WOMAN AND LABOUR

by Olive Schreiner

Author of "Dreams, " "The Story of an African Farm, " "Trooper PeterHalket, " "Dream Life and Real Life, " etc. Etc. 

 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 sea-- 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. "

 Tennyson. 

 Olive Schreiner. De Aar, Cape of Good Hope, South Africa. 1911. 

Contents

 Introduction

 Chapter I. Parasitism

 Chapter II. Parasitism (continued)

 Chapter III. Parasitism (continued)

 Chapter IV. Woman and War

 Chapter V. Sex Differences

 Chapter VI. Certain Objections

Introduction. 

It is necessary to say a few words to explain this book. The originaltitle of the book was "Musings on Woman and Labour. "

It is, what its name implies, a collection of musings on some of thepoints connected with woman's work. 

In my early youth I began a book on Woman. I continued the work tillten years ago. It necessarily touched on most matters in which sex has apart, however incompletely. 

It began by tracing the differences of sex function to their earliestappearances in life on the globe; not only as when in the animal world, two amoeboid globules coalesce, and the process of sexual generationalmost unconsciously begins; but to its yet more primitivemanifestations in plant life. In the first three chapters I traced, as far as I was able, the evolution of sex in different branches ofnon-human life. Many large facts surprised me in following this line ofthought by their bearing on the whole modern sex problem. Such factsas this; that, in the great majority of species on the earth the femaleform exceeds the male in size and strength and often in predatoryinstinct; and that sex relationships may assume almost any form on earthas the conditions of life vary; and that, even in their sexual relationstowards offspring, those differences which we, conventionally, are aptto suppose are inherent in the paternal or the maternal sex form, arenot inherent--as when one studies the lives of certain toads, where thefemale deposits her eggs in cavities on the back of the male, where theeggs are preserved and hatched; or, of certain sea animals, in which themale carries the young about with him and rears them in a pouch formedof his own substance; and countless other such. And above all, thisimportant fact, which had first impressed me when as a child I wanderedalone in the African bush and watched cock-o-veets singing theirinter-knit love-songs, and small singing birds building their neststogether, and caring for and watching over, not only their young, buteach other, and which has powerfully influenced all I have thought andfelt on sex matters since;--the fact that, along the line of birdlife and among certain of its species sex has attained its highest andaesthetic, and one might almost say intellectual, development onearth: a point of development to which no human race as a whole hasyet reached, and which represents the realisation of the highest sexualideal which haunts humanity. 

When these three chapters we ended I went on to deal, as far aspossible, with woman's condition in the most primitive, in the savageand in the semi-savage states. I had always been strangely interestedfrom childhood in watching the condition of the native African womenin their primitive society about me. When I was eighteen I had aconversation with a Kafir woman still in her untouched primitivecondition, a conversation which made a more profound impression on mymind than any but one other incident connected with the position ofwoman has ever done. She was a woman whom I cannot think of otherwisethan as a person of genius. In language more eloquent and intense thanI have ever heard from the lips of any other woman, she painted thecondition of the women of her race; the labour of women, the anguish ofwoman as she grew older, and the limitations of her life closed in abouther, her sufferings under the condition of polygamy and subjection; allthis she painted with a passion and intensity I have not known equalled;and yet, and this was the interesting point, when I went on to questionher, combined with a deep and almost fierce bitterness against lifeand the unseen powers which had shaped woman and her conditions as theywere, there was not one word of bitterness against the individual man, nor any will or intention to revolt; rather, there was a stern andalmost majestic attitude of acceptance of the inevitable; life and theconditions of her race being what they were. It was this conversationwhich first forced upon me a truth, which I have since come to regard asalmost axiomatic, that, the women of no race or class will ever rise inrevolt or attempt to bring about a revolutionary readjustment of theirrelation to their society, however intense their suffering and howeverclear their perception of it, while the welfare and persistence of theirsociety requires their submission: that, wherever there is a generalattempt on the part of the women of any society to readjust theirposition in it, a close analysis will always show that the changed orchanging conditions of that society have made woman's acquiescence nolonger necessary or desirable. 

Another point which it was attempted to deal with in this division ofthe book was the probability, amounting almost to a certainty, thatwoman's physical suffering and weakness in childbirth and certain otherdirections was the price which woman has been compelled to pay for thepassing of the race from the quadrupedal and four-handed state to theerect; and which was essential if humanity as we know it was to exist(this of course was dealt with by a physiological study of woman'sstructure); and also, to deal with the highly probable, though unprovedand perhaps unprovable, suggestion, that it was largely the necessitywhich woman was under of bearing her helpless young in her arms whileprocuring food for them and herself, and of carrying them when escapingfrom enemies, that led to the entirely erect position being forced ondeveloping humanity. 

These and many other points throwing an interesting light on the laterdevelopment of women (such as the relation between agriculture and thesubjection of women) were gone into in this division of the book dealingwith primitive and semi-barbarous womanhood. 

When this division was ended, I had them type-written, and with thefirst three chapters bound in one volume about the year 1888; and thenwent on to work at the last division, which I had already begun. 

This dealt with what is more popularly known as the women's question:with the causes which in modern European societies are leading women toattempt readjustment in their relation to their social organism; withthe direction in which such readjustments are taking place; and with theresults which in the future it appears likely such readjustments willproduce. 

After eleven years, 1899, these chapters were finished and bound in alarge volume with the first two divisions. There then only remained torevise the book and write a preface. In addition to the prose argumentI had in each chapter one or more allegories; because while it is easyclearly to express abstract thoughts in argumentative prose, whateveremotion those thoughts awaken I have not felt myself able adequatelyto express except in the other form. (The allegory "Three Dreams in aDesert" which I published about nineteen years ago was taken from thisbook; and I have felt that perhaps being taken from its context it wasnot quite clear to every one. ) I had also tried throughout to illustratethe subject with exactly those particular facts in the animal and humanworld, with which I had come into personal contact and which had helpedto form the conclusions which were given; as it has always seemed tome that in dealing with sociological questions a knowledge of the exactmanner in which any writer has arrived at his view is necessary inmeasuring its worth. The work had occupied a large part of my life, andI had hoped, whatever its deficiencies, that it might at least stimulateother minds, perhaps more happily situated, to an enlarged study of thequestion. 

In 1899 I was living in Johannesburg, when, owing to ill-health, I wasordered suddenly to spend some time at a lower level. At the end oftwo months the Boer War broke out. Two days after war was proclaimed Iarrived at De Aar on my way back to the Transvaal; but Martial Law hadalready been proclaimed there, and the military authorities refused toallow my return to my home in Johannesburg and sent me to the Colony;nor was I allowed to send any communication through, to any person, whomight have extended some care over my possessions. Some eight monthsafter, when the British troops had taken and entered Johannesburg; afriend, who, being on the British side, had been allowed to go up, wroteme that he had visited my house and found it looted, that all that wasof value had been taken or destroyed; that my desk had been forced openand broken up, and its contents set on fire in the centre of the room, so that the roof was blackened over the pile of burnt papers. He addedthat there was little in the remnants of paper of which I could make anyuse, but that he had gathered and stored the fragments till such timeas I might be allowed to come and see them. I thus knew my book had beendestroyed. 

Some months later in the war when confined in a little up-countryhamlet, many hundreds of miles from the coast and from Johannesburg;with the brunt of the war at that time breaking around us, de Wet havingcrossed the Orange River and being said to have been within a few milesof us, and the British columns moving hither and thither, I was livingin a little house on the outskirts of the village, in a single room, with a stretcher and two packing-cases as furniture, and with my littledog for company. Thirty-six armed African natives were set to guardnight and day at the doors and windows of the house; and I was onlyallowed to go out during certain hours in the middle of the day to fetchwater from the fountain, or to buy what I needed, and I was allowed toreceive no books, newspapers or magazines. A high barbed wire fence, guarded by armed natives, surrounded the village, through which it wouldhave been death to try to escape. All day the pompoms from the armouredtrains, that paraded on the railway line nine miles distant, could beheard at intervals; and at night the talk of the armed natives as theypressed against the windows, and the tramp of the watch with the endless"Who goes there?" as they walked round the wire fence through the long, dark hours, when one was allowed neither to light a candle nor strikea match. When a conflict was fought near by, the dying and wounded werebrought in; three men belonging to our little village were led out toexecution; death sentences were read in our little market-place; ourprison was filled with our fellow-countrymen; and we did not knowfrom hour to hour what the next would bring to any of us. Under theseconditions I felt it necessary I should resolutely force my thought attimes from the horror of the world around me, to dwell on some abstractquestion, and it was under these circumstances that this little book waswritten; being a remembrance mainly drawn from one chapter of the largerbook. The armed native guards standing against the uncurtained windows, it was impossible to open the shutters, and the room was thereforealways so dark that even the physical act of writing was difficult. 

A year and a half after, when the war was over and peace had beenproclaimed for above four months, I with difficulty obtained a permit tovisit the Transvaal. I found among the burnt fragments the leathern backof my book intact, the front half of the leaves burnt away; the backhalf of the leaves next to the cover still all there, but so browned andscorched with the flames that they broke as you touched them; and therewas nothing left but to destroy it. I even then felt a hope that at somefuture time I might yet rewrite the entire book. But life is short; andI have found that not only shall I never rewrite the book, but Ishall not have the health even to fill out and harmonise this littleremembrance from it. 

It is therefore with considerable pain that I give out this fragment. Iam only comforted by the thought that perhaps, all sincere and earnestsearch after truth, even where it fails to reach it, yet, often comesso near to it, that other minds more happily situated may be led, bypointing out its very limitations and errors, to obtain a larger view. 

I have dared to give this long and very uninteresting explanation, notat all because I have wished by giving the conditions under which thislittle book was written, to make excuse for any repetitions or lack ofliterary perfection, for these things matter very little; but, because(and this matters very much) it might lead to misconception on thesubject-matter itself if its genesis were not exactly understood. 

Not only is this book not a general view of the whole vast bodyof phenomena connected with woman's position; but it is not even abird's-eye view of the whole question of woman's relation to labour. 

In the original book the matter of the parasitism of woman filled onlyone chapter out of twelve, and it was mainly from this chapter that thisbook was drawn. The question of the parasitism of woman is, I think, very vital, very important; it explains many phenomena which nothingelse explains; and it will be of increasing importance. But for themoment there are other aspects of woman's relation to labour practicallyquite as pressing. In the larger book I had devoted one chapter entirelyto an examination of the work woman has done and still does in themodern world, and the gigantic evils which arise from the fact thather labour, especially domestic labour, often the most wearisome andunending known to any section of the human race, is not adequatelyrecognised or recompensed. Especially on this point I have feared thisbook might lead to a misconception, if by its great insistence on theproblem of sex parasitism, and the lighter dealing with other aspects, it should lead to the impression that woman's domestic labour at thepresent day (something quite distinct from, though indirectly connectedwith, the sexual relation between man and woman) should not be highlyand most highly recognised and recompensed. I believe it will be in thefuture, and then when woman gives up her independent field of labour fordomestic or marital duty of any kind, she will not receive her shareof 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 fairdivision, in an equal partnership. (It may be objected that where a manand woman have valued each other sufficiently to select one another fromall other humans for a lifelong physical union, it is an impertinenceto suppose there could be any necessity to adjust economic relations. Inlove there is no first nor last! And that the desire of each must be toexcel the other in service. That this should be so is true; that it isso now, in the case of union between two perfectly morally developedhumans, is also true, and that this condition may in a distant future bealmost universal is certainly true. But dealing with this matter as apractical question today, we have to consider not what should be, orwhat may be, but what, given traditions and institutions of oursocieties, is, today. ) Especially I have feared that the points dealtwith in this little book, when taken apart from other aspects of thequestion, might lead to the conception that it was intended to expressthe thought, that it was possible or desirable that woman in addition toher child-bearing should take from man his share in the support and careof his offspring or of the woman who fulfilled with regard to himselfdomestic duties of any kind. In that chapter in the original bookdevoted to the consideration of man's labour in connection with womanand with his offspring more than one hundred pages were devoted toillustrating how essential to the humanising and civilising of man, andtherefore of the whole race, was an increased sense of sexual andpaternal responsibility, and an increased justice towards woman as adomestic labourer. In the last half of the same chapter I dealt at greatlength with what seems to me an even more pressing practical sexquestion at this moment--man's attitude towards those women who are notengaged in domestic labour; toward that vast and always increasing bodyof women, who as modern conditions develop are thrown out into thestream of modern economic life to sustain themselves and often others bytheir own labour; and who yet are there bound hand and foot, not by theintellectual or physical limitations of their nature, but by artificialconstrictions and conventions, the remnants of a past condition ofsociety. It is largely this maladjustment, which, deeply studied in allits ramifications, will be found to lie as the taproot and centralsource of the most terrible of the social diseases that afflict us. 

The fact that for equal work equally well performed by a man and bya woman, it is ordained that the woman on the ground of her sex aloneshall receive a less recompense, is the nearest approach to a wilfuland unqualified "wrong" in the whole relation of woman to society today. That males of enlightenment and equity can for an hour tolerate theexistence of this inequality has seemed to me always incomprehensible;and it is only explainable when one regards it as a result of theblinding effects of custom and habit. Personally, I have felt soprofoundly on this subject, that this, with one other point connectedwith woman's sexual relation to man, are the only matters connected withwoman's position, in thinking of which I have always felt it necessaryalmost fiercely to crush down indignation and to restrain it, if I wouldmaintain an impartiality of outlook. I should therefore much regret ifthe light and passing manner in which this question has been touched onin this little book made it seem of less vital importance than I holdit. 

In the last chapter of the original book, the longest, and I believe themost important, I dealt with the problems connected with marriage andthe personal relations of men and women in the modern world. In it Itried to give expression to that which I hold to be a great truth, andone on which I should not fear to challenge the verdict of long futuregenerations--that, the direction in which the endeavour of woman toreadjust herself to the new conditions of life is leading today, isnot towards a greater sexual laxity, or promiscuity, or to an increasedself-indulgence, but toward a higher appreciation of the sacredness ofall sex relations, and a clearer perception of the sex relation betweenman and woman as the basis of human society, on whose integrity, beautyand healthfulness depend the health and beauty of human life, as awhole. Above all, that it will lead to a closer, more permanent, moreemotionally and intellectually complete and intimate relation betweenthe individual man and woman. And if in the present disco-ordinatetransitional stage of our social growth it is found necessary toallow of readjustment by means of divorce, it will not be becausesuch readjustments will be regarded lightly, but rather, as when, in acomplex and delicate mechanism moved by a central spring, we allowin the structure for the readjustment and regulation of that spring, because on its absolute perfection of action depends the movement of thewhole mechanism. In the last pages of the book, I tried to express whatseems to me a most profound truth often overlooked--that as humanityand human societies pass on slowly from their present barbarous andsemi-savage condition in matters of sex into a higher, it will be foundincreasingly, that over and above its function in producing and sendingonward the physical stream of life (a function which humanity shareswith the most lowly animal and vegetable forms of life, and which evenby some noted thinkers of the present day seems to be regarded as itsonly possible function, ) that sex and the sexual relation between manand woman have distinct aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual functionsand ends, apart entirely from physical reproduction. That noble as isthe function of the physical reproduction of humanity by the union ofman and woman, rightly viewed, that union has in it latent, other, andeven higher forms, of creative energy and life-dispensing power, andthat its history on earth has only begun. As the first wild rose when ithung from its stem with its centre of stamens and pistils and its singlewhorl of pale petals, had only begun its course, and was destined, asthe ages passed, to develop stamen upon stamen and petal upon petal, till it assumed a hundred forms of joy and beauty. 

And, it would indeed almost seem, that, on the path toward the higherdevelopment of sexual life on earth, as man has so often had to leadin other paths, that here it is perhaps woman, by reason of those verysexual conditions which in the past have crushed and trammelled her, whois bound to lead the way, and man to follow. So that it may be at last, that sexual love--that tired angel who through the ages has presidedover the march of humanity, with distraught eyes, and feather-shaftsbroken, and wings drabbled in the mires of lust and greed, and goldenlocks caked over with the dust of injustice and oppression--till thoselooking at him have sometimes cried in terror, "He is the Evil andnot the Good of life!" and have sought, if it were not possible, toexterminate him--shall yet, at last, bathed from the mire and dust ofages in the streams of friendship and freedom, leap upwards, with whitewings spread, resplendent in the sunshine of a distant future--theessentially Good and Beautiful of human existence. 

I have given this long and very wearisome explanation of the scope andorigin of this little book, because I feel that it might lead to gravemisunderstanding were it not understood how it came to be written. 

I have inscribed it to my friend, Lady Constance Lytton; not becauseI think it worthy of her, nor yet because of the splendid part shehas played in the struggle of the women fighting today in England forcertain forms of freedom for all women. It is, if I may be allowedwithout violating the sanctity of a close personal friendship so tosay, because she, with one or two other men and women I have known, haveembodied for me the highest ideal of human nature, in which intellectualpower and strength of will are combined with an infinite tenderness anda wide human sympathy; a combination which, whether in the person of theman or the woman, is essential to the existence of the fully rounded andharmonised human creature; and which an English woman of genius summedin one line when she cried in her invocation of her great Frenchsister:--

"Thou large-brained woman and large-hearted man!"

One word more I should like to add, as I may not again speak or writeon this subject. I should like to say to the men and women of thegenerations which will come after us--"You will look back at us withastonishment! You will wonder at passionate struggles that accomplishedso little; at the, to you, obvious paths to attain our ends which we didnot take; at the intolerable evils before which it will seem to you wesat down passive; at the great truths staring us in the face, which wefailed to see; at the truths we grasped at, but could never quiteget our fingers round. You will marvel at the labour that ended in solittle--but, what you will never know is how it was thinking of you andfor you, that we struggled as we did and accomplished the little whichwe have done; that it was in the thought of your larger realisation andfuller life, that we found consolation for the futilities of our own. "

"What I aspired to be, and was not, comforts me. "

O. S. 

Chapter I. Parasitism. 

In that clamour which has arisen in the modern world, where now this, and then that, is demanded for and by large bodies of modern women, hewho listens carefully may detect as a keynote, beneath all the clamour, a demand which may be embodied in such a cry as this: Give us labour andthe training which fits for labour! We demand this, not for ourselvesalone, but for the race. 

If this demand be logically expanded, it will take such form as this:Give us labour! For countless ages, for thousands, millions it may be, we have laboured. When first man wandered, the naked, newly-erectedsavage, and hunted and fought, we wandered with him: each step ofhis was ours. Within our bodies we bore the race, on our shoulders wecarried it; we sought the roots and plants for its food; and, when man'sbarbed arrow or hook brought the game, our hands dressed it. Side byside, the savage man and the savage woman, we wandered free together andlaboured free together. And we were contented!

Then a change came. 

We ceased from our wanderings, and, camping upon one spot of earth, again the labours of life were divided between us. While man went forthto hunt, or to battle with the foe who would have dispossessed us ofall, we laboured on the land. We hoed the earth, we reaped the grain, we shaped the dwellings, we wove the clothing, we modelled the earthenvessels and drew the lines upon them, which were humanity's firstattempt at domestic art; we studied the properties and uses of plants, and our old women were the first physicians of the race, as, often, itsfirst priests and prophets. 

We fed the race at our breast, we bore it on our shoulders; through usit was shaped, fed, and clothed. Labour more toilsome and unending thanthat of man was ours; yet did we never cry out that it was too heavy forus. While savage man lay in the sunshine on his skins, resting, that hemight be fitted for war or the chase, or while he shaped his weapons ofdeath, he ate and drank that which our hands had provided for him; andwhile we knelt over our grindstone, or hoed in the fields, with onechild in our womb, perhaps, and one on our back, toiling till theyoung body was old before its time--did we ever cry out that the labourallotted to us was too hard for us? Did we not know that the woman whothrew down her burden was as a man who cast away his shield in battle--acoward and a traitor to his race? Man fought--that was his work; we fedand nurtured the race--that was ours. We knew that upon our labours, even as upon man's, depended the life and well-being of the people whomwe bore. We endured our toil, as man bore his wounds, silently; and wewere content. 

Then again a change came. 

Ages passed, and time was when it was no longer necessary that all menshould 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 theselabours. Then our fellow-man, having no longer full occupation in hisold fields of labour, began to take his share in ours. He too began tocultivate the field, to build the house, to grind the corn (or makehis male slaves do it); and the hoe, and the potter's tools, and thethatching-needle, and at last even the grindstones which we first hadpicked up and smoothed to grind the food for our children, began to passfrom our hands into his. The old, sweet life of the open fields was oursno more; we moved within the gates, where the time passes more slowlyand the world is sadder than in the air outside; but we had our own workstill, and were content. 

If, indeed, we might no longer grow the food for our people, we werestill its dressers; if we did not always plant and prepare the flax andhemp, we still wove the garments for our race; if we did no longer raisethe house walls, the tapestries that covered them were the work of ourhands; we brewed the ale, and the simples which were used as medicineswe distilled and prescribed; and, close about our feet, from birthto manhood, grew up the children whom we had borne; their voiceswere always in our ears. At the doors of our houses we sat with ourspinning-wheels, and we looked out across the fields that were once oursto labour 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 herwhy she did not go out a-hunting or a-fighting, or enter the great hallto dispense justice and confer upon the making of laws, she would haveanswered: "Am I a fool that you put to me such questions? Have I not ahundred maidens to keep at work at spinning-wheels and needles? With myown hands daily do I not dispense bread to over a hundred folk? In thegreat hall go and see the tapestries I with my maidens have created bythe labour of years, and which we shall labour over for twenty more, that my children's children may see recorded the great deeds of theirforefathers. In my store-room are there not salves and simples, that myown hands have prepared for the healing of my household and the sick inthe country round? Ill would it go indeed, if when the folk came homefrom war and the chase of wild beasts, weary or wounded, they found allthe womenfolk gone out a-hunting and a-fighting, and none there to dresstheir wounds, or prepare their meat, or guide and rule the household!Better far might my lord and his followers come and help us with ourwork, than that we should go to help them! You are surely bereft of allwit. What becomes of the country if the women forsake their toil?"

