars more lightly and bend our 
 backs lower; though we know well that, long 
 [297]
 
 WOMAN AND LABOR 
 
 before the boat reaches those stretches, other 
 hands than ours will man the oars and guide 
 its helm? Is it all a dream? 
 
 The ancient Chaldean seer had a vision of a 
 Garden of Eden which lay in a remote past. 
 It was dreamed that man and woman once 
 lived in joy and fellowship, till woman ate of 
 the tree of knowledge and gave to man to eat ; 
 and that both were driven forth to wander, to 
 toil in bitterness; because they had eaten of 
 the fruit. 
 
 We also have our dream of a Garden, but it 
 lies in a distant future. We dream that 
 woman shall eat of the tree of knowledge to- 
 gether with man, and that side by side and 
 hand close to hand, through ages of much toil 
 and labor, they shall together raise about them 
 an Eden nobler than any the Chaldean 
 dreamed of; an Eden created by their own la- 
 bor and made beautiful by their own fellow- 
 ship. 
 
 In his apocalypse there was one who saw a 
 new heaven and a new earth; we see a new 
 earth; but therein dwells love the love of 
 comrades and co-workers. 
 [298]
 
 CERTAIN OBJECTIONS 
 
 It is because so wide and gracious to us are 
 the possibilities of the future; so impossible is 
 a return to the past, so deadly is a passive 
 acquiescence in the present, that to-day we are 
 found everywhere raising our strange new cry 
 "Labor and the training that fits us for 
 labor!" 
 
 THE END 
 
 [299]
 
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