And the burgher's wife, asked why she did not go to labour in herhusband's workshop, or away into the market-place, or go a-trading toforeign countries, would certainly have answered: "I am too busy tospeak with such as you! The bread is in the oven (already I smell ita-burning), the winter is coming on, and my children lack good woollenhose and my husband needs a warm coat. I have six vats of ale alla-brewing, and I have daughters whom I must teach to spin and sew, andthe babies are clinging round my knees. And you ask me why I do not goabroad to seek for new labours! Godsooth! Would you have me to leave myhousehold to starve in summer and die of cold in winter, and my childrento go untrained, while I gad about to seek for other work? A man musthave his belly full and his back covered before all things in life. Who, think you, would spin and bake and brew, and rear and train my babes, if I went abroad? New labour, indeed, when the days are not long enough, and I have to toil far into the night! I have no time to talk withfools! Who will rear and shape the nation if I do not?"

And the young maiden at the cottage door, beside her wheel, asked whyshe was content and did not seek new fields of labour, would surely haveanswered: "Go away, I have no time to listen to you. Do you not see thatI am spinning here that I too may have a home of my own? I am weavingthe linen garments that shall clothe my household in the long years tocome! I cannot marry till the chest upstairs be full. You cannot hearit, but as I sit here alone, spinning, far off across the hum of myspinning-wheel I hear the voices of my little unborn children calling tome--'O mother, mother, make haste, that we may be!'--and sometimes, whenI seem to be looking out across my wheel into the sunshine, it is theblaze of my own fireside that I see, and the light shines on the facesround it; and I spin on the faster and the steadier when I think of whatshall come. Do you ask me why I do not go out and labour in the fieldswith the lad whom I have chosen? Is his work, then, indeed more neededthan mine for the raising of that home that shall be ours? Oh, very hardI will labour, 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 myspinning-wheel, I hear the voices of my children calling, and I musthurry on. Do you ask me why I do not seek for labour whose hands arefull 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, ifasked the question why we were contented with our field of labour andsought no other. Man had his work; we had ours. We knew that we upboreour world on our shoulders; and that through the labour of our hands itwas sustained and strengthened--and we were contented. 

But now, again a change has come. 

Something that is entirely new has entered into the field of humanlabour, and left nothing as it was. 

In man's fields of toil, change has accomplished, and is yet morequickly accomplishing, itself. 

On lands where once fifty men and youths toiled with their cattle, todayone steam-plough, guided by but two pair of hands, passes swiftly; andan automatic reaper in one day reaps and binds and prepares for thegarner the produce of fields it would have taken a hundred strong malearms to harvest in the past. The iron tools and weapons, only oneof which it took an ancient father of our race long months of sternexertion to extract from ore and bring to shape and temper, are nowpoured forth by steam-driven machinery as a millpond pours forth itswater; and even in war, the male's ancient and especial field of labour, a complete reversal of the ancient order has taken place. Time was whenthe size and strength of the muscles in a man's legs and arms, and thestrength and size of his body, largely determined his fighting powers, and an Achilles or a Richard Coeur de Lion, armed only with his spearor battle-axe, made a host fly before him; today the puniest mannikinbehind a modern Maxim gun may mow down in perfect safety a phalanx ofheroes whose legs and arms and physical powers a Greek god might haveenvied, but who, having not the modern machinery of war, fall powerless. The day of the primary import to humanity of the strength in man'sextensor and flexor muscles, whether in labours of war or of peace, isgone by for ever; and the day of the all-importance of the culture andactivity of man's brain and nerve has already come. 

The brain of one consumptive German chemist, who in his laboratorycompounds a new explosive, has more effect upon the wars of the modernpeoples than ten thousand soldierly legs and arms; and the man whoinvents one new labour-saving machine may, through the cerebration ofa few days, have performed the labour it would otherwise have takenhundreds of thousands of his lusty fellows decades to accomplish. 

Year by year, month by month, and almost hour by hour, this change isincreasingly showing itself in the field of the modern labour; and crudemuscular force, whether in man or beast, sinks continually in its valuein the world of human toil; while intellectual power, virility, andactivity, and that culture which leads to the mastery of the inanimateforces of nature, to the invention of machinery, and to that delicatemanipulative skill often required in guiding it, becomes ever of greaterand greater importance to the race. Already today we tremble on theverge of a discovery, which may come tomorrow or the next day, when, through the attainment of a simple and cheap method of controllingsome widely diffused, everywhere accessible, natural force (such, forinstance, as the force of the great tidal wave) there will at once andfor ever pass away even that comparatively small value which still, inour present stage of material civilisation, clings to the expenditureof mere crude, mechanical, human energy; and the creature, howeverphysically powerful, who can merely pull, push, and lift, much after themanner of a machine, will have no further value in the field of humanlabour. 

Therefore, even today, we find that wherever that condition which wecall modern civilisation prevails, and in proportion as it tends toprevail--wherever steam-power, electricity, or the forces of windand water, are compelled by man's intellectual activity to act as themotor-powers in the accomplishment of human toil, wherever the delicateadaptions of scientifically constructed machinery are taking the placeof the simple manipulation of the human hand--there has arisen, all theworld over, a large body of males who find that their ancient fields oflabour have slipped or are slipping from them, and who discover thatthe modern world has no place or need for them. At the gates ofour dockyards, in our streets, and in our fields, are to be foundeverywhere, in proportion as modern civilisation is really dominant, men whose bulk and mere animal strength would have made them as warriorsinvaluable members of any primitive community, and who would have beenvaluable even in any simpler civilisation than our own, as machinesof toil; but who, owing to lack of intellectual or delicate manualtraining, have now no form of labour to offer society which it standsreally in need of, and who therefore tend to form our Great MaleUnemployed--a body which finds the only powers it possesses so littleneeded by its fellows that, in return for its intensest physical labour, it hardly earns the poorest sustenance. The material conditions of lifehave been rapidly modified, and the man has not been modified with them;machinery has largely filled his place in his old field of labour, andhe has found no new one. 

It is from these men, men who, viewed from the broad humanitarianstandpoint, are often of the most lovable and interesting type, andwho might in a simpler state of society, where physical force was thedominating factor, have been the heroes, leaders, and chiefs of theirpeople, that there arises in the modern world the bitter cry of the maleunemployed: "Give us labour or we die!" (The problem of the unemployedmale is, of course, not nearly so modern as that of the unemployedfemale. It may be said in England to have taken its rise in almost itspresent form as early as the fifteenth century, when economic changesbegan to sever the agricultural labourer from the land, and rob him ofhis ancient forms of social toil. Still, in its most acute form, it maybe called a modern problem. )

Yet it is only upon one, and a comparatively small, section of themales of the modern civilised world that these changes in the materialconditions of life have told in such fashion as to take all usefuloccupation from them and render them wholly or partly worthless tosociety. If the modern man's field of labour has contracted at one end(the physical), at the other (the intellectual) it has immeasurablyexpanded! If machinery and the command of inanimate motor-forceshave rendered of comparatively little value the male's mere physicalmotor-power, the demand upon his intellectual faculties, the callfor the expenditure of nervous energy, and the exercise of delicatemanipulative skill in the labour of human life, have immeasurablyincreased. 

In a million new directions forms of honoured and remunerative sociallabour are opening up before the feet of the modern man, which hisancestors never dreamed of; and day by day they yet increase innumbers and importance. The steamship, the hydraulic lift, the patentroad-maker, the railway-train, the electric tram-car, the steam-drivenmill, the Maxim gun and the torpedo boat, once made, may perform theirlabours with the guidance and assistance of comparatively few hands; buta whole army of men of science, engineers, clerks, and highly-trainedworkmen is necessary for their invention, construction, and maintenance. In the domains of art, of science, of literature, and above all in thefield of politics and government, an almost infinite extension has takenplace in the fields of male labour. Where in primitive times woman wasoften the only builder, and patterns she daubed on her hut walls ortraced on her earthen vessels the only attempts at domestic art; andwhere later but an individual here and there was required to designa king's palace or a god's temple or to ornament it with statues orpaintings, today a mighty army of men, a million strong, is employed inproducing plastic art alone, both high and low, from the traceries onwall-paper and the illustrations in penny journals, to the productionof the pictures and statues which adorn the national collections, anda mighty new field of toil has opened before the anciently hunting andfighting male. Where once one ancient witch-doctress may have been theonly creature in a whole district who studied the nature of herbs andearths, or a solitary wizard experimenting on poisons was the onlyindividual in a whole territory interrogating nature; and where later, a few score of alchemists and astrologers only were engaged in examiningthe structure of substances, or the movement of planets, today thousandsof men in every civilised community are labouring to unravel themysteries of nature, and the practical chemist, the physician, theanatomist, the engineer, the astronomer, the mathematician, theelectrician, form a mighty and always increasingly important army ofmale labourers. Where once an isolated bard supplied a nation with itsliteratures, or where later a few thousand priests and men of letterswrote and transcribed for the few to read, today literature gives labourto a multitude almost as countless as a swarm of locusts. From thepenny-a-liner to the artist and thinker, the demand for their labourcontinually increases. Where one town-crier with stout legs and lustylungs was once all-sufficient to spread the town and country news, ascore of men now sit daily pen in hand, preparing the columns of themorning's paper, and far into the night a hundred compositors areengaged in a labour which requires a higher culture of brain and fingerthan most ancient kings and rulers possessed. Even in the labours ofwar, the most brutal and primitive of the occupations lingering on intocivilised life from the savage state, the new demand for labour of anintellectual kind is enormous. The invention, construction, and workingof one Krupp gun, though its mere discharge hardly demands more crudemuscular exertion than a savage expends in throwing his boomerang, yetrepresents an infinitude of intellectual care and thought, far greaterthan that which went to the shaping of all the weapons of a primitivearmy. Above all, in the domain of politics and government, where once aking or queen, aided by a handful of councillors, was alone practicallyconcerned in the labours of national guidance or legislation; today, owing to the rapid means of intercommunication, printing, and theconsequent diffusion of political and social information throughout aterritory, it has become possible, for the first time, for all adultsin a large community to keep themselves closely informed on all nationalaffairs; and in every highly-civilised state the ordinary male has beenalmost compelled to take his share, however small, in the duties andlabours of legislation and government. Thus there has opened before themass of men a vast new sphere of labour undreamed of by their ancestors. In every direction the change which material civilisation has wrought, while it has militated against that comparatively small section of maleswho have nothing to offer society but the expenditure of their untrainedmuscular energy (inflicting much and often completely unmeritedsuffering upon them), has immeasurably extended the field of male labouras a whole. Never before in the history of the earth has the man's fieldof remunerative toil been so wide, so interesting, so complex, and inits results so all-important to society; never before has the male sex, taken as a whole, been so fully and strenuously employed. 

So much is this the case, that, exactly as in the earlier conditions ofsociety an excessive and almost crushing amount of the most importantphysical labour generally devolved upon the female, so under moderncivilised conditions among the wealthier and fully civilised classes, an unduly excessive share of labour tends to devolve upon the male. Thatalmost entirely modern, morbid condition, affecting brain and nervoussystem, and shortening the lives of thousands in modern civilisedsocieties, which is vulgarly known as "overwork" or "nervous breakdown, "is but one evidence of the even excessive share of mental toil devolvingupon the modern male of the cultured classes, who, in addition tomaintaining himself, has frequently dependent upon him a larger orsmaller number of entirely parasitic females. But, whatever the resultof the changes of modern civilisation may be with regard to the male, he certainly cannot complain that they have as a whole robbed him ofhis fields of labour, diminished his share in the conduct of life, orreduced him to a condition of morbid inactivity. 

In our woman's field of labour, matters have tended to shape themselveswholly otherwise! The changes which have taken place during the lastcenturies, and which we sum up under the compendious term "moderncivilisation, " have tended to rob woman, not merely in part but almostwholly, of the more valuable of her ancient domain of productive andsocial labour; and, where there has not been a determined and consciousresistance on her part, have nowhere spontaneously tended to open out toher new and compensatory fields. 

It is this fact which constitutes our modern "Woman's Labour Problem. "

Our spinning-wheels are all broken; in a thousand huge buildingssteam-driven looms, guided by a few hundred thousands of hands (oftenthose of men), produce the clothings of half the world; and we dare nolonger 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 ploughmanand the miller took our place; but for a time we kept fast possession ofthe kneading-trough and the brewing-vat. Today, steam often shapes ourbread, and the loaves are set down at our very door--it may be by aman-driven motor-car! The history of our household drinks we know nolonger; we merely see them set before us at our tables. Day by daymachine-prepared and factory-produced viands take a larger and largerplace in the dietary of rich and poor, till the working man's wifeplaces before her household little that is of her own preparation; whileamong the wealthier classes, so far has domestic change gone that menare not unfrequently found labouring in our houses and kitchens, andeven standing behind our chairs ready to do all but actually place themorsels of food between our feminine lips. The army of rosy milkmaidshas passed away for ever, to give place to the cream-separator and the, largely, male-and-machinery manipulated butter pat. In every directionthe ancient saw, that it was exclusively the woman's sphere to preparethe viands for her household, has become, in proportion as civilisationhas perfected itself, an antiquated lie. 

Even the minor domestic operations are tending to pass out of the circleof woman's labour. In modern cities our carpets are beaten, our windowscleaned, our floors polished, by machinery, or extra domestic, and oftenmale labour. Change has gone much farther than to the mere takingfrom us of the preparation of the materials from which the clothing isformed. Already the domestic sewing-machine, which has supplanted almostentirely the ancient needle, begins to become antiquated, and a thousandmachines driven in factories by central engines are supplying not onlythe husband and son, but the woman herself, with almost every article ofclothing from vest to jacket; while among the wealthy classes, themale dress-designer with his hundred male-milliners and dressmakersis helping finally to explode the ancient myth, that it is woman'sexclusive sphere, and a part of her domestic toil, to cut and shape thegarments she or her household wear. 

Year by year, day by day, there is a silently working but determinedtendency for the sphere of woman's domestic labours to contract itself;and the contraction is marked exactly in proportion as that complexcondition which we term "modern civilisation" 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 wealthierclasses than the poorer, and is an unfailing indication of advancingmodern civilisation. (There is, indeed, often something pathetic in theattitude of many a good old mother of the race, who having survived, here and there, into the heart of our modern civilisation, is sorelypuzzled by the change in woman's duties and obligations. She may befound looking into the eyes of some ancient crone, who, like herself, has survived from a previous state of civilisation, seeking there aconfirmation of a view of life of which a troublous doubt has crepteven into her own soul. "I, " she cries, "always cured my own hams, andknitted my own socks, and made up all the linen by hand. We always didit when we were girls--but now my daughters object!" And her oldcrone answers her? "Yes, we did it; it's the right thing; but it's soexpensive. It's so much cheaper to buy things ready made!" And theyshake their heads and go their ways, feeling that the world is strangelyout 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 tothe same pond, when that pond has been drained and nothing is left butbaked mud, will still persist in bringing her younglings down to it, andwalks about with flapping wings and anxious quack, trying to induce themto enter it. But the ducklings, with fresh young instincts, hear far offthe delicious drippings from the new dam which has been built higher upto catch the water, and they smell the chickweed and the long grass thatis growing up beside it; and absolutely refuse to disport themselves onthe baked mud or to pretend to seek for worms where no worms are. Andthey leave the ancient mother quacking beside her pond and set out toseek for new pastures--perhaps to lose themselves upon the way?--perhapsto find them? To the old mother one is inclined to say, "Ah, good oldmother duck, can you not see the world has changed? You cannot bring thewater back into the dried-up pond! Mayhap it was better and pleasanterwhen it was there, but it has gone for ever; and, would you and yoursswim again, it must be in other waters. " New machinery, new duties. )

But it is not only, nor even mainly, in the sphere of women's materialdomestic labours that change has touched her and shrunk her ancientfield of labour. 

Time was, when the woman kept her children about her knees till adultyears were reached. Hers was the training and influence which shapedthem. From the moment when the infant first lay on her breast, till herdaughters left her for marriage and her sons went to take share in man'slabour, they were continually under the mother's influence. Today, so complex have become even the technical and simpler branches ofeducation, so mighty and inexorable are the demands which moderncivilisation makes for specialised instruction and training for allindividuals who are to survive and retain their usefulness under modernconditions, that, from the earliest years of its life, the child is ofnecessity largely removed from the hands of the mother, and placedin those of the specialised instructor. Among the wealthier classes, scarcely is the infant born when it passes into the hands of the trainednurse, and from hers on into the hands of the qualified teacher; till, at nine or ten, the son in certain countries often leaves his home forever for the public school, to pass on to the college and university;while the daughter, in the hands of trained instructors and dependents, owes in the majority of cases hardly more of her education or formationto maternal toil. While even among our poorer classes, the infantschool, and the public school; and later on the necessity for manualtraining, takes the son and often the daughter as completely, and alwaysincreasingly as civilisation advances, from the mother's control. Somarked has this change in woman's ancient field of labour become, that awoman of almost any class may have borne many children and yet in earlymiddle age be found sitting alone in an empty house, all her offspringgone from her to receive training and instruction at the hands ofothers. The ancient statement that the training and education of heroffspring is exclusively the duty of the mother, however true itmay have been with regard to a remote past, has become an absolutemisstatement; and the woman who should at the present day insist onentirely 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 radically have the changes ofmodern civilisation touched our ancient field of labour in anotherdirection--in that very portion of the field of human labour which ispeculiarly and organically ours, and which can never be wholly takenfrom 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, whenthe first and all-important duty of the female to her society wasto bear, to bear much, and to bear unceasingly! On her adequate andpersistent performance of this passive form of labour, and of hersuccessful feeding of her young from her own breast, and rearing it, depended, not merely the welfare, but often the very existence, ofher tribe or nation. Where, as is the case among almost all barbarouspeoples, the rate of infant mortality is high; where the unceasingcasualties resulting from war, the chase, and acts of personal violencetend continually to reduce the number of adult males; where, surgicalknowledge being still in its infancy, most wounds are fatal; where, above all, recurrent pestilence and famine, unfailing if of irregularrecurrence, decimated the people, it has been all important that womanshould employ her creative power to its very uttermost limits if therace were not at once to dwindle and die out. "May thy wife's womb nevercease from bearing, " is still today the highest expression of goodwillon the part of a native African chief to his departing guest. For, notonly does the prolific woman in the primitive state contribute to thewealth and strength of her nation as a whole, but to that of her ownmale companion and of her family. Where the social conditions of lifeare so simple that, in addition to bearing and suckling the child, itis reared and nourished through childhood almost entirely through thelabour and care of the mother, requiring no expenditure of tribalor family wealth on its training or education, its value as an adultenormously outweighs, both to the state and the male, the trouble andexpense of rearing it, which falls almost entirely on the individualwoman who bears it. The man who has twenty children to become warriorsand labourers is by so much the richer and the more powerful than he whohas but one; while the state whose women are prolific and labour for andrear their children stands so far insured against destruction. Incessantand persistent child-bearing is thus truly the highest duty and the mostsocially esteemed occupation of the primitive woman, equalling fully insocial importance the labour of the man as hunter and warrior. 

Even under those conditions of civilisation which have existed in thecenturies which divide primitive savagery from high civilisation, thedemand for continuous, unbroken child-bearing on the part of the womanas 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 surgery beingunknown, serious wounds were still almost always fatal; in the lowstate of sanitary science, plagues such as those which in the reignof Justinian swept across the civilised world from India to NorthernEurope, well nigh depopulating the globe, or the Black Death of 1349, which in England alone swept away more than half the population of theisland, were but extreme forms of the destruction of population going oncontinually as the result of zymotic disease; while wars were notmerely far more common but, owing to the famines which almost invariablyfollowed them, were far more destructive to human life than in our owndays, and deaths by violence, whether at the hands of the state or asthe result of personal enmity, were of daily occurrence in all lands. Under these conditions abstinence on the part of woman from incessantchild-bearing might have led to almost the same serious diminution oreven extinction of her people, as in the savage state; while the veryexistence of her civilisation depended on the production of an immensenumber of individuals as beasts of burden, without the expenditureof whose crude muscular force in physical labour of agriculture andmanufacture those intermediate civilisations would, in the absence ofmachinery, have been impossible. Twenty men had to be born, fed at thebreast, and reared by women to perform the crude brute labour which isperformed today by one small, well-adjusted steam crane; and the demandfor large masses of human creatures as mere reservoirs of motor forcefor accomplishing the simplest processes was imperative. So strong, indeed, was the consciousness of the importance to society of continuouschild-bearing on the part of woman, that as late as the middle of thesixteenth century Martin Luther wrote: "If a woman becomes weary or atlast 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 crudeand somewhat brutal form, to a conviction common to the bulk of hiscontemporaries, both male and female. 

Today, this condition has almost completely reversed itself. 

The advance of science and the amelioration of the physical conditionsof life tend rapidly toward a diminution of human mortality. The infantdeath-rate among the upper classes in modern civilisations has fallenby more than one-half; while among poorer classes it is already, thoughslowly, falling: the increased knowledge of the laws of sanitation hasmade among all highly civilised peoples the depopulation by plague athing of the past, and the discoveries of the next twenty or thirtyyears will probably do away for ever with the danger to man of zymoticdisease. Famines of the old desolating type have become an impossibilitywhere rapid means of transportation convey the superfluity of one landto supply the lack of another; and war and deeds of violence, thoughstill lingering among us, have already become episodal in the lives ofnations as of individuals; while the vast advances in antiseptic surgeryhave caused even the effects of wounds and dismemberments to become onlyvery partially fatal to human life. All these changes have tended todiminish human mortality and protract human life; and they have todayalready made it possible for a race not only to maintain its numbers, but even to increase them, with a comparatively small expenditure ofwoman's vitality in the passive labour of child-bearing. 

But yet more seriously has the demand for woman's labour as child-bearerbeen diminished by change in another direction. 

Every mechanical invention which lessens the necessity for rough, untrained, muscular, human labour, diminishes also the social demandupon woman as the producer in large masses of such labourers. Alreadythroughout the modern civilised world we have reached a point at whichthe social demand is not merely for human creatures in the bulk for useas beasts of burden, but, rather, and only, for such human creatures asshall be so trained and cultured as to be fitted for the performance ofthe 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 today merely produces twelvechildren and suckles them, and then turns them loose on her society andfamily, is regarded, and rightly so, as a curse and down draught, andnot the productive labourer, of her community. Indeed, so difficult andexpensive has become in the modern world the rearing and training ofeven one individual, in a manner suited to fit it for coping with thecomplexities and difficulties of civilised life, that, to the family aswell as to the state, unlimited fecundity on the part of the female hasalready, in most cases, become irremediable evil; whether it be in thecase of the artisan, who at the cost of immense self-sacrifice mustsupport and train his children till their twelfth or fourteenth year, if they are ever to become even skilled manual labourers, and who if hisfamily be large often sinks beneath the burden, allowing his offspring, untaught and untrained, to become waste products of human life; or, inthat of the professional man, who by his mental toil is compelled tosupport and educate, at immense expense, his sons till they are twentyor older, and to sustain his daughters, often throughout their wholelives should they not marry, and to whom a large family proves often noless disastrous; while the state whose women produce recklessly largemasses of individuals in excess of those for whom they can provideinstruction and nourishment is a state, in so far, tending towarddeterioration. The commandment to the modern woman is now not simply"Thou shalt bear, " but rather, "Thou shalt not bear in excess of thypower to rear and train satisfactorily;" and the woman who shouldtoday appear at the door of a workhouse or the tribunal of thepoor-law guardians followed by her twelve infants, demanding honourablesustenance for them and herself in return for the labour she hadundergone in producing them, would meet with but short shrift. And themodern man who on his wedding-day should be greeted with the ancientgood wish, that he might become the father of twenty sons and twentydaughters, would regard it as a malediction rather than a blessing. Itis certain that the time is now rapidly approaching when child-bearingwill be regarded rather as a lofty privilege, permissible only tothose who have shown their power rightly to train and provide for theiroffspring, than a labour which in itself, and under whatever conditionsperformed, is beneficial to society. (The difference between theprimitive and modern view on this matter is aptly and quaintlyillustrated by two incidents. Seeing a certain Bantu woman who appearedbetter cared for, less hard worked, and happier than the mass ofher companions, we made inquiry, and found that she had two impotentbrothers; because of this she herself had not married, but had borne bydifferent men fourteen children, all of whom when grown she had givento her brothers. "They are fond of me because I have given them so manychildren, therefore I have not to work like the other women; and mybrothers 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 viewedfrom the modern standpoint, was evidently regarded as pre-eminently ofvalue to her family and to society because of her mere fecundity. On theother hand, a few weeks back appeared an account in the London papersof an individual who, taken up at the East End for some brutal offence, blubbered out in court that she was the mother of twenty children. "You should be ashamed of yourself!" responded the magistrate; "a womancapable of such conduct would be capable of doing anything!" and thefine was remorselessly inflicted. Undoubtedly, if somewhat brutally, the magistrate yet gave true voice to the modern view on the subject ofexcessive and reckless child-bearing. )

Further, owing partly to the diminished demand for child-bearing, risingfrom the extreme difficulty and expense of rearing and education, andto many other complex social causes, to which we shall return later, millions of women in our modern societies are so placed as to beabsolutely compelled to go through life not merely childless, butwithout sex relationship in any form whatever; while another mighty armyof women is reduced by the dislocations of our civilisation to acceptingsexual relationships which practically negate child-bearing, and whoseonly product is physical and moral disease. 

Thus, it has come to pass that vast numbers of us are, by modern socialconditions, prohibited from child-bearing at all; and that even thoseamong us who are child-bearers are required, in proportion as the classof race to which we belong stands high in the scale of civilisation, toproduce in most cases a limited number of offspring; so that even forthese of us, child-bearing and suckling, instead of filling the entirecircle of female life from the first appearance of puberty to the end ofmiddle age, becomes an episodal occupation, employing from three or fourto ten or twenty of the threescore-and-ten-years which are allotted tohuman life. In such societies the statement (so profoundly true whenmade with regard to most savage societies, and even largely true withregard to those in the intermediate stages of civilisation) that themain and continuous occupation of all women from puberty to age is thebearing and suckling of children, and that this occupation must fullysatisfy all her needs for social labour and activity, becomes anantiquated and unmitigated misstatement. 

Not only are millions of our women precluded from ever bearing a child, but for those of us who do bear the demand is ever increasingly incivilised societies coupled with the condition that if we would actsocially we must restrict our powers. (As regards modern civilisednations, we find that those whose birthrate is the highest per woman areby no means the happiest, most enlightened, or powerful; nor do we evenfind that the population always increases in proportion to the births. France, which in many respects leads in the van of civilisation, hasone of the lowest birthrates per woman in Europe; and among the free andenlightened population of Switzerland and Scandinavia the birthrate isoften exceedingly low; while Ireland, one of the most unhappy and weakof European nations, had long one of the highest birthrates, withoutany proportional increase in population or power. With regard to thedifferent classes in one community, the same effect is observable. Thebirthrate per woman is higher among the lowest and most ignorant classesin the back slums of our great cities, than among the women of the upperand cultured classes, mainly because the age at which marriages arecontracted always tends to become higher as the culture and intelligenceof individuals rises, but also because of the regulation of the numberof births after marriage. Yet the number of children reared to adultyears among the more intelligent classes probably equals or exceedsthose of the lowest, owing to the high rate of infant mortality wherebirths are excessive. )

Looking round, then, with the uttermost impartiality we can command, on the entire field of woman's ancient and traditional labours, we findthat fully three-fourths of it have shrunk away for ever, and that theremaining fourth still tends to shrink. 

It is this great fact, so often and so completely overlooked, which liesas the propelling force behind that vast and restless "Woman's Movement"which marks our day. It is this fact, whether clearly and intellectuallygrasped, or, as is more often the case, vaguely and painfully felt, which awakes in the hearts of the ablest modern European women theirpassionate, and at times it would seem almost incoherent, cry for newforms of labour and new fields for the exercise of their powers. 

Thrown into strict logical form, our demand is this: We do not ask thatthe wheels of time should reverse themselves, or the stream of lifeflow backward. We do not ask that our ancient spinning-wheels be againresuscitated and placed in our hands; we do not demand that our oldgrindstones and hoes be returned to us, or that man should again betakehimself entirely to his ancient province of war and the chase, leavingto us all domestic and civil labour. We do not even demand that societyshall immediately so reconstruct itself that every woman may be again achild-bearer (deep and over-mastering as lies the hunger for motherhoodin every virile woman's heart!); neither do we demand that the childrenwhom we bear shall again be put exclusively into our hands to train. This, we know, cannot be. The past material conditions of life have gonefor ever; no will of man can recall them; but this is our demand: Wedemand that, in that strange new world that is arising alike uponthe man and the woman, where nothing is as it was, and all things areassuming new shapes and relations, that in this new world we also shallhave our share of honoured and socially useful human toil, our fullhalf of the labour of the Children of Woman. We demand nothing more thanthis, and we will take nothing less. This is our "WOMAN'S RIGHT!"

Chapter II. Parasitism (continued). 

Is it to be, that, in the future, machinery and the captive motor-forcesof nature are largely to take the place of human hand and foot inthe labour of clothing and feeding the nations; are these branchesof industry to be no longer domestic labours?--then, we demand in thefactory, the warehouse, and the field, wherever machinery has usurpedour ancient labour-ground, that we also should have our place, asguiders, controllers, and possessors. Is child-bearing to become thelabour of but a portion of our sex?--then we demand for those amongus who are allowed to take no share in it, compensatory and equallyhonourable and important fields of social toil. Is the training ofhuman creatures to become a yet more and more onerous and laboriousoccupation, their education and culture to become increasingly a highart, complex and scientific?--if so, then, we demand that high andcomplex culture and training which shall fit us for instructing the racewhich we bring into the world. Is the demand for child-bearing tobecome so diminished that, even in the lives of those among us who arechild-bearers, it shall fill no more than half a dozen years out of thethree-score-and-ten of human life?--then we demand that an additionaloutlet be ours which shall fill up with dignity and value the taleof the years not so employed. Is intellectual labour to take ever andincreasingly the place of crude muscular exertion in the labour oflife?--then we demand for ourselves that culture and the freedomof action which alone can yield us the knowledge of life and theintellectual vigour and strength which will enable us to undertake thesame share of mental which we have borne in the past in physical laboursof 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, demandour full queens' share in the duties and labours of government andlegislation. Slowly but determinately, as the old fields of labour closeup and are submerged behind us, we demand entrance into the new. 

We make this demand, not for our own sakes alone, but for the succour ofthe race. 

A horseman, riding along on a dark night in an unknown land, may chanceto feel his horse start beneath him; rearing, it may almost hurl him tothe earth: in the darkness he may curse his beast, and believe its aimis 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 hastravelled, looking backward, he may perceive that the spot where hisbeast reared, planting its feet into the earth, and where it refused tomove 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 whichlead his creature, though in the dark, to leap backward, seeking anew path along which both might travel. (Is it not recorded that evenBalaam's ass on which he rode saw the angel with flaming sword, butBalaam saw it not?)

In the confusion and darkness of the present, it may well seem tosome, that woman, in her desire to seek for new paths of labour andemployment, is guided only by an irresponsible impulse; or that sheseeks 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 clearerfuture shall have arisen and the obscuring mists of the present havebeen dissipated, may it not then be clearly manifest that not forherself alone, but for her entire race, has woman sought her new paths?

For let it be noted exactly what our position is, who today, aswomen, are demanding new fields of labour and a reconstruction of ourrelationship with life. 

It is often said that the labour problem before the modern woman andthat before the unemployed or partially or almost uselessly employedmale, are absolutely identical; and that therefore, when the male labourproblem of our age solves itself, that of the woman will of necessityhave met its solution also. 

This statement, with a certain specious semblance of truth, is yet, webelieve, radically and fundamentally false. It is true that both themale and the female problems of our age have taken their rise largelyin the same rapid material changes which during the last centuries, and more especially the last ninety years, have altered the face of thehuman world. Both men and women have been robbed by those changes oftheir ancient remunerative fields of social work: here the resemblancestops. The male, from whom the changes of modern civilisation have takenhis ancient field of labour, has but one choice before him: he must findnew fields of labour, or he must perish. Society will not ultimatelysupport him in an absolutely quiescent and almost useless condition. If he does not vigorously exert himself in some direction or other (thedirection 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 bepreserved, and allowed to reproduce themselves without any exertionor activity of mind or body, but a vast body of males who, having losttheir old forms of social employment, should refuse in any way to exertthemselves or seek for new, would at no great length of time becomeextinct. There never has been, and as far as can be seen, there neverwill be, a time when the majority of the males in any society will besupported by the rest of the males in a condition of perfect mental andphysical inactivity. "Find labour or die, " is the choice ultimately putbefore the human male today, as in the past; and this constitutes hislabour problem. (The nearest approach to complete parasitism on the partof a vast body of males occurred, perhaps, in ancient Rome at thetime of the decay and downfall of the Empire, when the bulk of thepopulation, male as well as female, was fed on imported corn, wine, and oil, and supplied even with entertainment, almost entirely withoutexertion or labour of any kind; but this condition was of shortduration, and speedily contributed to the downfall of the diseasedEmpire itself. Among the wealthy and so-called upper classes, the malesof various aristocracies have frequently tended to become completelyparasitic after a lapse of time, but such a condition has always beenmet by a short and sharp remedy; and the class has fallen, or becomeextinct. The condition of the males of the upper classes in Francebefore the Revolution affords an interesting illustration of thispoint. )

The labour of the man may not always be useful in the highest sense tohis society, or it may even be distinctly harmful and antisocial, as inthe case of the robber-barons of the Middle Ages, who lived by capturingand despoiling all who passed by their castles; or as in the case ofthe share speculators, stock-jobbers, ring-and-corner capitalists, andmonopolists of the present day, who feed upon the productive labours ofsociety without contributing anything to its welfare. But even males sooccupied are compelled to expend a vast amount of energy and even alow intelligence in their callings; and, however injurious to theirsocieties, they run no personal risk of handing down effete andenervated constitutions to their race. Whether beneficially orunbeneficially, the human male must, generally speaking, employ hisintellect, 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 labour slipfrom her, is not generally or often at the present day the choicebetween finding new fields of labour, or death; but one far more seriousin its ultimate reaction on humanity as a whole--it is the choicebetween finding new forms of labour or sinking slowly into a conditionof more or less complete and passive sex-parasitism! (It is not withoutprofound interest to note the varying phenomena of sex-parasitism asthey present themselves in the animal world, both in the male and in thefemale form. Though among the greater number of species in the animalworld the female form is larger and more powerful rather than the male(e. G. , among birds of prey, such as eagles, falcons, vultures, &c. , andamong fishes, insects, &c. ), yet sex-parasitism appears among both sexforms. In certain sea-creatures, for example, the female carries aboutin the folds of her covering three or four minute and quite inactivemales, who are entirely passive and dependent upon her. Among termites, on the other hand, the female has so far degenerated that she hasentirely lost the power of locomotion; she can no longer provide herselfor her offspring with nourishment, or defend or even clean herself; shehas become a mere passive, distended bag of eggs, without intelligenceor activity, she and her offspring existing through the exertions ofthe workers of the community. Among other insects, such, for example, ascertain ticks, another form of female parasitism prevails, and while themale remains a complex, highly active, and winded creature, the female, fastening herself by the head into the flesh of some living animaland sucking its blood, has lost wings and all activity, and power oflocomotion; having become a mere distended bladder, which when filledwith eggs bursts and ends a parasitic existence which has hardly beenlife. It is not impossible, and it appears, indeed, highly probable, that it has been this degeneration and parasitism on the part of thefemale which has set its limitation to the evolution of ants, creatureswhich, having reached a point of mental development in some respectsalmost as high as that of man, have yet become curiously and immovablyarrested. The whole question of sex-parasitism among the lower animalsis one throwing suggestive and instructive side-lights on human socialproblems, but is too extensive to be here entered on. )

Again and again in the history of the past, when among human creaturesa certain stage of material civilisation has been reached, a curioustendency has manifested itself for the human female to become moreor less parasitic; social conditions tend to rob her of all formsof active, conscious, social labour, and to reduce her, like thefield-tick, to the passive exercise of her sex functions alone. And theresult of this parasitism has invariably been the decay in vitality andintelligence of the female, followed after a longer or shorter period bythat of her male descendants and her entire society. 

Nevertheless, in the history of the past the dangers of thesex-parasitism have never threatened more than a small section of thefemales of the human race, those exclusively of some comparativelysmall dominant race or class; the mass of women beneath them beingstill compelled to assume many forms of strenuous activity. It is atthe present day, and under the peculiar conditions of our moderncivilisation, that for the first time sex-parasitism has become adanger, more or less remote, to the mass of civilised women, perhapsultimately to all. 

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

The parasitism of the human female becomes a possibility only when apoint in civilisation is reached (such as that which was attained in theancient civilisations of Greece, Rome, Persia, Assyria, India, and suchas today exists in many of the civilisations of the East, such as thoseof China and Turkey), when, owing to the extensive employment of thelabour of slaves, or of subject races or classes, the dominant race orclass has become so liberally supplied with the material goods of life, that mere physical toil on the part of its own female members has becomeunnecessary. It is when this point has been reached, and neverbefore, that the symptoms of female parasitism have in the past almostinvariably tended to manifest themselves, and have become a socialdanger. The males of the dominant class have almost always contrived toabsorb to themselves the new intellectual occupations, with the absenceof necessity for the old forms of physical toil made possible in theirsocieties; and the females of the dominant class or race, for whosemuscular labours there was now also no longer any need, not succeedingin grasping or attaining to these new forms of labour, have sunk into astate in which, performing no species of active social duty, they haveexisted through the passive performance of sexual functions alone, withhow much or how little of discontent will now never be known, since noliterary record has been made by the woman of the past, of her desiresor sorrows. Then, in place of the active labouring woman, upholdingsociety by her toil, has come the effete wife, concubine, or prostitute, clad in fine raiment, the work of others' fingers; fed on luxuriousviands, the result of others' toil, waited on and tended by the labourof others. The need for her physical labour having gone, and mentalindustry not having taken its place, she bedecked and scented herperson, 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, shesought by dissipations and amusements to fill up the inordinate blankleft by the lack of productive activity. And as the hand whitened andframe softened, till, at last, the very duties of motherhood, which wereall the constitution of her life left her, became distasteful, and, fromthe instant when her infant came damp from her womb, it passed into thehands of others, to be tended and reared by them; and from youth to ageher offspring often owed nothing to her personal toil. In many cases socomplete was her enervation, that at last the very joy of giving life, the glory and beatitude of a virile womanhood, became distasteful;and she sought to evade it, not because of its interference with moreimperious duties to those already born of her, or to her society, but because her existence of inactivity had robbed her of all joy instrenuous exertion and endurance in any form. Finely clad, tenderlyhoused, life became for her merely the gratification of her own physicaland sexual appetites, and the appetites of the male, through thestimulation of which she could maintain herself. And, whether as keptwife, kept mistress, or prostitute, she contributed nothing to theactive and sustaining labours of her society. She had attained to thefull development of that type which, whether in modern Paris or New Yorkor London, or in ancient Greece, Assyria, or Rome, is essentially one inits features, its nature, and its results. She was the "fine lady, "the human female parasite--the most deadly microbe which can make itsappearance on the surface of any social organism. (The relation offemale parasitism generally, to the peculiar phenomenon of prostitution, is fundamental. Prostitution can never be adequately dealt with, eitherfrom the moral or the scientific standpoint, unless its relation to thegeneral phenomenon of female parasitism be fully recognised. It is thefailure to do this which leaves so painful a sense of abortion on themind, after listening to most modern utterances on the question, whether made from the emotional platform of the moral reformer, or theintellectual platform of the would-be scientist. We are left with afeeling that the matter has been handled but not dealt with: that theknife has not reached the core. )

Wherever in the history of the past this type has reached its fulldevelopment and has comprised the bulk of the females belonging to anydominant class or race, it has heralded its decay. In Assyria, Greece, Rome, Persia, as in Turkey today, the same material conditions haveproduced the same social disease among wealthy and dominant races; andagain and again when the nation so affected has come into contactwith nations more healthily constituted, this diseased condition hascontributed to its destruction. 

In ancient Greece, in its superb and virile youth, its womanhood wasrichly and even heavily endowed with duties and occupations. Not themass of the woman alone, but the king's wife and the prince's daughterdo we find going to the well to bear water, cleansing the householdlinen in the streams, feeding and doctoring their households, manufacturing the clothing of their race, and performing even a shareof the highest social functions as priestesses and prophetesses. It wasfrom the 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 buriedfoundations underlay the more visible and ornate portions of a greattemple, making its structure and persistence possible. In Greece, aftera certain lapse of time, these virile labouring women in the upperclasses were to be found no more. The accumulated wealth of the dominantrace, gathered through the labour of slaves and subject people, had soimmensely increased that there was no longer a call for physical labouron the part of the dominant womanhood; immured within the walls of theirhouses as wives or mistresses, waited on by slaves and dependents, theyno longer sustained by their exertion either their own life or the lifeof their people. The males absorbed the intellectual labours of life;slaves and dependents the physical. For a moment, at the end of thefifth and beginning of the fourth century, when the womanhood ofGreece had already internally decayed, there was indeed a brilliantintellectual efflorescence among her males, like to the gorgeous coloursin the sunset sky when the sun is already sinking; but the heartof Greece was already rotting and her vigour failing. Increasingly, division and dissimilarity arose between male and female, as the maleadvanced in culture and entered upon new fields of intellectual toilwhile the female sank passively backward and lower in the scale of life, and thus was made ultimately a chasm which even sexual love could notbridge. The abnormal institution of avowed inter-male sexual relationsupon the highest plane was one, and the most serious result, of thisseverance. The inevitable and invincible desire of all highly developedhuman natures, to blend with their sexual relationships their highestintellectual interests and sympathies, could find no satisfaction orresponse in the relationship between the immured, comparatively ignorantand helpless females of the upper classes, in Greece, and the brilliant, cultured, and many-sided males who formed its dominant class in thefifth and fourth centuries. Man turned towards man; and parenthood, thedivine gift of imparting human life, was severed from the loftiest andprofoundest phases of human emotion: Xanthippe fretted out her ignorantand miserable little life between the walls of her house, and Socrateslay in the Agora, discussing philosophy and morals with Alcibiades;and the race decayed at its core. (See Jowett's translation of Plato's"Banquet"; but for full light on this important question the entireliterature of Greece in the fifth and fourth centuries B. C. Should bestudied. ) Here and there an Aspasia, or earlier still a Sappho, burstthrough the confining bonds of woman's environment, and with the forceof irresistible genius broke triumphantly into new fields of action andpowerful mental activity, standing side by side with the male; but theircases were exceptional. Had they, or such as they, been able to treaddown a pathway, along which the mass of Grecian women might havefollowed them; had it been possible for the bulk of the women of thedominant race in Greece at the end of the fifth century to rise fromtheir condition of supine inaction and ignorance and to have taken theirshare in the intellectual labours and stern activities of their race, Greece would never have fallen, as she fell at the end of the fourthcentury, instantaneously and completely, as a rotten puff-ball falls inat the touch of a healthy finger; first, before the briberies of Philip, and then yet more completely before the arms of his yet more warlikeson, who was also the son of the fierce, virile, and indomitableOlympia. (Like almost all men remarkable for either good or evil, Alexander inherited from his mother his most notable qualities--hiscourage, his intellectual activity, and an ambition indifferent to anymeans that made for his own end. Fearless in her life, she fearlesslymet death "with a courage worthy of her rank and domineering character, when her hour of retribution came"; and Alexander is incomprehensibletill we recognise him as rising from the womb of Olympia. ) Nor couldshe have been swept clean, a few hundred years later, from Thessaly toSparta, from Corinth to Ephesus, her temples destroyed, her effete womencaptured by the hordes of the Goths--a people less skilfully armedand less civilised than the descendants of the race of Pericles andLeonidas, but who were a branch of that great Teutonic folk whosemonogamous domestic life was sound at the core, and whose fearless, labouring, and resolute women yet bore for the men they followed to theends of the earth, what Spartan women once said they alone bore--men. 

In Rome, in the days of her virtue and vigour, the Roman matron labouredmightily, and bore on her shoulders her full half of the social burden, though her sphere of labour and influence was even somewhat smallerthan that of the Teutonic sisterhood whose descendants were finally tosupplant her own. From the vestal virgin to the matron, the Roman womanin the days of the nation's health and growth fulfilled lofty functionsand bore the whole weight of domestic toil. From the days of Lucretia, the great Roman dame whom we find spinning with her handmaidens deepinto 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 everywhere, erect, labouring, and resolute, the Roman woman who gave birth to the men who built upRoman greatness. A few centuries later, and Rome also had reached thatdangerous spot in the order of social change which Greece had reachedcenturies before her. Slave labour and the enjoyment of the unlimitedspoils of subject races had done away for ever with the demand forphysical labour on the part of the members of the dominant race. Thencame the period when the male still occupied himself with the dutiesof war and government, of legislation and self-culture; but the Romanmatron had already ceased for ever from her toils. Decked in jewels andfine clothing, brought at the cost of infinite human labour from theends of the earth, nourished on delicate victuals, prepared by others'hands, she sought now only with amusement to pass away a life that nolonger offered her the excitement and joy of active productive exertion. She frequented theatres or baths, or reclined on her sofa, or drove inher chariot; and like more modern counterparts, painted herself, worepatches, affected an artistic walk, and a handshake with the elbowraised and the fingers hanging down. Her children were reared bydependents; and in the intellectual labour and government of her ageshe took small part, and was fit to take none. There were not wantingwriters and thinkers who saw clearly the end to which the enervation ofthe female was tending, and who were not sparing in their denunciations. "Time was, " cries one Roman writer of that age, "when the matron turnedthe spindle with the hand and kept at the same time the pot in her eyethat the pottage might not be singed, but now, " he adds bitterly, "when the wife, loaded with jewels, reposes among pillows, or seeks thedissipation of baths and theatres, all things go downward and the statedecays. " Yet neither he nor that large body of writers and thinkers whosaw the condition towards which the parasitism of woman was tendingto reduce society, preached any adequate remedy. (Indeed, must notthe protest and the remedy in all such cases, if they are to be of anyavail, take their rise within the diseased class itself?)

Thoughtful men sighed over the present and yearned for the past, norseem to have perceived that it was irrevocably gone; that the Romanlady who, with a hundred servants standing idle about her, should, inimitation of her ancestress, have gone out with her pitcher on her headto draw water from the well, while in all her own courtyards pipe-ledstreams gushed forth, would have acted the part of the pretender; thathad she insisted on resuscitating her loom and had sat up all nightto spin, she could never have produced those fabrics which alone herhousehold demanded, and would have been but a puerile actor; that it wasnot by attempting to return to the ancient and for ever closed fields oftoil, but by entering upon new, that she could alone serve her raceand retain her own dignity and virility. That not by bearing water andweaving linen, but by so training and disciplining herself that sheshould be fitted to bear her share in the labour necessary to the justand wise guidance of a great empire, and be capable of training a raceof men adequate to exercise an enlightened, merciful, and beneficentrule over the vast masses of subject people--that so, and so only, could she fulfil her duty toward the new society about her, and bear itsburden together with man, as her ancestresses of bygone generations hadborne the burden of theirs. 

That in this direction, and this alone, lay the only possible remedy forthe evils of woman's condition, was a conception apparently graspedby none; and the female sank lower and lower, till the image of theparasitic woman of Rome (with a rag of the old Roman intensity lefteven in her degradation!)--seeking madly by pursuit of pleasure andsensuality to fill the void left by the lack of honourable activity;accepting lust in the place of love, ease in the place of exertion, andan unlimited consumption in the place of production; too enervated atlast to care even to produce offspring, and shrinking from every formof endurance--remains, even to the present day, the most perfect, andtherefore the most appalling, picture of the parasite female that earthhas produced--a picture only less terrible than it is pathetic. 

We recognise that it was inevitable that this womanhood--born it wouldseem from its elevation to guide and enlighten a world, and in placethereof feeding on it--should at last have given birth to a manhood aseffete as itself, and that both should in the end have been swept awaybefore the march of those Teutonic folk, whose women were virile andcould give birth to men; a folk among whom the woman received on themorning of her marriage, from the man who was to be her companionthrough 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 bestowedon him in return a suit of armour, in token that they two werehenceforth to be one in toil and in the facing of danger; that she tooshould dare with him in war and suffer with him in peace; and of whomanother writer tells us, that their women not only bore the race andfed it at their breasts without the help of others' hands, but that theyundertook the whole management of house and lands, leaving the malesfree for war and chase; of whom Suetonius tells us, that when AugustusCaesar demanded hostages from a tribe, he took women, not men, becausehe found by experience that the women were more regarded than men, andof whom Strabo says, that so highly did the Germanic races value theintellect of their women that they regarded them as inspired, andentered into no war or great undertaking without their advice andcounsel; while among the Cimbrian women who accompanied their husbandsin the invasion of Italy were certain who marched barefooted in themidst of the lines, distinguished by their white hair and milk-whiterobes, and who were regarded as inspired, and of whom Florus, describingan early Roman victory, says, "The conflict was not less fierce andobstinate with the wives of the vanquished; in their carts and wagonsthey formed a line of battle, and from their elevated situation, as fromso many turrets, annoyed the Romans with their poles and lances. (TheSouth African Boer woman after two thousand years appears not wholly tohave forgotten the ancestral tactics. ) Their death was as glorious astheir martial spirit. Finding that all was lost, they strangled theirchildren, and either destroyed themselves in one scene of mutualslaughter, or with the sashes that bound up their hair suspendedthemselves by the neck to the boughs of trees or the tops of theirwagons. " It is of these women that Valerius Maximus says, that, "If thegods on the day of battle had inspired the men with equal fortitude, Marius would never have boasted of his Teutonic victory;" and of whomTacitus, speaking of those women who accompanied their husbands to war, remarks, "These are the darling witnesses of his conduct, the applaudersof his valour, at once beloved and valued. The wounded seek theirmothers and their wives; undismayed at the sight, the women count eachhonourable scar and suck the gushing blood. They are even hardy enoughto mix with the combatants, administering refreshment and exhorting themto deeds of valour, " and adds moreover, that "To be contented with onewife was peculiar to the Germans; while the woman was contented with onehusband, as with one life, one mind, one body. "

It was inevitable that before the sons of women such as these, the sonsof the parasitic Roman should be swept from existence, as the offspringof the caged canary would fall in conflict with the offspring of thefree. 

Again and again with wearisome reiteration, the same story repeatsitself. Among the Jews in the days of their health and growth, we findtheir women bearing the major weight of agricultural and domestic toil, full always of labour and care--from Rachel, whom Jacob met and lovedas she watered her father's flocks, to Ruth, the ancestress of a line ofkings and heroes, whom her Boas noted labouring in the harvest-fields;from Sarah, kneading and baking cakes for Abraham's prophetic visitors, to Miriam, prophetess and singer, and Deborah, who judging Israelfrom beneath her palm-tree, "and the land had rest for forty years. "Everywhere the ancient Jewish woman appears, an active sustaining poweramong her people; and perhaps the noblest picture of the labouringwoman to be found in any literature is contained in the Jewish writings, indited possibly at the very time when the labouring woman was for thefirst time tending among a section of the Jews to become a thing of thepast; when already Solomon, with his seven hundred parasitic wives andthree hundred parasitic concubines, loomed large on the horizon of thenational life, to take the place of flock-tending Rachel and gleaningRuth, and to produce amid their palaces of cedar and gold, among themall, no Joseph or David, but in the way of descendant only a Rehoboam, under whose hand the kingdom was to totter to its fall. (The pictureof the labouring as opposed to the parasitic ideal of womanhood appearsunder the heading, "The words of King Lemuel; the oracle which hismother taught him. ") At risk of presenting the reader with that withwhich he is already painfully familiar, we here transcribe thepassage; which, allowing for differences in material and intellectualsurroundings, paints also the ideal of the labouring womanhood of thepresent 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 hands, She 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 field, and buyeth it; With the fruit of her hands she planteth a vineyard. She girdeth her loins with strength, And maketh strong her 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 she 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. "

In the East today the same story has wearisomely written itself: inChina, where the present vitality and power of the most ancient ofexisting civilisations may be measured accurately by the length of itswoman's shoes; in Turkish harems, where one of the noblest dominantAryan races the world has yet produced, is being slowly suffocated inthe arms of a parasite womanhood, and might, indeed, along ago have beenobliterated, had not a certain virility and strength been continuallyreinfused into it through the persons of purchased wives, who in earlychildhood and youth had been themselves active labouring peasants. Everywhere, in the past as in the present, the parasitism of the femaleheralds the decay of a nation or class, and as invariably indicatesdisease as the pustules of smallpox upon the skin indicate the existenceof a purulent virus in the system. 

We are, indeed, far from asserting that the civilisations of the pastwhich have decayed, have decayed alone through the parasitism of theirfemales. Vast, far-reaching social phenomena have invariably causes andreactions immeasurably too complex to be summed up under one so simple aterm. Behind the phenomenon of female parasitism has always lain anotherand yet larger social phenomenon; it has invariably been preceded, as wehave seen, by the subjugation of large bodies of other human creatures, either as slaves, subject races, or classes; and as the result of theexcessive labours of those classes there has always been an accumulationof unearned wealth in the hands of the dominant class or race. It hasinvariably been by feeding on this wealth, the result of forced orill-paid labour, that the female of the dominant race or class has inthe past lost her activity and has come to exist purely through thepassive performance of her sexual functions. Without slaves or subjectclasses to perform the crude physical labours of life and producesuperfluous 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 statesthat the decay of the great nations and civilisations of the past hasresulted from the enervation caused by excessive wealth and luxury; andthere is a further, and if possible more profound, truth underlying thestatement that their destruction has ultimately been the result of theenervation of the entire race, male and female. 

But when we come further to inquire how, exactly, this process of decaytook place, we shall find that the part which the parasitism of thefemale has played has been fundamental. The mere use of any of thematerial products of labour, which we term wealth, can never in itselfproduce that decay, physical or mental, which precedes the downfall ofgreat civilised nations. The eating of salmon at ten shillings a poundcan in itself no more debilitate and corrupt the moral, intellectual, and physical constitution of the man consuming it, than it couldenervate his naked forefathers who speared it in their rivers for food;the fact that an individual wears a robe made from the filaments of aworm, can no more deteriorate his spiritual or physical fibre, thanwere it made of sheep's wool; an entire race, housed in marble palaces, faring delicately, and clad in silks, and surrounded by the noblestproducts of literature and plastic art, so those palaces, viands, garments, and products of art were the result of their own labours, could never be enervated by them. The debilitating effect of wealthsets in at that point exactly (and never before) at which the supply ofmaterial necessaries and comforts, and of aesthetic enjoyments, clogsthe individuality, causing it to rest satisfied in the mere passivepossession of the results of the labour of others, without feeling anynecessity or desire for further productive activity of its own. (Of theother deleterious effects of unearned wealth on the individual or classpossessing it, such as its power of lessening human sympathy, &c. , &c. , we do not now speak, as while ultimately and indirectly, undoubtedly, tending to disintegrate a society, they do not necessarily andimmediately enervate it, which enervation is the point we are hereconsidering. )

The exact material condition at which this point will be reached willvary, not only with the race and the age, but with the individual. AMarcus Aurelius in a palace of gold and marble was able to retainhis simplicity and virility as completely as though he had lived in acow-herd's hut; while on the other hand, it is quite possible for thewife of a savage chief who has but four slaves to bring her her cornand milk and spread her skins in the sun, to become almost as purelyparasitic as the most delicately pampered female of fashion in ancientRome, or modern Paris, London, or New York; while the exact amount ofunearned material wealth which will emasculate individuals in the samesociety, will vary exactly as their intellectual and moral fibre andnatural activity are strong or weak. (It is not uncommon in modernsocieties to find women of a class relatively very moderately wealthy, the wives and daughters of shopkeepers or professional men, who if theirmale relations will supply them with a very limited amount of moneywithout exertion on their part, will become as completely parasitic anduseless as women with untold wealth at their command. )

The debilitating effect of unlaboured-for wealth lies, then, not in thenature of any material adjunct to life in itself, but in the power itmay possess of robbing the individual of all incentive to exertion, thusdestroying the intellectual, the physical, and finally, the moral fibre. 

In all the civilisations of the past examination will show that almostinvariably it has been the female who has tended first to reach thispoint, and we think examination will show that it has almost invariablybeen 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 ofdomestic labour that slave or hired labour most easily and insidiouslypenetrates. The force of blows or hireling gold can far more easilysupply labourers as the preparers of food and clothing, and even as therearers of children, than it can supply labourers fitted to be entrustedwith the toils of war and government, which have in the past been theespecial sphere of male toil. The Roman woman had for generations beensupplanted in the sphere of her domestic labours and in the toil ofrearing and educating her offspring, and had long become abjectlyparasitic, before the Roman male had been able to substitute the labourof the hireling and barbarian for his own, in the army, and in thedrudgeries of governmental toil. 

Secondly, the female having one all-important though passive functionwhich cannot be taken from her, and which is peculiarly connectedwith her own person, in the act of child-bearing, and her mere sexualattributes being an object of desire and cupidity to the male, she isliable in a peculiarly insidious and gradual manner to become dependenton this one sexual function alone for her support. So much is this thecase, that even when she does not in any way perform this function thereis still a curious tendency for the kudos of the function still to hangabout her, and for her mere potentiality in the direction of a dutywhich she may never fulfil, to be confused in her own estimation andthat of society with the actual fulfilment of that function. Under themighty aegis of the woman who bears and rears offspring and in otherdirections labours greatly and actively for her race, creeps ingradually and unnoticed the woman who does none of these things. Fromthe mighty labouring woman who bears human creatures to the full extentof her power, rears her offspring unaided, and performs at the sametime severe social labour in other directions (and who is, undoubtedly, wherever found, the most productive toiler known to the race); it is butone step, though a long one, from this woman to the woman who producesoffspring freely but does not herself rear them, and performs nocompensatory social labour. While from this woman, again, to the one whobears few or no children, but who, whether as a wife or mistress, livesby the exercise of her sex function alone, the step is short. Thereis but one step farther to the prostitute, who affects no form ofproductive labour, and who, in place of life, is recognised as producingdisease and death, but who exists parasitically through her sexualattribute. Enormous as is the distance between the women at the twoextremes of this series, and sharply opposed as their relation to theworld is, there is yet, in actual life, no sharp, clear, sudden-drawnline dividing the women of the one type from those of the other. Theyshade off into each other by delicate and in sensible degrees. And itis down this inclined plane that the women of civilised races arepeculiarly tempted, unconsciously, to slip; from the noble height ofa condition of the most strenuous social activity, into a condition ofcomplete, helpless, and inactive parasitism, without being clearly awareof the fact themselves, and without society's becoming so--the womanwho has ceased to rear her own offspring, or who has ceased to bearoffspring at all, and who performs no other productive social function, yet shields the fact from her own eyes by dwelling on the fact that sheis a woman, in whom the capacity is at least latent. (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 thoseof the world by playing at the ancient ancestral forms of male labour. He is almost always found talking loudly of the protection he affords tohelpless females and to society, though he is in truth himself protectedthrough the exertion of soldiers, policemen, magistrates, and societygenerally; and he is almost invariably fond of dangling a sword orother weapon, and wearing some kind of uniform, for the assumption ofmilitarism without severe toil delights him. But it is in a degeneratetravesty of the ancient labour of hunting where, at terrible risk tohimself, and with endless fatigue, his ancestors supplied the race withits meat and defended it from destruction by wild beasts) that he findshis greatest satisfaction; it serves to render the degradation anduselessness of his existence less obvious to himself and to others thanif he passed his life reclining in an armchair. 

On Yorkshire moors today may be seen walls of sod, behind which hidecertain human males, while hard-labouring men are employed from earlydawn 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, whichit had taken so much human labour to rear and provide, falls dead at hisfeet; thereby greatly to the increase of the hunter's glory, when, thetoils of the chase over, he returns to his city haunts to record hisbag. One might almost fancy one saw arise from the heathery turf theshade of some ancient Teutonic ancestor, whose dust has long reposedthere, pointing a finger of scorn at his degenerate descendant, as heleers out from behind the sod wall. During the the later Roman Empire, Commodus, in the degenerate days of Rome, at great expense had wildbeasts brought from distant lands that he might have the glory ofslaying them in the Roman circus; and medals representing himself asHercules slaying the Nemean lion were struck at his orders. We are notaware that any representation has yet been made in the region of plasticart of the hero of the sod wall; but history repeats itself--and thatalso may come. It is to be noted that these hunters are not youths, but often ripely adult men, before whom all the lofty enjoyments andemployments possible to the male in modern life, lie open. )

These peculiarities in her condition have in all civilised societieslaid the female more early and seriously open to the attacks ofparasitism than the male. And while the accumulation of wealth hasalways been the antecedent condition, and the degeneracy and effetenessof the male the final and obvious cause, of the decay of the greatdominant races of the past; yet, between these two has always lain, as agreat middle term, the parasitism of the female, without which the firstwould have been inoperative and the last impossible. 

Not slavery, nor the most vast accumulations of wealth, could destroya nation by enervation, whose women remained active, virile, andlaborious. 

The conception which again and again appears to have haunted successivesocieties, that it was a possibility for the human male to advancein physical power and intellectual vigour, while his companion femalebecame stationary and inactive, taking no share in the labours ofsociety beyond the passive fulfilment of sexual functions, has alwaysbeen negated. It has ended as would end the experiment of a manseeking to raise a breed of winning race-horses out of unexercised, short-winded, knock-kneed mares. No, more disastrously! For while thefemale animal transmits herself to her descendant only or mainly bymeans of germinal inheritance, and through the influence she mayexert over it during gestation, the human female, by producing theintellectual and moral atmosphere in which the early infant yearsof life are passed, impresses herself far more indelibly on herdescendants. Only an able and labouring womanhood can permanentlyproduce an able and labouring manhood; only an effete and inactive malecan ultimately be produced by an effete and inactive womanhood. Thecurled darling, scented and languid, with his drawl, his delicateapparel, his devotion to the rarity and variety of his viands, whoseseverest labour is the search after pleasure, and for whom even thechase, which was for his remote ancestor an invigorating and manly toilessential for the meat and life of his people, becomes a luxurious andfarcical amusement;--this male, whether found in the later RomanEmpire, the Turkish harem of today, or in our Northern civilisations, ispossible only because generations of parasitic women have preceded him. More repulsive than the parasite female herself, because a yet furtherproduct of decay, it is yet only the scent of his mother's boudoir thatwe smell in his hair. He is like to the bald patches and rotten wool onthe back of a scabby sheep; which indeed indicate that, deep beneath thesurface, a parasite insect is eating its way into the flesh, but whichare not so much the cause of disease, as its final manifestation. 

As we have said it is the power of the human female to impressherself on her descendants, male and female, not only through germinalinheritance, through influence during the period of gestation, butabove all by producing the mental atmosphere in which the impressionableinfant years of life are passed, which makes the condition of thechild-bearing female one of paramount interest of the race. It is thisfact which causes even prostitution (in many other respects the mostrepulsive of all the forms of female parasitism which afflicts humanity)to be, probably, not more adverse to the advance and even to theconservation of a healthy and powerful society, than the parasitismof its child-bearing women. For the prostitute, heavily as she weightssociety for her support, returning disease and mental and emotionaldisintegration for what she consumes, does not yet so immediately affectthe next generation as the kept wife, or kept mistress, who impressesher effete image indelibly on the generations succeeding. (It cannot betoo often repeated that the woman who merely bears and brings a childinto the world, and then leaves it to be fed and reared by the handsof another, has performed very much less than half of the labour ofproducing adult humans; in such cases it is the nurse and not the motherwho is the most important labourer. )

No man ever yet entered life farther than the length of one navel-cordfrom the body of the woman who bore him. It is the woman who is thefinal standard of the race, from which there can be no departure for anydistance 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 shedecays, decays the people. 

Other causes may, and do, lead to the enervation and degeneration of aclass or race; the parasitism of its child-bearing women must. 

We, the European women of this age, stand today where again and again, in the history of the past, women of other races have stood; but ourcondition is yet more grave, and of wider import to humanity as a wholethan theirs ever was. Let us again consider more closely why this is so. 

Chapter III. Parasitism (continued). 

We have seen that, in the past, no such thing as the parasitism of theentire body or large majority of the females inhabiting any territorywas possible. Beneath that body of women of the dominant class or race, who did not labour either mentally or physically, there has always beenof necessity a far more vast body of females who not only performed thecrude physical toil essential to the existence of society before theintroduction of mechanical methods of production, but who were compelledto labour the more intensely because there was a parasite class abovethem to be maintained by their physical toil. The more the femaleparasite flourished of old, in one class or race, the more certainlyall women of other classes or races were compelled to labour only tooexcessively; and ultimately these females and their descendants wereapt to supplant the more enervated class or race. In the absence ofmachinery and of a vast employment of the motor-forces of nature, parasitism could only threaten a comparatively small section of anycommunity, and a minute section of the human race as a whole. Femaleparasitism in the past resembled gout--a disease dangerous only to theover-fed, pampered, and few, never to the population of any society as awhole. 

At the present day, so enormous has been the advance made in thesubstitution of mechanical force for crude, physical, human exertion(mechanical force being employed today even in the shaping offeeding-bottles and the creation of artificial foods as substitutesfor mother's milk!), that it is now possible not only for a small andwealthy section of women in each civilised community to be maintainedwithout performing any of the ancient, crude, physical labours of theirsex, and without depending on the slavery of, or any vast increase inthe labour of, other classes of females; but this condition has alreadybeen reached, or is tending to be reached, by that large mass of womenin civilised societies, who form the intermediate class between poorand rich. During the next fifty years, so rapid will undoubtedly be thespread of the material conditions of civilisation, both in the societiesat present civilised and in the societies at present unpermeated byour material civilisation, that the ancient forms of female, domestic, physical labour of even the women of the poorest classes will be littlerequired, their place being taken, not by other females, but by alwaysincreasingly perfected labour-saving machinery. 

Thus, female parasitism, which in the past threatened only a minutesection of earth's women, under existing conditions threatens vastmasses, and may, under future conditions, threaten the entire body. 

If woman is content to leave to the male all labour in the new andall-important fields which are rapidly opening before the human race;if, as the old forms of domestic labour slip from her for everand evitably, she does not grasp the new, it is inevitable, that, ultimately, not merely a class, but the whole bodies of females incivilised societies, must sink into a state of more or less absolutedependence on their sexual functions alone. (How real is this apparentlyvery remote danger is interestingly illustrated by a proposition gravelymade a few years ago by a man of note in England. He proposed that acompulsory provision should be made for at least the women of the upperand middle classes, by which they might be maintained through lifeentirely without regard to any productive labour they might perform, not even the passive labour of sexual reproduction being of necessityrequired of them. That this proposal was received by the women strivingto reconstruct the relation of the modern woman to life withoutacclamation and with scorn, may have surprised its maker; but with nomore reason than that man would have for feeling surprise who, seeinga number of persons anxious to escape the infection of some contagiousdisease, should propose as a cure to inoculate them all with it in itsmost virulent form!)

As new forms of natural force are mastered and mechanical appliancesperfected, it will be quite possible for the male half of all civilisedraces (and therefore ultimately of all) to absorb the entire fields ofintellectual and highly trained manual labour; and it would be entirelypossible for the female half of the race, whether as prostitutes, askept mistresses, or as kept wives, to cease from all forms of activetoil, and, as the passive tools of sexual reproduction, or, moredecadently still, as the mere instruments of sexual indulgence, to sinkinto a condition of complete and helpless sex-parasitism. 

Sex-parasitism, therefore, presents itself at the end of the nineteenthcentury and beginning of the twentieth in a guise which it has neverbefore worn. We, the European women of the nineteenth and twentiethcenturies, stand therefore in a position the gravity and importance ofwhich was not equalled by that of any of our forerunners in the ancientcivilisation. As we master and rise above, or fall and are conquered by, the difficulties of our position, so also will be the future, not merelyof our own class, or even of our own race alone, but also of thosevast masses who are following on in the wake of our civilisation. Thedecision we are called on to make is a decision for the race; behind uscomes on the tread of incalculable millions of feet. 

There is thus no truth in the assertion so often made, even bythoughtful persons, that the male labour question and the woman'squestion of our day are completely one, and that, would the women ofthe European race of today but wait peacefully till the males alone hadsolved their problem, they would find that their own had been solved atthe same time. 

Were the entire male labour problem of this age satisfactorily settledtomorrow; were all the unemployed or uselessly employed males at bothends of societies, whom the changes of modern civilisation have robbedof their ancient forms of labour, so educated and trained that they wereperfectly fitted for the new conditions of life; and were the materialbenefit and intellectual possibilities, which the substitution ofmechanical for human labour now makes possible to humanity, no longerabsorbed by the few but dispersed among the whole mass of males inreturn for their trained labour, yet the woman's problem might befurther from satisfactory solution than it is today; and, if it wereaffected at all, might be affected for the worse. It is wholly untruethat fifty pounds, or two thousand, earned by the male as the result ofhis physical or mental toil, if part of it be spent by him in supportingnon-labouring females, whether as prostitutes, wives, or mistresses, isthe same thing to the female or to the race as though that sum had beenearned by her own exertion, either directly as wages or indirectly bytoiling for the man whose wages supported her. For the moment, truly, the woman so tended lies softer and warmer than had she been compelledto exert herself; ultimately, intellectually, morally, and evenphysically, the difference in the effect upon her as an individual andon the race is the difference between advance and degradation, betweenlife and death. The increased wealth of the male no more of necessitybenefits and raises the female upon whom he expends it, than theincreased wealth of his mistress necessarily benefits mentally orphysically a poodle because she can give him a down cushion in place ofone of feathers, and chicken in place of beef. The wealthier the malesof a society become, the greater the temptation, both to themselves andto the females connected with them, to drift toward female parasitism. 

The readjustment of the position of the male worker, if it led to amore equitable distribution of wealth among males, might indeed diminishslightly the accompanying tendency to parasitism in the very wealthiestfemale class; but it would, on the other hand, open up exactly thoseconditions which make parasitism possible to millions of women todayleading healthy and active lives. (The fact cannot be too often dweltupon that parasitism is not connected with any definite amount ofwealth. Any sum supplied to an individual which will so far satisfyhim or her as to enable them to live without exertion may absolutelyparasitise them; while vast wealth unhealthy as its effects generallytend to be) may, upon certain rare and noble natures, exert hardly anyenervating or deleterious influence. An amusing illustration of thedifferent points at which enervation is reached by different femalescame under our own observation. The wife of an American millionairewas visited by a woman, the daughter and also the widow of smallprofessional men. She stated that she was in need of both food andclothing. The millionaire's wife gave her a leg of mutton and twovaluable dresses. The woman proceeded to whine, though in vigoroushealth, that she had no one to carry them home for her, and couldnot think of carrying them herself. The American, the descendant ofgenerations of able, labouring, New England, Puritan women, tucked theleg of mutton under one arm and the bundle of clothes under the otherand 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 contactwith was that of a daughter of a poor English officer on half-pay andwho had to exist on a few hundreds a year. This woman could neithercook her own food nor make her own clothes, nor was she engaged in anysocial, political, or intellectual or artistic labour. Though able todance for a night or play tennis for an afternoon, she was yet hardlyable to do her own hair or attire herself, and appeared absolutely tohave lost all power of compelling herself to do anything which was atthe moment fatiguing or displeasing, as all labour is apt to be, howevergreat its ultimate reward. In a life of twenty-eight years thiswoman had probably not contributed one hour's earnest toil, mental orphysical, to the increase of the sum total of productive human labour. Surrounded with acres of cultivable land, she would possibly havepreferred to lie down and die of hunger rather than have cultivated halfan acre for food. This is an extreme case; but the ultimate effect ofparasitism is always a paralysis of the will and an inability to compeloneself into any course of action for the moment unpleasurable andexhaustive. 

That the two problems are not identical is shown, if indeed evidencewere needed, by the fact that those males most actively employed inattempting to readjust the relations of the mass of labouring males tothe new conditions of life, are sometimes precisely those males whoare most bitterly opposed to woman in her attempt to readjust herown position. Not even by the members of those professions, generallyregarded as the strongholds of obstructionism and prejudice, has a moreshort-sighted opposition often been made to the attempts of woman toenter new fields of labour, than have again and again been made by malehand-workers, whether as isolated individuals or in their corporatecapacity as trade unions. They have, at least in some certain instances, endeavoured to exclude women, not merely from new fields of intellectualand social labour, but even from those ancient fields of textilemanufacture and handicraft, which have through all generations of thepast been woman's. The patent and undeniable fact, that where the malelabour movement flourishes the woman movement also flourishes, risesnot from the fact that they are identical, but that the same healthy andvirile condition in a race or society gives rise to both. 

As two streams rising from one fountain-head and running a parallelcourse through long reaches may yet remain wholly distinct, one findingits way satisfactorily to the sea, while the other loses itself in sandor becomes a stagnant marsh, so our modern male and female movements, taking their rise from the same material conditions in moderncivilisation, and presenting endless and close analogies with oneanother in their cause of development, yet remain fundamentallydistinct. By both movements the future of the race must be profoundlymodified for good or evil; both touch the race in a manner absolutelyvital; but both will have to be fought out on their own ground, and independently: and it can be only by determined, conscious, andpersistent action on the part of woman that the solution of her ownlabour problems will proceed co-extensively with that of the other. 

How distinct, though similar, is the underlying motive of the twomovements, is manifested most clearly by this fact, that, while the malelabour movement takes its rise mainly among the poor and hand-labouringclasses, where the material pressure of the modern conditions of lifefall heaviest, and where the danger of physical suffering and evenextinction under that pressure is most felt; the Woman Labour Movementhas taken its rise almost as exclusively among the wealthy, cultured, and brain-labouring classes, where alone, at the present day, thedanger of enervation through non-employment, and of degeneration throughdependence on the sex function exists. The female labour movement of ourday is, in its ultimate essence, an endeavour on the part of a sectionof the race to save itself from inactivity and degeneration, and this, even at the immediate cost of most heavy loss in material comfort andease to the individuals composing it. The male labour movementis, directly and in the first place, material; and, or at leastsuperficially, more or less self-seeking, though its ultimate reactionon society by saving the poorer members from degradation and dependencyand want is undoubtedly wholly social and absolutely essential forthe health and continued development of the human race. In the Woman'sLabour Movement of our day, which has essentially taken its rise amongwomen of the more cultured and wealthy classes, and which consistsmainly in a demand to have the doors leading to professional, political, and highly skilled labour thrown open to them, the ultimate end can onlybe attained at the cost of more or less intense, immediate, personalsuffering and renunciation, though eventually, if brought to asatisfactory conclusion, it will undoubtedly tend to the material andphysical well-being of woman herself, as well as to that of her malecompanions and descendants. 

The coming half-century will be a time of peculiar strain, as mankindseeks rapidly to adjust moral ideals and social relationships and thegeneral ordering of life to the new and continually unfolding materialconditions. If these two great movements of our age, having this astheir object, can be brought into close harmony and co-operation, thereadjustment will be the sooner and more painlessly accomplished; but, for the moment, the two movements alike in their origin and alike inmany of their methods of procedure, remain distinct. 

It is this fact, the consciousness on the part of the women taking theirshare in the Woman's Movement of our age, that their efforts are not, and cannot be, of immediate advantage to themselves, but that theyalmost of necessity and immediately lead to loss and renunciation, whichgives to this movement its very peculiar tone; setting it apart from thelarge mass of economic movements, placing it rather in a line with thosevast religious developments which at the interval of ages have sweptacross humanity, irresistibly modifying and reorganising it. 

It is the perception of this fact, that, not for herself, nor even forfellow-women alone, but for the benefit of humanity at large, it isnecessary she should seek to readjust herself to life, which lends tothe modern woman's most superficial and seemingly trivial attempts atreadjustment, a certain dignity and importance. 

It is this profound hidden conviction which removes from the sphere ofthe ridiculous the attitude of even the feeblest woman who waves herpoor little "Woman's rights" flag on the edge of a platform, and whichcauses us to forgive even the passionate denunciations, not alwayswisely thought out, in which she would represent the suffering and evilsof woman's condition, as wrongs intentionally inflicted upon her, wherethey are merely the inevitable results of ages of social movement. 

It is this over-shadowing consciousness of a large impersonalobligation, which removes from the sphere of the contemptible andinsignificant even the action of the individual young girl, who leavesa home of comfort or luxury for a city garret, where in solitude, andunder that stern pressure which is felt by all individuals in armsagainst the trend of their environment, she seeks to acquire theknowledge necessary for entering on a new form of labour. It is thisprofound consciousness which makes not less than heroic the figure ofthe little half-starved student, battling against gigantic odds to takeher place beside man in the fields of modern intellectual toil, andwhich, whether she succeed or fail, makes her a landmark in the courseof our human evolution. It is this consciousness of large impersonalends to be attained, and to the attainment of which each individual isbound to play her part, however small, which removes from the domain ofthe unnecessary, and raises to importance, the action of each womanwho resists the tyranny of fashions in dress or bearing or custom whichimpedes her in her strife towards the new adjustment. 

It is this consciousness which renders almost of solemn import theefforts of the individual female after physical or mental self-cultureand expansion; this, which fills with a lofty enthusiasm the heart ofthe young girl, who, it may be, in some solitary farm-house, in somedistant wild of Africa or America, deep into the night bends over herbooks with the passion and fervour with which an early Christian mayhave bent over the pages of his Scriptures; feeling that, it may be, shefits herself by each increase of knowledge for she knows not what dutiestowards the world, in the years to come. It is this consciousness ofgreat impersonal ends, to be brought, even if slowly and imperceptibly, a little nearer by her action, which gives to many a woman strengthfor renunciation, when she puts from her the lower type of sexualrelationship, even if bound up with all the external honour a legal bondcan confer, if it offers her only enervation and parasitism; and whichenables her often to accept poverty, toil, and sexual isolation (anisolation even more terrible to the woman than to any male), and therenunciation of motherhood, that crowning beatitude of the woman'sexistence, which, and which alone, fully compensates her for the organicsufferings of womanhood--in the conviction that, by so doing, she makesmore possible a fuller and higher attainment of motherhood and wifehoodto the women who will follow her. It is this consciousness which makesof solemn importance the knock of the humblest woman at the closeddoor which shuts off a new field of labour, physical or mental: is sheconvinced that, not for herself, but in the service of the whole race, she knocks. 

It is this abiding consciousness of an end to be attained, reachingbeyond her personal life and individual interests, which constitutes thereligious element of the Woman's Movement of our day, and binds with thecommon bond of an impersonal enthusiasm into one solid body the womenof whatsoever race, class, and nation who are struggling after thereadjustment of woman to life. 

This it is also, which in spite of defects and failures on the part ofindividuals, yet makes the body who these women compose, as a whole, oneof the most impressive and irresistible of modern forces. The privatesoldier of the great victorious army is not always an imposing object ashe walks down the village street, cap on side of head and sword danglingbetween his legs, nor is he always impressive even when he burnishes uphis accoutrements or cleans his pannikins; but it is of individualssuch as these that the great army is made, which tomorrow, when it isgathered together, may shake the world with its tread. 

Possibly not one woman in ten, or even one woman in twenty thousandamong those taking part in this struggle, could draw up a clear andsuccinct account of the causes which have led to the disco-ordination inwoman's present position, or give a full account of the benefits to flowfrom readjustment; as probably not one private soldier in an army of tenor even of twenty thousand, though he is willing to give his life forhis land, would yet be able to draw up a clear and succinct account ofhis land's history in the past and of the conditions which have madewar inevitable; and almost as little can he often paint an exact anddetailed picture of the benefits to flow from his efts. He knows hisland has need of him; he knows his own small place and work. 

It is possible that not one woman in ten thousand has grasped withscientific exactitude, and still less could express with verbalsharpness, the great central conditions which yet compel and animate herinto action. 

Even the great, central fact, that with each generation the entire racepasses through the body of its womanhood as through a mould, reappearingwith the indelible marks of that mould upon it, that as the os cervix ofwoman, through which the head of the human infant passes at birth, formsa ring, determining for ever the size at birth of the human head, asize which could only increase if in the course of ages the os cervix ofwoman should itself slowly expand; and that so exactly the intellectualcapacity, the physical vigour, the emotional depth of woman, formsalso an untranscendable circle, circumscribing with each successivegeneration the limits of the expansion of the human race;--even thisfact she may not so clearly have grasped intellectually as to be able tothrow it into the form of a logical statement. The profound truth, thatthe continued development of the human race on earth (a developmentwhich, as the old myths and dreams of a narrow personal heaven fadefrom our view, becomes increasingly for many of us the spiritual hope bylight of which we continue to live), a development which we hope shallmake the humanity of a distant future as much higher in intellectualpower and wider in social sympathy than the highest human units ofour day, as that is higher than the first primeval ancestor whowith quivering limb strove to walk upright and shape his lips to theexpression of a word, is possible only if the male and female halves ofhumanity progress together, expanding side by side in the future as theyhave done in the past--even this truth it is possible few women haveexactly and logically grasped as the basis of their action. The truththat, as the first primitive human males and females, unable to countfarther than their fingers, or grasp an abstract idea, or feel thecontrolling power of social emotion, could only develop into theSapphos, Aristotles, and Shelleys of a more expanded civilisation, ifside by side, and line by line, male and female forms have expandedtogether; if, as the convolutions of his brain increased in complexity, so increased the convolutions in hers; if, as her forehead grew higher, so developed his; and that, if the long upward march of the future isever to be accomplished by the race, male and female must march side byside, acting and reacting on each other through inheritance; or progressis impossible. The truth that, as the existence of even the male Bushmanwould be impossible without the existence of the analogous Bushwomanwith the same gifts; and that as races which can produce among theirmales a William Kingdon Clifford, a Tolstoy, or a Robert Browning, wouldbe inconceivable and impossible, unless among its females it could alsoproduce a Sophia Kovalevsky, a George Eliot, or a Louise Michel; so, also, in the future, that higher and more socialised human race we dreamof can only come into existence, because in both the sex forms haveevolved together, now this sex and then that, so to speak, catchingup the ball of life and throwing it back to the other, slightly ifimperceptibly enlarging and beautifying it as it passes through theirhands. The fact that without the reaction of interevolution between thesexes, there can be no real and permanent human advance; without theenlarged deep-thinking Eve to bear him, no enlarged Adam; without theenlarged widely sympathising Adam to beget her, no enlarged widelycomprehending Eve; without an enlarged Adam and an enlarged Eve, noenlarged and beautified generation of mankind on earth; that an arrestin one form is an arrest in both; and in the upward march of the entirehuman family. The truth that, if at the present day, woman, after herlong upward march side by side with man, developing with him throughthe countless ages, by means of the endless exercise of the faculties ofmind and body, has now, at last, reached her ultimate limit of growth, and can progress no farther; that, then, here also, today, the growthof the human spirit is to be stayed; that here, on the spot of woman'sarrest, is the standard of the race to be finally planted, to moveforward no more, for ever:--that, if the parasite woman on her couch, loaded with gewgaws, the plaything and amusement of man, be thepermanent and final manifestation of female human life on the globe, then that couch is also the death-bed of human evolution. These profoundunderlying truths, perhaps, not one woman in twenty thousand of thoseactively engaged in the struggle for readjustment has so closely andkeenly grasped that she can readily throw them into the form of exactlanguage; and yet, probably, not the feeblest woman taking share in ourendeavour toward readjustment and expansion fails to be animated by avague but profound consciousness of their existence. Beyond the smallevils, which she seeks by her immediate, personal action to remedy, lie, she feels; large ills of which they form but an off-shoot; beyond thesmall good which she seeks to effect, lies, she believes, a great anduniversal beatitude to be attained; beyond the little struggle of today, lies the larger struggle of the centuries, in which neither she alonenor her sex alone are concerned, but all mankind. 

That such should be the mental attitude of the average woman taking partin the readjustive sexual movement of today; that so often on the publicplatform and in literature adduces merely secondary arguments, andis wholly unable logically to give an account of the great propellingconditions behind it, is sometimes taken as an indication of theinefficiency, and probably the ultimate failure, of the movement inwhich she takes part. But in truth, that is not so. It is ratheran indication which shows how healthy, and deeply implanted in thesubstance of human life, are the roots of this movement; and it placesit in a line with all those vast controlling movements which have in thecourse of the ages reorganised human life. 

For those great movements which have permanently modified the conditionof humanity have never taken their rise amid the chopped logic ofschools; they have never drawn their vitality from a series of purelyintellectual and abstract inductions. They have arisen always throughthe action of widely spread material and spiritual conditions, creatingwidespread human needs; which, pressing upon the isolated individuals, awakens at last continuous, if often vague and uncertain, socialmovement in a given direction. Mere intellectual comprehension mayguide, retard, or accelerate the great human movements; it has nevercreated them. It may even be questioned whether those very leaders, whohave superficially appeared to create and organise great and successfulsocial movements, have themselves, in most cases, perhaps in any, fullyunderstood in all their complexity the movements they themselves haveappeared to rule. They have been, rather, themselves permeated by thegreat common need; and being possessed of more will, passion, intensity, or intellect, they have been able to give voice to that which inothers was dumb, and conscious direction to that which in others wasunconscious desire: they have been but the foremost crest of a greatwave of human necessity: they have not themselves created the wave whichbears themselves, and humanity, onwards. The artificial social movementswhich have had their origin in the arbitrary will of individuals, guidedwith however much determination and reason, have of necessity provedephemeral and abortive. An Alexander might will to weld a Greece andan Asia into one; a Napoleon might resolve to create of a diversifiedEurope one consolidated state; and by dint of skill and determinationthey might for a moment appear to be accomplishing that which theydesired; but the constraining individual will being withdrawn, theobject of their toil has melted away, as the little heap of damp sandgathered 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 moment the handthat shaped it is withdrawn; while the small, soft, indefinite, wateryfragment of jelly-fish lying beside it, though tossed hither andthither by water and wind, yet retains its shape and grows, because itsparticles are bound by an internal and organic force. 

Our woman's movement resembles strongly, in this matter, the giganticreligious and intellectual movement which for centuries convulsed thelife of Europe; and had, as its ultimate outcome, the final emancipationof the human intellect and the freedom of the human spirit. Lookedback upon from the vantage-point of the present, this past presents theappearance of one vast, steady, persistent movement proceeding alwaysin one ultimate direction, as though guided by some controlling humanintellect. But, to the mass of human individuals taking part in it, itpresented an appearance far otherwise. It was fought out, now here, now there, by isolated individuals and small groups, and often forwhat appeared small and almost personal ends, having sometimes, superficially, little in common. Now it was a Giordano Bruno, burntin Rome in defence of abstract theory with regard to the nature of theFirst Cause; then an Albigense hurled from his rocks because he refusedto part with the leaves of his old Bible; now a Dutch peasant woman, walking serenely to the stake because she refused to bow her head beforetwo crossed rods; then a Servetus burnt by Protestant Calvin at Geneva;or a Spinoza cut off from his tribe and people because he couldsee nothing but God anywhere; and then it was an exiled Rousseau orVoltaire, or a persecuted Bradlaugh; till, in our own day the lastsounds of the long fight are dying about us, as fading echoes, in theguise of a few puerile attempts to enforce trivial disabilities on theground of abstract convictions. The vanguard of humanity has won itsbattle for freedom of thought. 

But, to the men and women taking part in that mighty movement duringthe long centuries of the past, probably nothing was quite clear, in themajority of cases, but their own immediate move. Not the leaders--mostcertainly not good old Martin Luther, even when he gave utterance tohis immortal "I can no otherwise" (the eternal justification of allreformers and social innovators!), understood the whole breadth of thebattlefield on which they were engaged, or grasped with precision theissues which were involved. The valiant Englishman, who, as the flamesshot 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 candlein England, as shall never be put out!" undoubtedly believed thatthe candle lighted was the mere tallow rushlight of a small sectarianfreedom for England alone; nor perceived that what he lighted was butone ray of the vast, universal aurora of intellectual and spiritualliberty, whose light was ultimately to stream, not only across England, but across the earth. Nevertheless, undoubtedly, behind all theselimited efforts, for what appeared, superficially, limited causes, lay, in the hearts of the men and women concerned, through the ages, aprofound if vague consciousness of ends larger than they clearly knew, to be subserved by their action; of a universal social duty and a greatnecessity. 

That the Woman's Movement of our day has not taken its origin from anymere process of theoretic argument; that it breaks out, now here andnow there, in forms divergent and at times superficially almostirreconcilable; that the majority of those taking part in it are driveninto action as the result of the immediate pressure of the conditionsof life, and are not always able logically to state the nature of allcauses which propel them, or to paint clearly all results of theiraction; so far from removing it from the category of the vastreorganising movements of humanity, places it in a line with them, showing how vital, spontaneous, and wholly organic and unartificial isits nature. 

The fact that, at one point, it manifests itself in a passionate, andat times almost incoherent, cry for an accredited share in public andsocial duties; while at another it makes itself felt as a determinedendeavour after self-culture; that in one land it embodies itself mainlyin a resolute endeavour to enlarge the sphere of remunerative labourfor women; while in another it manifests itself chiefly as an effort torecoordinate the personal relation of the sexes; that in one individualit manifests itself as a passionate and sometimes noisy struggle forliberty of personal action; while in another it is being fought outsilently in the depth of the individual consciousness--that primalbattle-ground, in which all questions of reform and human advance mustultimately be fought and decided;--all this diversity, and the factthat the average woman is entirely concerned in labour in her own littlefield, 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 thenegation of all possibility of parasitism in the human female. Slowly, and unconsciously, as the child is shaped in the womb, this movementshapes itself in the bosom of our time, taking its place beside thosevast human developments, of which men, noting their spontaneity and theco-ordination of their parts, have said, in the phraseology of old days, "This thing is not of man, but of God. "

He who today looks at some great Gothic cathedral in its final form, seems to be looking at that which might have been the incarnation of thedream of some single soul of genius. But in truth, its origin was farotherwise. Ages elapsed from the time the first rough stone was laid asa foundation till the last spire and pinnacle were shaped, and the handwhich laid the foundation-stone was never the same as that which setthe last stone upon the coping. Generations often succeeded one another, labouring at gargoyle, rose-window, and shaft, and died, leaving thework to others; the master-builder who drew up the first rough outlinepassed away, and was succeeded by others, and the details of the work ascompleted bore sometimes but faint resemblance to the work as he devisedit; no man fully understood all that others had done or were doing, but each laboured in his place; and the work as completed had unity;it expressed not the desire and necessity of one mind, but of the humanspirit of that age; and not less essential to the existence of thebuilding was the labour of the workman who passed a life of devotionin carving gargoyles or shaping rose-windows, than that of the greatestmaster who drew general outlines: perhaps it was yet more heroic; for, for the master-builder, who, even if it were but vaguely, had an imageof what the work would be when the last stone was laid and the lastspire raised, it was easy to labour with devotion and zeal, though wellhe might know that the placing of that last stone and the raising ofthat last spire would not be his, and that the building in its fullbeauty and strength he should never see; but for the journeyman labourerwho carried on his duties and month by month toiled at carving his ownlittle gargoyle or shaping the traceries in his own little oriel window, without any complete vision, it was not so easy; nevertheless, it wasthrough the conscientious labours of such alone, through their heaps ofchipped and spoiled stones, which may have lain thick about them, thatat the last the pile was reared in its strength and beauty. 

For a Moses who could climb Pisgah, and, though it were through amist of bitter tears, could see stretching before him the land of theinheritance, a land which his feet should never tread and whose fruithis hand should never touch, it was yet, perhaps, not so hard to turnround and die; for, as in a dream, he had seen the land: but for thethousands who could climb no Pisgah, who were to leave their boneswhitening in the desert, having even from afar never seen the trueoutline of the land; those who, on that long march, had not even bornethe Ark nor struck the timbrel, but carried only their small householdvessels and possessions, for these it was perhaps not so easy to liedown and perish in the desert, knowing only that far ahead somewhere, lay a Land of Promise. Nevertheless, it was by the slow and sometimeswavering march of such as these, that the land was reached by the peopleat last. 

For her, whose insight enables her to see, through the distance, thoselarge beatitudes towards which the struggles and suffering of the womenof today may tend; who sees beyond the present, though in a future whichshe knows she will never enter, an enlarged and strengthened womanhoodbearing forward with it a strengthened and expanded race, it is not sohard to renounce and labour with unshaken purpose: but for thosewho have not that view, and struggle on, animated at most by a vagueconsciousness that somewhere ahead lies a large end, towards which theirefforts tend; who labour year after year at some poor little gargoyle ofa Franchise Bill, or the shaping of some rough little foundation-stoneof reform in education, or dress a stone (which perhaps never quite fitsthe spot it was intended for, and has to be thrown aside!); or whocarve away all their lives to produce a corbel of some reform in sexualrelations, in the end to find it break under the chisel; who, out ofmany failures attain, perhaps, to no success, or but to one, and thatso 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 labour without growingweary. Nevertheless, it is through the labours of these myriad toilers, each working in her own minute sphere, with her own small outlook, andout of endless failures and miscarriages, that at last the enwidenedand beautified relations of woman to life must rise, if they are ever tocome. 

When a starfish lies on the ground at the bottom of a sloping rock ithas to climb, it seems to the onlooker as though there were nothingwhich 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 millionfine tentacles; impulses of will from the central nerve radiatethroughout the whole body, and each tiny fibre, fine as a hair, slowlyextends itself, and seizes on the minute particle of rough rock nearestto it; now a small tentacle slips its hold, and then it holds firmly, and then slowly and slowly the whole inert mass rises to the top. 

It is often said of those who lead in this attempt at the readaptionof woman's relation to life, that they are "New Women"; and they areat times spoken of as though they were a something portentous andunheard-of in the order of human life. 

But, the truth is, we are not new. We who lead in this movement todayare of that old, old Teutonic womanhood, which twenty centuries agoploughed its march through European forests and morasses beside its malecompanion; which marched with the Cimbri to Italy, and with the Franksacross the Rhine, with the Varagians into Russia, and the Alamani intoSwitzerland; which peopled Scandinavia, and penetrated to Britain; whosepriestesses had their shrines in German forests, and gave out the oraclefor peace or war. We have in us the blood of a womanhood that was neverbought and never sold; that wore no veil, and had no foot bound; whoserealised ideal of marriage was sexual companionship and an equality induty and labour; who stood side by side with the males they loved inpeace or war, and whose children, when they had borne them, suckedmanhood from their breasts, and even through their foetal existenceheard a brave heart beat above them. We are women of a breed whoseracial ideal was no Helen of Troy, passed passively from male handto male hand, as men pass gold or lead; but that Brynhild whom Segurdfound, clad in helm and byrne, the warrior maid, who gave him counsel"the deepest that ever yet was given to living man, " and "wrought on himto the performing of great deeds;" who, when he died, raised high thefuneral pyre and lay down on it beside him, crying, "Nor shall the doorswing to at the heel of him as I go in beside him!" We are of a raceof women that of old knew no fear, and feared no death, and lived greatlives and hoped great hopes; and if today some of us have fallen on eviland degenerate times, there moves in us yet the throb of the old blood. 

If it be today on no physical battlefield that we stand beside our men, and on no march through no external forest or morass that we have tolead; 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 ofthe old, free Northern woman which makes the world today. Though thebattlefield be now for us all, in the laboratory or the workshop, in theforum or the study, in the assembly and in the mart and the politicalarena, with the pen and not the sword, of the head and not the arm, westill stand side by side with the men we love, "to dare with them inwar and to suffer with them in peace, " as the Roman wrote of our oldNorthern womanhood. 

Those women, of whom the old writers tell us, who, barefooted andwhite robed, led their Northern hosts on that long march to Italy, wereanimated by the thought that they led their people to a land of warmersunshine and richer fruitage; we, today, believe we have caught sightof a land bathed in a nobler than any material sunlight, with a fruitagericher than any which the senses only can grasp: and behind us, webelieve there follows a longer train than any composed of our own raceand people; the sound of the tread we hear behind us is that of allearth's women, bearing within them the entire race. The footpath, yethardly perceptible, which we tread down today, will, we believe, belife's broadest and straightest road, along which the children of menwill pass to a higher co-ordination and harmony. The banner whichwe unfurl today is not new: it is the standard of the old, free, monogamous, labouring woman, which, twenty hundred years ago, floatedover the forests of Europe. We shall bear it on, each generation as itfalls passing it into the hand of that which follows, till we plant itso high that all nations of the world shall see it; till the women ofthe humblest human races shall be gathered beneath its folds, and nochild enter life that was not born within its shade. 

We are not new! If you would understand us, go back two thousandyears, and study our descent; our breed is our explanation. We are thedaughters of our fathers as well as of our mothers. In our dreams westill hear the clash of the shields of our forefathers as they struckthem together before battle and raised the shout of "Freedom!" In ourdreams it is with us still, and when we wake it breaks from our ownlips! We are the daughters of those men. 

But, it may be said, "Are there not women among you who would use theshibboleth, of freedom and labour, merely as a means for opening adoor to a greater and more highly flavoured self-indulgence, to a morelucrative and enjoyable parasitism? Are there not women who, under theguise of 'work, ' are seeking only increased means of sensuous pleasureand self-indulgence; to whom intellectual training and the opening tonew fields of labour side by side with man, mean merely new means ofself-advertisement and parasitic success?" We answer: There may besuch, truly; among us--but not of us! This at least is true, that we, ourselves, are seldom deceived by them; the sheep generally recognisethe wolf however carefully fitted the sheepskin under which he hides, though the onlookers may not; and though not always be able to drive himfrom the flock! The outer world may be misled; we, who stand shoulder toshoulder with them, know them; they are not many; neither are theynew. They are one of the oldest survivals, and among the most primitiverelics in the race. They are as old as Loki among the gods, as Luciferamong the Sons of the Morning, as the serpent in the Garden of Eden, aspain and dislocation in the web of human life. 

Such women are as old as that first primitive woman who, when she wentwith her fellows to gather wood for the common household, put grass inthe centre 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 hisshield in battle, and yet, when it was over, gathered with the victorsto share the spoils, as old as cowardice and lust in the human andanimal world; only to cease from being when, perhaps, an enlarged andexpanded 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 oneither side. To lookers on, they may appear soldiers; but the soldierknows who they are. At the Judean supper there was one Master, and tothe onlooker there may have seemed twelve apostles; in truth only twelvewere of the company, and one was not of it. There has always been thisthirteenth figure at every sacramental gathering, since the world began, wherever the upholders of a great cause have broken spiritual bread; butit may be questioned whether in any instance this thirteenth figurehas been able to destroy, or even vitally to retard, any great humanmovement. Judas could hang his Master by a kiss; but he could notsilence the voice which for a thousand years rang out of that Judeangrave. Again and again, in social, political, and intellectualmovements, the betrayer betrays;--and the cause marches on over the bodyof the man. 

There are women, as there are men, whose political, social, intellectual, or philanthropic labours are put on, as the harlot putson paint, and for the same purpose: but they can no more retard theprogress of the great bulk of vital and sincere womanhood, than thedriftwood on the surface of a mighty river can ultimately prevent itswaters from reaching the sea. 

Chapter IV. Woman and War. 

But it may also be said, "Granting fully that you are right, that, aswoman's old fields of labour slip from her, she must grasp the new, ormust become wholly dependent on her sexual function alone, all the otherelements of human nature in her becoming atrophied and arrested throughlack 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 humanlabour tends to become more and more intellectual and less and lesspurely mechanical, as perfected machinery takes the place of crude humanexertion; and that therefore if woman is to be saved from degenerationand parasitism, and the body of humanity from arrest, she must receive atraining which will cultivate all the intellectual and all the physicalfaculties with which she is endowed, and be allowed freely to employthem; nevertheless, would it not be possible, and perhaps be well, thata dividing line of some kind should be drawn between the occupationsof men and of women? Would it not, for example, be possible thatwoman should retain agriculture, textile manufacture, trade, domesticmanagement, the education of youth, and medicine, in addition tochild-bearing, as her exclusive fields of toil; while, to the male, should be left the study of abstract science, law and war, andstatecraft; as of old, man took war and the chase, and woman absorbedthe further labours of life? Why should there not be again a fair andeven division in the field of social labour?"

Superficially, this suggestion appears rational, having at least thisto recommend it, that it appears to harmonise with the course of humanevolution in the past; but closely examined, it will, we think, be foundto have no practical or scientific basis, and to be out of harmony withthe conditions of modern life. In ancient and primitive societies, themere larger size and muscular strength of man, and woman's incessantphysical activity in child-bearing and suckling and rearing the young, made almost inevitable a certain sexual division of labour in almostall countries, save perhaps in ancient Egypt. (The division of labourbetween the sexes in Ancient Egypt and other exceptional countries, isa matter of much interest, which cannot here be entered on. ) Womannaturally took the heavy agricultural and domestic labours, which wereyet more consistent with the continual dependence of infant life onher own, than those of man in war and the chase. There was nothingartificial in such a division; it threw the heaviest burden of the mostwearying and unexciting forms of social labour on woman, but under itboth sexes laboured in a manner essential to the existence of society, and each transmitted to the other, through inheritance, the fruit of itsslowly expanding and always exerted powers; and the race progressed. 

Individual women might sometimes, and even often, become the warriorchief of a tribe; the King of Ashantee might train his terrible regimentof females; and men might now and again plant and weave for theirchildren: but in the main, and in most societies, the division oflabour was just, natural, beneficial; and it was inevitable that such adivision should take place. Were today a band of civilised men, women, and infants thrown down absolutely naked and defenceless in some desert, and cut off hopelessly from all external civilised life, undoubtedlyvery much the old division of labour would, at least for a time, reassert itself; men would look about for stones and sticks with whichto make weapons to repel wild beasts and enemies, and would go a-huntingmeat and fighting savage enemies and tend the beasts when tamed: (Theyoung captured animals would probably be tamed and reared by the women. )women would suckle their children, cook the meat men brought, buildshelters, look for roots and if possible cultivate them; there certainlywould be no parasite in the society; the woman who refused to labour forher offspring, and the man who refused to hunt or defend society, wouldnot be supported by their fellows, would soon be extinguished by want. As wild beasts were extinguished and others tamed and the materials forwar improved, fewer men would be needed for hunting and war; then theywould remain at home and aid in building and planting; many women wouldretire into the house to perfect domestic toil and handicrafts, and ona small scale the common ancient evolution of society would probablypractically repeat itself. But for the present, we see no such naturaland spontaneous division of labour based on natural sexual distinctionsin the new fields of intellectual or delicately skilled manual labour, which are taking the place of the old. 

It is possible, though at present there is nothing to give indication ofsuch a fact, and it seems highly improbable, that, in some subtlemanner now incomprehensible, there might tend to be a subtle correlationbetween that condition of the brain and nervous system which accompaniesability in the direction of certain modern forms of mental, sociallabour, and the particular form of reproductive function possessed byan individual. It may be that, inexplicable as it seems, there mayultimately be found to be some connection between that condition of thebrain and nervous system which fits the individual for the study of thehigher mathematics, let us say, and the nature of their sex attributes. The mere fact that, of the handful of women who, up to the present, have received training and been allowed to devote themselves to abstractstudy, several have excelled in the higher mathematics, proves ofnecessity no pre-eminent tendency on the part of the female sex inthe direction of mathematics, as compared to labour in the fields ofstatesmanship, administration, or law; as into these fields there hasbeen practically no admittance for women. It is sometimes stated, that as several women of genius in modern times have sought to findexpression for their creative powers in the art of fiction, there mustbe some inherent connection in the human brain between the ovarian sexfunction and the art of fiction. The fact is, that modern fiction beingmerely a description of human life in any of its phases, and beingthe only art that can be exercised without special training or specialappliances, and produced in the moments stolen from the multifarious, brain-destroying occupations which fill the average woman's life, theyhave been driven to find this outlet for their powers as the only onepresenting itself. How far otherwise might have been the directions inwhich their genius would naturally have expressed itself can be knownonly partially even to the women themselves; what the world has lost bythat compulsory expression of genius, in a form which may not have beenits most natural form of expression, or only one of its forms, no onecan ever know. Even in the little third-rate novelist whose works cumberthe ground, we see often a pathetic figure, when we recognise thatbeneath that failure in a complex and difficult art, may lie burieda sound legislator, an able architect, an original scientificinvestigator, or a good judge. Scientifically speaking, it is asunproven that there is any organic relation between the brain of thefemale and the production of art in the form of fiction, as that thereis an organic relation between the hand of woman and a typewritingmachine. Both the creative writer and the typist, in their respectivespheres, are merely finding outlets for their powers in the direction ofleast resistance. The tendency of women at the present day to undertakecertain forms of labour, proves only that in the crabbed, walled-in, and bound conditions surrounding woman at the present day, these are thelines along which action is most possible to her. 

It may possibly be that in future ages, when the male and female formshave been placed in like intellectual conditions, with like stimuli, like training, and like rewards, that some aptitudes may be foundrunning parallel with the line of sex function when humanity is viewedas a whole. It may possibly be that, when the historian of the futurelooks back over the history of the intellectually freed and activesexes for countless generations, that a decided preference of the femaleintellect for mathematics, engineering, or statecraft may be made clear;and that a like marked inclination in the male to excel in acting, music, or astronomy may by careful and large comparison be shown. But, for the present, we have no adequate scientific data from which to drawany conclusion, and any attempt to divide the occupations in which maleand female intellects and wills should be employed, must be to attempta purely artificial and arbitrary division: a division not more rationaland scientific than an attempt to determine by the colour of his eyesand the shape and strength of his legs, whether a lad should be anastronomer or an engraver. Those physical differences among mankindwhich divide races and nations--not merely those differences, enormouslygreater as they are generally, than any physical differences betweenmale and female of the same race, which divide the Jew and the Swede, the Japanese and the Englishman, but even those subtle physicaldifferences which divide closely allied races such as the English andGerman--often appear to be allied with certain subtle differences inintellectual aptitudes. Yet even with regard to these differences, itis almost impossible to determine scientifically in how far they are theresult of national traditions, environment, and education, and in howfar the result of real differences in organic conformation. (In thinkingof physical sex differences, the civilised man of modern times hasalways to guard himself against being unconsciously misled by the veryexaggerated external sex differences which our unnatural method of sexclothing and dressing the hair produces. The unclothed and natural humanmale and female bodies are not more divided from each other than thoseof the lion and lioness. Our remote Saxon ancestors, with their great, almost naked, white bodies and flowing hair worn long by both sexes, were but little distinguished from each other; while among their moderndescendants the short hair, darkly clothed, manifestly two-legged malediffers absolutely from the usually long-haired, colour bedizened, much beskirted female. Were the structural differences between male andfemale really one half as marked as the artificial visual differences, they would be greater than those dividing, not merely any species of manfrom another, but as great as those which divide orders in the animalworld. Only a mind exceedingly alert and analytical can fail ultimatelyto be misled by habitual visual misrepresentation. There is not, probably, one man or woman in twenty thousand who is not powerfullyinfluenced in modern life in their conception of the differences, physical and intellectual, dividing the human male and female, by thegrotesque exaggerations of modern attire and artificial manners. )

No study of the mere physical differences between individuals ofdifferent races would have enabled us to arrive at any knowledge oftheir mental aptitude; nor does the fact that certain individuals of agiven human variety have certain aptitudes form a rational ground forcompelling all individuals of that variety to undertake a certain formof labour. 

No analysis, however subtle, of the physical conformation of the Jewcould have suggested a priori, and still less could have proved, apartfrom ages of practical experience, that, running parallel with anyphysical characteristics which may distinguish him from his fellows, wasan innate and unique intellectual gift in the direction of religion. Thefact that, during three thousand years, from Moses to Isaiah, throughJesus and Paul on to Spinoza, the Jewish race has produced men whohave given half the world its religious faith and impetus, proves that, somewhere and somehow, whether connected organically with that physicalorganisation that marks the Jew, or as the result of his traditions andtraining, there does go this gift in the matter of religion. Yet, onthe other hand, we find millions of Jews who are totally and markedlydeficient in it, and to base any practical legislation for theindividual even on this proven intellectual aptitude of the race as awhole would be manifestly as ridiculous as abortive. Yet more markedly, with the German--no consideration of his physical peculiarities, thoughit proceeded to the subtlest analysis of nerve, bone, and muscle, couldin the present stage of our knowledge have proved to us what generationsof experience appear to have proved, that, with that organisation whichconstitutes the German, goes an unique aptitude for music. There isalways the possibility of mistaking the result of training and externalcircumstance for inherent tendency, but when we consider the passion formusic which the German has shown, and when we consider that the greatestmusicians the world has seen, from Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart toWagner, have been of that race, it appears highly probable that such acorrelation between the German organisation and the intellectual gift ofmusic does exist. Similar intellectual peculiarities seem to be connotedby the external differences which mark off other races from each other. Nevertheless, were persons of all of these nationalities gathered in onecolony, any attempt to legislate for their restriction to certain formsof intellectual labour on the ground of their apparently proved nationalaptitudes or disabilities, would be regarded as insane. To insist thatall Jews, and none but Jews, should lead and instruct in religiousmatters; that all Englishmen, and none but Englishmen, should engage intrade; that each German should make his living by music, and none buta German allowed to practise it, would drive to despair the unfortunateindividual Englishman, whose most marked deficiency might be in thedirection of finance and bartering trade power; the Jew, whose religiousinstincts might be entirely rudimentary; or the German, who could notdistinguish one note from another; and the society as a whole would bean irremediable loser, in one of the heaviest of all forms of socialloss--the loss of the full use of the highest capacities of all itsmembers. 

It may be that with sexes as with races, the subtlest physicaldifference between them may have their fine mental correlatives; but noabstract consideration of the human body in relation to its functionsof sex can, in the present state of our knowledge, show us whatintellectual capacities tend to vary with sexual structure, and nothingin the present or past condition of male and female give us morethan the very faintest possible indication of the relation of theirintellectual aptitudes and their sexual functions. And even were itproved by centuries of experiment that with the possession of theuterine function of sex tends to go exceptional intellectual capacityin the direction of mathematics rather than natural history, or aninclination for statecraft rather than for mechanical invention; were itproved that, generally speaking and as a whole, out of twenty thousandwomen devoting themselves to law and twenty thousand to medicine, theytended to achieve relatively more in the field of law than ofmedicine, there would yet be no possible healthy or rational groundfor restricting the activities of the individual female to that linein which the average female appeared rather more frequently to excel. (Minds not keenly analytical are always apt to mistake mere correlationof appearance with causative sequence. We have heard it gravely assertedthat between potatoes, pigs, mud cabins and Irishmen there was anorganic connection: but we who have lived in Colonies, know that withintwo generations the pure-bred descendant of the mud cabiner becomesoften the successful politician, wealthy financier, or great judge; andshows no more predilection for potatoes, pigs, and mud cabins than menof any other race. )

That even one individual in a society should be debarred fromundertaking that form of social toil for which it is most fitted, makesan unnecessary deficit in the general social assets. That one maleFroebel should be prohibited or hampered in his labour as an educator ofinfancy, on the ground that infantile instruction was the field ofthe female; that one female with gifts in the direction of stateadministration, should be compelled to instruct an infants' school, perhaps without the slightest gift for so doing, is a running to wasteof social life-blood. 

Free trade in labour and equality of training, intellectual or physical, is essential if the organic aptitudes of a sex or class are to bedetermined. And our demand today is that natural conditions, inexorably, but beneficently, may determine the labours of each individual, and notartificial restrictions. 

As there is no need to legislate that Hindus, being generally supposedto have a natural incapacity for field sports, shall not betakethemselves to them--for, if they have no capacity, they will fail; and, as in spite of the Hindus' supposed general incapacity for sport, it ispossible for an individual Hindu to become the noted batsman of his age;so, also, there is no need to legislate that women should be restrictedin her choice of fields of labour; for the organic incapacity of theindividual, if it exist, will legislate far more powerfully than anyartificial, legal, or social obstruction can do; and it may be that theone individual in ten thousand who selects a field not generally soughtby his fellows will enrich humanity by the result of an especial genius. Allowing all to start from the one point in the world of intellectualculture and labour, 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 intothe water: if it swims, well; if it sinks, well; but do not tie arope round its throat and weight it with a brick, and then assert itsincapacity to keep afloat. 

For the present our cry is, "We take all labour for our province!"

From the judge's seat to the legislator's chair; from the statesman'scloset to the merchant's office; from the chemist's laboratory to theastronomer's tower, there is no post or form of toil for which it is notour intention to attempt to fit ourselves; and there is no closed doorwe do not intend to force open; and there is no fruit in the garden ofknowledge it is not our determination to eat. Acting in us, and throughus, nature we know will mercilessly expose to us our deficiencies inthe field of human toil, and reveal to us our powers. And, for today, wetake all labour for our province!

But, it may then be said: "What of war, that struggle of the humancreature to attain its ends by physical force and at the price of thelife of others: will you take part in that also?" We reply: Yes; moreparticularly in that field we intend to play our part. We have alwaysborne part of the weight of war, and the major part. It is not merelythat in primitive times we suffered from the destruction of the fieldswe tilled and the houses we built; or that in later times as domesticlabourers and producers, though unwaged, we, in taxes and material lossand additional labour, paid as much as our males towards the cost ofwar; nor is it that in a comparatively insignificant manner, asnurses of the wounded in modern times, or now and again as warriorchieftainesses and leaders in primitive and other societies, we haveborne our part; nor is it even because the spirit of resolution in itswomen, and their willingness to endure, has in all ages again and againlargely determined the fate of a race that goes to war, that we demandour controlling right where war is concerned. Our relation to war isfar more intimate, personal, and indissoluble than this. Men have madeboomerangs, bows, swords, or guns with which to destroy one another; wehave made the men who destroyed and were destroyed! We have in all agesproduced, at an enormous cost, the primal munition of war, without whichno other would exist. There is no battlefield on earth, nor ever hasbeen, howsoever covered with slain, which is has not cost the women ofthe race more in actual bloodshed and anguish to supply, then it hascost 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 notmerely lost actually more blood, and gone through a more acute anguishand weariness, in the long months of bearing and in the final agony ofchildbirth, than has been experienced by the men who cover it; but, inthe long months and years of rearing that follow, the women of the racego through a long, patiently endured strain which no knapsacked soldieron his longest march has ever more than equalled; while, even in thematter of death, in all civilised societies, the probability that theaverage woman will die in childbirth is immeasurably greater than theprobability that the average male will die in battle. 

There is, perhaps, no woman, whether she have borne children, orbe merely potentially a child-bearer, who could look down upon abattlefield covered with slain, but the thought would rise in her, "Somany mothers' sons! So many bodies brought into the world to lie there!So many months of weariness and pain while bones and muscles were shapedwithin; so many hours of anguish and struggle that breath might be; somany baby mouths drawing life at woman's breasts;--all this, that menmight lie with glazed eyeballs, and swollen bodies, and fixed, blue, unclosed mouths, and great limbs tossed--this, that an acre of groundmight be manured with human flesh, that next year's grass or poppies orkaroo bushes may spring up greener and redder, where they have lain, orthat the sand of a plain may have a glint of white bones!" And we cry, "Without an inexorable cause, this should not be!" No woman who is awoman says of a human body, "It is nothing!"

On that day, when the woman takes her place beside the man in thegovernance and arrangement of external affairs of her race will alsobe that day that heralds the death of war as a means of arranging humandifferences. No tinsel of trumpets and flags will ultimately seducewomen into the insanity of recklessly destroying life, or gild thewilful taking of life with any other name than that of murder, whetherit 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 inthe human creature a deeper moral insight, or a loftier type of socialinstinct than that which accompanies the paternal. Men have in all agesled as nobly as women in many paths of heroic virtue, and toward thehigher social sympathies; in certain ages, being freer and more widelycultured, they have led further and better. The fact that woman hasno inherent all-round moral superiority over her male companion, ornaturally on all points any higher social instinct, is perhaps mostclearly exemplified by one curious very small fact: the two termssignifying intimate human relationships which in almost all humanlanguages bear the most sinister and antisocial significance are bothterms which have as their root the term "mother, " and denote femininerelationships--the words "mother-in-law" and "step-mother. "

In general humanity, in the sense of social solidarity, and inmagnanimity, the male has continually proved himself at least the equalof the female. 

Nor will women shrink from war because they lack courage. Earth's womenof every generation have faced suffering and death with an equanimitythat no soldier on a battlefield has ever surpassed and few haveequalled; and where war has been to preserve life, or land, or freedom, unparasitised and labouring women have in all ages known how to bear anactive part, and die. 

Nor will woman's influence militate against war because in the futurewoman will not be able physically to bear her part in it. The smallersize of her muscle, which would severely have disadvantaged her whenwar was conducted with a battle-axe or sword and hand to hand, would nowlittle or at all affect her. If intent on training for war, she mightacquire the skill for guiding a Maxim or shooting down a foe with aLee-Metford at four thousand yards as ably as any male; and undoubtedly, it has not been only the peasant girl of France, who has carried latentand hid within her person the gifts that make the supreme general. Ifour European nations should continue in their present semi-civilisedcondition, which makes war possible, for a few generations longer, itis highly probable that as financiers, as managers of the commissariatdepartment, as inspectors of provisions and clothing for the army, womenwill play a very leading part; and that the nation which is the first toemploy its women so may be placed at a vast advantage over its fellowsin 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 warwhen her voice is fully, finally, and clearly heard in the governanceof states--it is because, on this one point, and on this point almostalone, the knowledge of woman, simply as woman, is superior to that ofman; she knows the history of human flesh; she knows its cost; hedoes not. (It is noteworthy that even Catharine of Russia, a ruler andstatesman of a virile and uncompromising type, and not usually troubledwith moral scruples, yet refused with indignation the offer of Frederickof Prussia to pay her heavily for a small number of Russian recruits inan age when the hiring out of soldiers was common among the sovereignsof Europe. )

In a besieged city, it might well happen that men in the streetsmight seize upon statues and marble carvings from public buildings andgalleries and hurl them in to stop the breaches made in their rampartsby the enemy, unconsideringly and merely because they came first tohand, not valuing them more than had they been paving-stones. But oneman could not do this--the sculptor! He, who, though there might be nowork of his own chisel among them, yet knew what each of these works ofart had cost, knew by experience the long years of struggle and studyand the infinitude of toil which had gone to the shaping of even onelimb, to the carving of even one perfected outline, he could never souse them without thought or care. Instinctively he would seek to throwin household goods, even gold and silver, all the city held, before hesacrificed its works of art!

Men's bodies are our woman's works of art. Given to us power of control, we will never carelessly throw them in to fill up the gaps in humanrelationships made by international ambitions and greeds. The thoughtwould never come to us as woman, "Cast in men's bodies; settle the thingso!" Arbitration and compensation would as naturally occur to heras cheaper and simpler methods of bridging the gaps in nationalrelationships, as to the sculptor it would occur to throw in anythingrather than statuary, though he might be driven to that at last!

This is one of those phases of human life, not very numerous, but veryimportant, towards which the man as man, and the woman as woman, onthe mere ground of their different sexual function with regard toreproduction, stand, and must stand, at a somewhat differing angle. The physical creation of human life, which, in as far as the male isconcerned, consists in a few moments of physical pleasure; to the femalemust always signify months of pressure and physical endurance, crownedwith danger to life. To the male, the giving of life is a laugh; to thefemale, blood, anguish, and sometimes death. Here we touch one of thefew 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 beborne within them for months, given birth to in anguish, fed fromtheir breasts and reared with toil, if the numbers of the tribe and thestrength of the nation are to be maintained. In nations continually atwar, incessant and unbroken child-bearing is by war imposed on all womenif the state is to survive; and whenever war occurs, if numbers are tobe maintained, there must be an increased child-bearing and rearing. This throws upon woman as woman a war tax, compared with which all thatthe male expends in military preparations is comparatively light. 

The relations of the female towards the production of human lifeinfluences undoubtedly even her relation towards animal and all life. "It is a fine day, let us go out and kill something!" cries the typicalmale of certain races, instinctively. "There is a living thing, it willdie if it is not cared for, " says the average woman, almost equallyinstinctively. It is true, that the woman will sacrifice as mercilessly, as cruelly, the life of a hated rival or an enemy, as any male; but shealways knows what she is doing, and the value of the life she takes!There is no light-hearted, careless enjoyment in the sacrifice of lifeto the normal woman; her instinct, instructed by practical experience, steps in to prevent it. She always knows what life costs; and that it ismore easy to destroy than create it. 

It is also true, that, from the loftiest standpoint, the condemnationof war which has arisen in the advancing human spirit, is in no senserelated to any particular form of sex function. The man and the womanalike, who with Isaiah on the hills of Palestine, or the Indian Buddhaunder his bo-tree, have seen the essential unity of all sentientlife; and who therefore see in war but a symptom of that crudedisco-ordination of life on earth, not yet at one with itself, whichaffects humanity in these early stages of its growth: and who arecompelled to regard as the ultimate goal of the race, though yet perhapsfar distant across the ridges of innumerable coming ages, that harmonybetween all forms of conscious life, metaphorically prefigured by theancient Hebrew, when he cried, "The wolf shall dwell with the lamb; andthe leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lionand the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them!"--to thatindividual, whether man or woman, who has reached this standpoint, thereis no need for enlightenment from the instincts of the child-bearers ofsociety as such; their condemnation of war, rising not so much from thefact that it is a wasteful destruction of human flesh, as that it is anindication of the non-existence of that co-ordination, the harmony whichis summed up in the cry, "My little children, love one another. "

But for the vast bulk of humanity, probably for generations to come, theinstinctive antagonism of the human child-bearer to reckless destructionof that which she has at so much cost produced, will be necessary toeducate the race to any clear conception of the bestiality and insanityof war. 

War will pass when intellectual culture and activity have made possibleto the female an equal share in the control and governance of modernnational life; it will probably not pass away much sooner; itsextinction will not be delayed much longer. 

It is especially in the domain of war that we, the bearers of men'sbodies, who supply its most valuable munition, who, not amid the clamourand ardour of battle, but singly, and alone, with a three-in-the-morningcourage, shed our blood and face death that the battlefield may haveits food, a food more precious to us than our heart's blood; it is weespecially, who in the domain of war, have our word to say, a word noman can say for us. It is our intention to enter into the domain ofwar and to labour there till in the course of generations we haveextinguished it. 

If today we claim all labour for our province, yet more especially do weclaim those fields in which the difference in the reproductive functionbetween man and woman may place male and female at a slightly differentangle with regard to certain phases of human life. 

Chapter V. Sex Differences. 

If we examine the physical phenomenon of sex as it manifests itself inthe human creature, we find, in the first stages of the individual'sexistence, no difference discernible, by any means we have at present atour command, between those germs which are ultimately to become male orfemale. Later, in the foetal life, at birth, and through infancy thoughthe organs of sex serve to distinguish the male from the female, thereis in the general structure and working of the organism little ornothing to divide the sexes. 

Even when puberty is reached, with its enormous development of sexualand reproductive activity modifying those parts of the organismwith which it is concerned, and producing certain secondary sexualcharacteristics, there yet remains the major extent of the humanbody and of physical function little, or not at all, affected by sexmodification. The eye, the ear, the sense of touch, the general organsof nutrition and respiration and volition are in the main identical, and often differ far more in persons of the same sex than in those ofopposite sexes; and even on the dissecting-table the tissues of the maleand female are often wholly indistinguishable. 

It is when we consider the reproductive organs themselves and theirforms of activity, and such parts of the organism modified directlyin relation to them, that a real and important difference is foundto exist, radical though absolutely complemental. It is exactly as weapproach the reproductive functions that the male and female bodiesdiffer; exactly as we recede from them that they become more and moresimilar, and even absolutely identical. Taking the eye, perhaps the mosthighly developed, complex organ in the body, and, if of an organ theterm may be allowed, the most intellectual organ of sense, we find itremains the same in male and female in structure, in appearance, andin function throughout life; while the breast, closely connected withreproduction, though absolutely identical in both forms in infancy, assumes a widely different organisation when reproductive activity isactually concerned. 

When we turn to the psychic phase of human life an exactly analogousphenomenon presents itself. The intelligence, emotions, and desires ofthe human infant at birth differ not at all perceptibly, as its sex maybe male or female; and such psychic differences as appear to exist inlater childhood are undoubtedly very largely the result of artificialtraining, forcing on the appearance of psychic sexual divergencies longbefore they would tend spontaneously to appear; as where sports andoccupations are interdicted to young children on the ground of theirsupposed sexual unfitness; as when an infant female is forciblyprevented from climbing or shouting, and the infant male from amusinghimself with needle and thread or dolls. Even in the fully adult human, and in spite of differences of training, the psychic activities overa large extent of life appear to be absolutely identical. The male andfemale brains acquire languages, solve mathematical problems, and masterscientific detail in a manner wholly indistinguishable: as illustratedby the fact that in modern universities the papers sent in by male andfemale candidates are as a rule absolutely identical in type. Placed inlike external conditions, their tastes and emotions, over a vast part ofthe surface of life, are identical; and, in an immense number of thosecases where psychic sex differences appear to exist, subject to rigidanalysis they are found to be purely artificial creations, for, whenother races or classes are studied, they are found non-existent assexual characteristics; as when the female is supposed by ignorantpersons in modern European societies to have an inherent love for brightcolours and ornaments, not shared by the male; while experience of othersocieties and past social conditions prove that it is as often the malewho has been even more desirous of attiring himself in bright raimentand adorning himself with brilliant jewels; or as when, among certaintribes of savages, the use of tobacco is supposed to be a peculiarlyfemale prerogative, while, in some modern societies, it is supposedto have some relation to masculinity. (The savage male of todaywhen attired in his paint, feathers, cats' tails and necklaces is animmeasurably more ornamented and imposing figure than his female, evenwhen fully attired for a dance in beads and bangles: the Orientalmale has sometimes scarcely been able to walk under the weight of hisornaments; and the males of Europe a couple of centuries ago, with theirpowdered wigs, lace ruffles and cuffs, paste buckles, feathered cockedhats, and patches were quite as ridiculous in their excess of adornmentas the complementary females of their own day, or the most parasiticfemales of this. Both in the class and the individual, whether male orfemale, an intense love of dress and meretricious external adornment isalmost invariably the concomitant and outcome of parasitism. Were theparasite female class in our own societies today to pass away, Frenchfashions with their easeless and grotesque variations (shaped not foruse or beauty, but the attracting of attention) would die out. And theextent to which any woman today, not herself belonging to the parasiteclass and still labouring, attempts to follow afar off the fashions ofthe parasite, may be taken generally as an almost certain indicationof the ease with which she would accept parasitism were its conditionsoffered her. The tendency of the cultured and intellectually labouringwoman of today to adopt a more rational type of attire, less shaped toattract attention to the individual than to confer comfort and abstainfrom impeding activity, is often spoken of as an attempt on the partof woman slavishly to imitate man. What is really taking place is, thatlike causes are producing like effects on human creatures with commoncharacteristics. )

But there remain certain psychic differences in attitude, on the part ofmale and female as such, which are inherent and not artificial: and, in the psychic human world, it is exactly as we approach the sphereof sexual and reproductive activity, with those emotions and instinctsconnected directly with sex and the reproduction of the race, that adifference does appear. 

In the animal world all forms of psychic variations are found allyingthemselves now with the male sex form, and then with the female. In theinsect and fish worlds, where the female forms are generally largerand stronger than the male, the female is generally more pugnacious andpredatory than the male. Among birds-of-prey, where also the female formis larger and stronger than the male, the psychic differences seemvery small. Among eagles and other allied forms, which are strictlymonogamous, the affection of the female for the male is so great thatshe is said never to mate again if the male dies, and both watch overand care for the young with extreme solicitude. The ostrich male form, though perhaps larger than the female, shares with her the labour ofhatching the eggs, relieving the hen of her duty at a fixed hour daily:and his care for the young when hatched is as tender as hers. Amongsong-birds, in which the male and female forms are so alike as sometimesto be indistinguishable, and which are also monogamous, the male andfemale forms not only exhibit the same passionate affection for eachother (in the case of the South African cock-o-veet, they have oneanswering love-song between them; the male sounding two or three notesand the female completing it with two or three more), but they build thenest together and rear the young with an equal devotion. In the case ofthe little kapok bird of the Cape, a beautiful, white, fluffy roundnest is made by both out of the white down of a certain plant, andimmediately below the entrance to the cavity in which the little femalesits on the eggs is a small shelf or basket, in which the tiny male sitsto watch over and guard them. It is among certain orders of birds thatsex manifestations appear to assume their most harmonious and poeticalforms on earth. Among gallinaceous birds, on the other hand, where thecock is much larger and more pugnacious than the female, and which arepolygamous, the cock does not court the female by song, but seizes herby force, and shows little or no interest in his offspring, neithersharing in the brooding nor feeding the young; and even at times seizingany 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 always (the female whale, for instance, being larger than themale); the male also tends to be more pugnacious and less careful of theyoung; though to this rule also there are exceptions. In the case ofthe South African mierkat, for instance, the female is generally morecombative and more difficult to tame than the male; and it is themales who from the moment of birth watch over the young with the mostpassionate and tender solicitude, keeping them warm under their persons, carrying them to places of safety in their mouths, and feeding them tillfull grown; and this they do not only for their own young, but to anyyoung who may be brought in contact with them. We have known a malemierkat so assiduous in feeding young that were quite unrelated tohimself, taking to them every morsel of food given him, that we havebeen compelled to shut him up in a room alone when feeding him, toprevent his starving himself to death: the male mierkat thus exhibitingexactly those psychic qualities which are generally regarded aspeculiarly feminine; the females, on the other hand, being far morepugnacious towards each other than are the males. 

Among mammals generally, except the tendency to greater pugnacity shownby the male towards other males, and the greater solicitude for theyoung shown generally by the female form, but not always; the psychicdifferences between the two sex forms are not great. Between the maleand female pointer as puppies, there is as little difference in mentalactivity as in physical; and even when adult, on the hunting ground, that great non-sexual field in which their highest mental and physicalactivities are displayed, there is little or nothing which distinguishesmaterially between the male and female; in method, manner, and quicknessthey are alike; in devotion to man, they are psychically identical. (Itis often said the female dog is more intelligent than the male; but Iam almost inclined to doubt this, after long and close study of bothforms. ) It is at the moment when the reproductive element comes fullyinto play that similarity and identity cease. In the intensity ofinitial sex instinct they are alike; the female will leap from windows, climb walls, and almost endanger her life to reach the male who waitsfor her, as readily as he will to gain her. It is when the bitch lieswith her six young drawing life from her breast, and gazing with wistfuland anguished solicitude at every hand stretched out to touch them, aworld of emotion concentrated on the sightless creatures, and a wholebody of new mental aptitudes brought into play in caring for them, it isthen that between her and the male who begot them, but cares nothing forthem, there does rise a psychic difference that is real and wide. Alikein the sports of puppydom and the non-sexual activities of adult age;alike in the possession of the initial sexual instinct which draws thesex to the sex, the moment active sexual reproduction is concerned, there is opened to the female a certain world of sensations andexperiences, from which her male companion is for ever excluded. 

So also is our human world: alike in the sports, and joys, and sorrowsof infancy; alike in the non-sexual labours of life; alike even in thepossession of that initial instinct which draws sex to sex, and which, differing slightly in its forms of manifestation is of correspondingintensity in both; the moment actual reproduction begins to take place, the man and the woman enter spheres of sensation, perception, emotion, desire, and knowledge which are not, and cannot be, absolutelyidentical. Between the man who, in an instant of light-heartedenjoyment, begets the infant (who may even beget it in a state ofhalf-drunken unconsciousness, and may easily know nothing of itsexistence for months or years after it is born, or never at all; and whounder no circumstances can have any direct sensational knowledge of itsrelation to himself) and the woman who bears it continuously for monthswithin her body, and who gives birth to it in pain, and who, if it is tolive, is compelled, or was in primitive times, to nourish it formonths from the blood of her own being--between these, there exists ofnecessity, towards a limited but all-important body of human interestsand phenomena, a certain distinct psychic attitude. At this one point, the two great halves of humanity stand confronting certain greatelements in human existence, from angles that are not identical. Fromthe moment the universal initial attraction of sex to sex becomesincarnate in the first concrete sexual act till the developed offspringattains maturity, no step in the reproductive journey, or in theirrelation to their offspring, has been quite identical for the man andthe woman. And this divergence of experiences in human relations mustreact on their attitude towards that particular body of human concernswhich directly is connected with the sexual reproduction of the race;and, it is exactly in these fields of human activity, where sex as sexis concerned, that woman as woman has a part to play which she cannotresign into the hands of others. 

It may be truly said that in the laboratory, the designing-room, thefactory, the mart, the mathematician's study, and in all fields ofpurely abstract or impersonal labour, while the entrance of woman wouldadd to the net result of human labour in those fields, and though agrave injustice is done to the individual woman excluded from perhapsthe only field she is fitted to excel in, that yet woman as womanhas probably little or nothing to contribute in those fields that isradically distinct from that which man might supply; there would be adifference in quantity but probably none in kind, in the work done forthe race. 

But in those spheres of social activity, dealing especially withcertain relations between human creatures because of their diverse ifcomplementary relation to the production of human life, the sexes assexes have often each a part to play which the other cannot play forthem; have each a knowledge gained from phases of human experience, which the other cannot supply; here woman as woman has somethingradically distinct to contribute to the sum-total of human knowledge, and her activity is of importance, not merely individually, butcollectively, and as a class. 

That demand, which today in all democratic self-governing countries isbeing made by women, to be accorded their share in the electoral, andultimately in the legislative and executive duties of government, isbased on two grounds: the wider, and more important, that they findnothing in the nature of their sex-function which exonerates them, as human beings, from their obligation to take part in the labours ofguidance and government in their state: the narrower, but yet importantground, that, in as far as in one direction, i. E. , in the special formof their sex function takes, they do differ from the male, they, in sofar, form a class and are bound to represent the interests of, and togive the state the benefit of, the insight of their class, in certaindirections. 

Those persons who imagine that the balance of great political partiesin almost any society would be seriously changed by the admission of itswomen in public functions are undoubtedly wholly wrong. The fundamentaldivision of humans into those inclined to hold by the past and defendwhatever is, and those hopeful of the future and inclined to introducechange, would probably be found to exist in much the same proportionwere the males or the females of any given society compared: and themales and females of each class will in the main share the faults, thevirtues, and the prejudices of their class. The individuals may lose bybeing excluded on the ground of sex from a share of public labour, andby being robbed of a portion of their lawful individual weight in theirown society; and the society as a whole may lose by having a smallernumber to select its chosen labourers from; yet, undoubtedly, on themass of social, political, and international questions, the conclusionsarrived at by one sex would be exactly those arrived at by the other. 

Were a body of humans elected to adjudicate upon Greek accents, or topass a decision on the relative fineness of woollens and linens, theform of sex of the persons composing it would probably have no bearingon the result; there is no rational ground for supposing that, on aquestion of Greek accents or the thickness of cloths, equally instructedmales and females would differ. Here sex plays no part. The experienceand instructedness of the individuals would tell: their sexualattributes would be indifferent. 

But there are points, comparatively small, even very small, in number, yet of vital importance to human life, in which sex does play a part. 

It is not a matter of indifference whether the body called to adjudicateupon the questions, whether the temporary sale of the female body forsexual purposes shall or shall not be a form of traffic encouragedand recognised by the state; or whether one law shall exist for thelicentious human female and another for the licentious human male;whether the claim of the female to the offspring she bears shall orshall not equal that of the male who begets it; whether an act ofinfidelity on the part of the male shall or shall not terminate thecontract which binds his female companion to him, as completely as anact of infidelity on her part would terminate her claim on him; it isnot a matter of indifference whether a body elected to adjudicate onsuch points as these consists of males solely, or females solely, or ofboth combined. As it consists of one, or the other, or of both, so notonly will the answers vary, but, in some cases, will they be completelydiverse. Here we come into that very narrow, but important, region, where sex as sex manifestly plays its part; where the male as maleand the female as female have each their body of perceptions andexperiences, which they do not hold in common; here one sex cannotadequately represent the other. It is here that each sexual part hassomething radically distinct to contribute to the wisdom of the race. 

We, today, take all labour for our province! We seek to enter thenon-sexual fields of intellectual or physical toil, because we areunable to see today, with regard to them, any dividing wall raised bysex which excludes us from them. We are yet equally determined to enterthose in which sex difference does play its part, because it is herethat woman, the bearer of the race, must stand side by side with man, the begetter; if a completed human wisdom, an insight that misses noaspect of human life, and an activity that is in harmony with the entireknowledge and the entire instinct of the entire human race, is to exist. It is here that the man cannot act for the woman nor the woman for theman; but both must interact. It is here that each sexual half of therace, so closely and indistinguishably blended elsewhere, has its owndistinct contribution to make to the sum total of human knowledge andhuman wisdom. Neither is the woman without the man, nor the man withoutthe woman, the completed human intelligence. 

Therefore;--We claim, today, all labour for our province! Those largefields in which it would appear sex plays no part, and equally thosesmaller in which it plays a part. 

Chapter VI. Certain Objections. 

It has been stated sometimes, though more often implicitly than in anydirect or logical form, (this statement being one it is not easy to makedefinitely without its reducing itself to nullity!) that woman shouldseek no fields of labour in the new world of social conditions thatis arising about us, as she has still her function as child-bearer: alabour which, by her own showing, is arduous and dangerous, though shemay love it as a soldier loves his battlefield; and that woman shouldperform her sex functions only, allowing man or the state to supporther, even when she is only potentially a child-bearer and bears nochildren. (Such a scheme, as has before been stated, was actually putforward by a literary man in England some years ago: but he had thesense to state that it should apply only to women of the upper classes, the mass of labouring women, who form the vast bulk of the English womenof the present day, being left to their ill-paid drudgery and theirchild-bearing as well!)

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 ofclass or race; but, at the present day, when probably much more thanhalf the world's most laborious and ill-paid labour is still performedby women, from tea pickers and cocoa tenders in India and the islands, to the washerwomen, cooks, and drudging labouring men's wives, whoin addition to the sternest and most unending toil, throw in theirchild-bearing as a little addition; and when, in some civilisedcountries women exceed the males in numbers by one million, sothat there would still be one million females for whom there was nolegitimate sexual outlet, though each male in the nation supported afemale, 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 mightanswer:--Through all the ages of the past, when, with heavy womb andhard labour-worn hands, we physically toiled beside man, bearing up bythe labour of our bodies the world about us, it was never suggested tous, "You, the child-bearers of the race, have in that one function alabour that equals all others combined; therefore, toil no more in otherdirections, we pray of you; neither plant, nor build, nor bend overthe grindstone; nor far into the night, while we sleep, sit weaving theclothing we and our children are to wear! Leave it to us, to plant, toreap, to weave, to work, to toil for you, O sacred child-bearer! Work nomore; every man of the race will work for you!" This cry in all the grimages of our past toil we never heard. 

And today, when the lofty theorist, who tonight stands before thedrawing-room fire in spotless shirtfront and perfectly fitting clothes, and declaims upon the amplitude of woman's work in life as child-bearer, and the mighty value of that labour which exceeds all other, makingit unnecessary for her to share man's grosser and lower toils: is itcertain he always in practical life remembers his theory? When wakingtomorrow morning, he finds that the elderly house drudge, who risesat dawn while he yet sleeps to make his tea and clean his boots, hasbrought his tea late, and polished his boots ill; may he not evensharply condemn her, and assure her she will have to leave unlessshe works harder and rises earlier? Does he exclaim to her, "Divinechild-bearer! Potential mother of the race! Why should you clean myboots or bring up my tea, while I lie warm in bed? Is it not enough youshould 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 owntea and clean my own boots, and pay you just the same!" Or, should hislandlady, now about to give birth to her ninth child, send him up apoorly-cooked dinner or forget to bring up his scuttle of coals, does hesend for her and thus apostrophise the astonished matron: "Child-bearerof the race! Producer of men! Cannot you be contented with so noble andlofty a function in life without toiling and moiling? Why carry up heavycoal-scuttles from the cellar and bend over hot fires, wearing out nerveand brain and muscle that should be reserved for higher duties? We, we, the men of the race, will perform its mean, its sordid, its grindingtoil! For woman is beauty, peace, repose! Your function is to give life, not to support it by labour. The Mother, the Mother! How wonderful itsounds! Toil no more! Rest is for you; labour and drudgery forus!" Would he not rather assure her that, unless she laboured moreassiduously and sternly, she would lose his custom and so be unable topay her month's rent; and perhaps so, with children and an invalid ordrunken husband whom she supports, be turned out into the streets? For, it is remarkable, that, with theorists of this class, it is not toil, orthe amount of toil, crushing alike to brain and body, which the femaleundertakes that is objected to; it is the form and the amount of thereward. It is not the hand-labouring woman, even in his own society, worn out and prematurely aged at forty with grinding domestic toil, thathas no beginning and knows no end--

 "Man's work is from sun to sun, But the woman's work is never done"--

it is not the haggard, work-crushed woman and mother who irons hisshirts, or the potential mother who destroys health and youth inthe sweater's den where she sews the garments in which he appears soradiantly in the drawing-room which disturbs him. It is the thoughtof the woman-doctor with an income of some hundreds a year, who drivesround in her carriage to see her patients, or receives them in herconsulting-rooms, and who spends the evening smoking and reading beforeher study fire or receiving her guests; it is the thought of the womanwho, as legislator, may loll for perhaps six hours of the day on thepadded seat of legislative bench, relieving the tedium now and then bya turn in the billiard- or refreshment-room, when she is not needed tovote or speak; it is the thought of the woman as Greek professor, withthree or four hundred a year, who gives half a dozen lectures a week, and has leisure to enjoy the society of her husband and children, andto devote to her own study and life of thought; it is she who wrings hisheart. It is not the woman, who, on hands and knees, at tenpence a day, scrubs the floors of the public buildings, or private dwellings, thatfills him with anguish for womanhood: that somewhat quadrupedal postureis for him truly feminine, and does not interfere with his ideal of themother and child-bearer; and that, in some other man's house, or perhapshis own, while he and the wife he keeps for his pleasures are visitingconcert or entertainment, some weary woman paces till far into the nightbearing with aching back and tired head the fretful, teething childhe brought into the world, for a pittance of twenty or thirty poundsa year, does not distress him. But that the same woman by work in anoffice should earn one hundred and fifty pounds, be able to have acomfortable home of her own, and her evening free for study or pleasure, distresses him deeply. It is not the labour, or the amount of labour, so much as the amount of reward that interferes with his ideal of theeternal womanly; he is as a rule quite contented that the women of therace should labour for him, whether as tea-pickers or washerwomen, ortoilers for the children he brings into the world, provided the rewardthey receive is not large, nor in such fields as he might himself at anytime desire to enter. 

When master and ass, drawing a heavy burden between them, have climbeda steep mountain range together; clambering over sharp rocks and acrosssliding gravel where no water is, and herbage is scant; if, when theywere come out on the top of the mountain, and before them stretch broad, green lands, and through wide half-open gates they catch the glimpse oftrees waving, and there comes the sound of running waters, if then, themaster should say to his ass, "Good beast of mine, lie down! I can pushthe whole burden myself now: lie down here; lie down, my creature; youhave toiled enough; I will go on alone!" then it might be even the beastwould whisper (with that glimpse through the swinging gates of the greenfields beyond)--"Good master, we two have climbed this mighty mountaintogether, 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 burdenwas two 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 havelistened. But now, just here, where I see the gates swinging open, asmooth road, and green fields before us, I think I shall go on a littlefarther. We two have climbed together; maybe we shall go on yet, side byside. "

For the heart of labouring womanhood cries out today to the man whowould suggest she need not seek new fields of labour, that child-bearingis enough for her share in life's labour, "Do you dare say to usnow, that we are fit to do nothing but child-bear, that when that isperformed our powers are exhausted? To us, who yet through all the agesof the past, when child-bearing was persistent and incessant, regardedit hardly as a toil, but rather as the reward of labour; has our righthand lost its cunning and our heart its strength, that today, when humanlabour is easier and humanity's work grows fairer, you say to us, 'Youcan do nothing now but child-bear'? Do you dare to say this, to us, whenthe 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 oneither hand by the bones of the womanhood that has fallen there, toilingbeside man? Do you dare say this, to us, when even today the food youeat, the clothes you wear, the comfort you enjoy, is largely given youby the unending muscular toil of woman?"

As the women of old planted and reaped and ground the grain that thechildren they bore might eat; as the maidens of old spun that they mightmake linen for their households and obtain the right to bear men; so, though we bend no more over grindstones, or labour in the fields, or weave by hand, it is our intention to enter all the new fields oflabour, that we also may have the power and right to bring men into theworld. It is our faith that the day comes in which not only shall no mandare to say, "It is enough portion for a woman in life that she beara child, " but when it will rather be said, "What noble labour has thatwoman performed, that she should have the privilege of bringing a man orwoman child into the world?"

But, it has also been objected, "What, and if the female half ofhumanity, though able, in addition to the exercise of its reproductivefunctions, to bear its share in the new fields of social labour as itdid in the old, be yet in certain directions a less productive labourerthan the male? What if, in the main, the result of the labour of the twohalves of humanity should not be found to be exactly equal?"

To this it may be answered, that it is within the range of possibilitythat, mysteriously co-ordinated with the male reproductive function inthe human, there may also be in some directions a tendency to possessgifts for labour useful and beneficial to the race in the stage ofgrowth 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 ourknowledge, this is a point on which no sane person would dogmatise; butit is possible! It may, on the other hand be, that, taken in the bulk, when all the branches of productive labour be considered, as the agespass, the value of the labour of the two halves of humanity will befound so identical and so closely to balance, that no superiority canpossibly 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 humanactivities is surveyed in future ages, it will be found that the valueof the labour of the female in the world that is rising about us, hasexceeded in quality or in quantity that of the male. We see no reasoneither, why this should be; there is nothing in the nature of thereproductive function in the female human which of necessity impliessuch superiority. 

Yet it may be, that, with the smaller general bulk and the muscularfineness, and the preponderance of brain and nervous system in net bulkover the fleshy and osseous parts of the organism, which generally, though by no means always, characterises the female as distinguishedfrom the male of the human species, there do go mental qualities whichwill peculiarly fit her for the labours of the future. It may be, thather lesser possession of the mere muscular and osseous strength, whichwere the elements of primary importance and which gave dominance in onestage of human growth, and which placed woman at a social disadvantageas compared with her companion, will, under new conditions of life, inwhich the value of crude mechanical strength as distinguished from highvitality and strong nervous activity is passing away, prove as largelyto her advantage, as his muscular bulk and strength in the past provedto the male. It is quite possible, in the new world which is arisingabout us, that the type of human most useful to society and best fittedfor its future conditions, and who will excel in the most numerous formsof activity, will be, not merely the muscularly powerful and bulky, butthe highly versatile, active, vital, adaptive, sensitive, physicallyfine-drawn type; and, as that type, though, like the muscularly heavyand powerful, by no means peculiar to and confined to one sex, is yetrather more commonly found in conjunction with a female organism, it isquite possible that, taken in the bulk and on the whole, the female halfof humanity may, by virtue of its structural adaptions, be found mostfitted for the bulk of human labours in the future!

As with individuals and races, so also with sexes, changed socialconditions may render exactly those subtile qualities, which in onesocial state were a disadvantage, of the highest social advantage inanother. 

The skilled diplomatist or politician, so powerful in his own element, on board ship during a storm becomes at once of less general value orconsideration than the meanest sailor who can reef a sail or guide awheel; and, were we to be reduced again suddenly to a state of nature, a company of highly civilised men and women would at once, as we havebefore remarked, find their social value completely inverted; landed ona desert shore, unarmed and naked, to encounter wild beasts and savages, and to combat nature for food, the primitive scale of human values wouldat once reassert itself. It would not then be the mighty financier, thelearned judge, or great poet and scholar who would be sought after, butthe thickest-headed navvy who could throw a stone so exactly that hebrought down a bird, and who could in a day raise a wall which wouldshelter the group; and the man so powerful that he could surely strikean enemy or wild beast dead with his club, would at once be objects ofsocial regard and attain individual eminence, and perhaps dominance. Itwould not be the skilled dancer, who in one night in a civilised stateearns her hundreds, nor yet the fragile clinging beauty, but the girlof the broad back and the strong limb, who could collect wood and carrywater, who would be the much considered and much sought after female insuch a community. Even in the animal world, there is the same inversionin values, according as the external conditions vary. The lion, whileruling over every other creature in his primitive wilds, by right of hisuntamable ferocity, size, and rapacity, is yet bound to become a preyto destruction and extermination when he comes into contact with thenew condition brought by man; while the wild dog, so immeasurablyhis inferior in size and ferocity, is tamed, survives and multiplies, exactly because he has been driven by his smaller structure and lesserphysical force to develop those social instincts and those forms ofintelligence which make him amenable to the new condition of life andvaluable in them. The same inversion in the value of qualities may betraced in the history of human species. The Jews, whose history has beenone long story of oppression at the hands of more muscular, physicallypowerful and pugilistic peoples; whom we find first making bricks underthe lash of the Egyptian, and later hanging his harp as an exile amongthe willow-trees of Babylon; who, for eighteen hundred years, has beentrampled, tortured, and despised beneath the feet of the more physicallypowerful and pugilistic, but not more vital, keen, intelligent, orpersistent races of Europe; has, today, by the slow turning of thewheel of life, come uppermost. The Egyptian task-master and warriorhave passed; what the Babylonian was we know no more, save for a few mudtablets and rock inscriptions recording the martial victories; but theonce captive Jew we see today in every city and every street; until atlast, the descendants of those men who spat when they spoke hisname, and forcibly drew his teeth to extract his money from him, waitpatiently behind each other for admission to his offices and palaces;while nobles solicit his daughters in marriage and kings are proud to besummoned to his table in hope of golden crumbs, and great questionsof peace and war are often held balanced in the hand of one littleasthmatic Jew. After long ages of disgrace and pariahism, the time hascome, whether for good or for evil, when just those qualities which theJew possesses and which subtilely distinguish him from others, are indemand; while those he has not are sinking into disuse; exactly thatdomination of the reflective faculties over the combative, which oncemade him slave, also saved him from becoming extinct in wars; and theintellectual quickness, the far-sighted keenness, the persistent mentalactivity and self-control, which could not in those ages save him fromdegradation or compensate for his lack of bone and muscle and combativeinstinct, are the very qualities the modern world demands and crowns. The day of Goliath with his club and his oaths is fast passing, and theday of David with his harp and skilfully constructed sling is comingnear and yet nearer. 

The qualities which give an animal, a race, or an individual, a higherutility or social dominance must always be influenced by any change inthe environment. As the wheel of life slowly revolves, that which waslowest comes continually uppermost, and that which was dominant becomessubservient. 

It is possible, that women, after countless ages, during which thatsmaller relative development in weight and muscularity which is incidentto almost all females which suckle their young, and that lesser desirefor pugilism inherent in almost all females who bear their young alive, rendered her lacking in the two qualities which made for individualdominance in her societies, may yet, in the future, discover that thosechanges in human conditions, which have done away with the primarynecessity for muscular force and pugilistic arts, have also inverted herplace in the scale of social values. 

It is possible, that the human female, like the Jew, the male of thattype farthest removed from the dominant male type of the past, may inthe future find, that, so far from those qualities which, in an earliercondition, lessened her social value and power of labour, continuing todo so, they will increase it. That the delicacy of hand, lightness ofstructure which were fatal when the dominant labour of life was towield a battle-axe or move a weight, may be no restraint but even anassistance in the intellectual and more delicate mechanical fields oflabour; that the preponderance of nervous and cerebral over muscularmaterial, and the tendency towards preservative and creative activityover pugilistic and destructive, so far from shutting her off from themost 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'slong years of servitude and physical subjection, and her experience aschild-bearer and protector of infancy, should, in any way, be foundin the future to have endowed her, as a kind of secondary sexualcharacteristic, with any additional strength of social instinct, with any exceptional width of human sympathy and any instinctivecomprehension; then, it is not merely possible, but certain, that, inthe ages that are coming, in which the labour of the human race will benot mainly destructive but conservative, in which the building up anddeveloping of humanity, and not continually the inter-destruction ofpart by part, will be the dominant activity of the race, that woman aswoman, and by right of that wherein she differs from the male, will havean all-important part to play in the activity of the race. 

The matter is one of curious and subtle interest, but what practicallyconcerns the human race is, not which of the two sexual halves whichmust always coexist is best fitted to excel in certain human labours inthis or that direction, at this or that time, nor even which has mostto contribute to the sum-total of human activities; but it is this, thatevery individual unit humanity contains, irrespective of race, sex, ortype, should find exactly that field of labour which may most contributeto its development, happiness, and health, and in which its peculiarfaculties and gifts shall be most effectively and beneficially exertedfor its fellows. 

It matters nothing, and less than nothing, to us as women, whether, ofthose children we bring into the world, our sons should excel in virtue, intelligence, and activity, our daughters, or our daughters our sons;so that, in each child we bring to life, not one potentiality shall belost, nor squandered on a lesser when it might have been expended on ahigher and more beneficent task. So that not one desirable facultyof the marvellous creatures we suffer to bring into existence be leftuncultivated, to us, as women, it matters nothing and less than nothing, which sex type excels in action, in knowledge, or in virtue, so bothattain their best. There is one thing only on earth, as precious towoman as the daughter who springs from her body--it is the son. Thereis one thing only dearer to the woman than herself--it is the man. As nosane human concerns himself as to whether the right or left ventricleof his heart works most satisfactorily, or is most essential to hiswell-being, so both be perfect in health and activity; as no sane womandistresses herself lest her right breast should not excel the left inbeauty and use; so no sane man or woman questions anxiously over therelative perfections of male and female. In love there is no first norlast. What we request of life is that the tools should be given to hishand or hers who can best handle them; that the least efficientshould not be forced into the place of the more efficient, and thatan artificially drawn line should never repress the activities of theindividual creature, which we as women bring into the world. 

But it may also be said to us, "What, and if, all your dreams and hopesfor woman and the future of the race be based on air? What, and if, desirable as it is that woman should not become practically dependent onher sexual function alone, and should play at least as great a part inthe productive labour of the race in the future as she played in that ofthe past--what, if woman cannot take the same vast share in the complexand largely mental labour fields of the future, as in the largelyphysical fields of the past? What, and if, in spite of all her effortand sacrifice to attain this end, exactly now and when the labour ofcivilised societies becomes mental rather than mechanical, woman befound wanting?"

In Swiss valleys today the traveller comes sometimes on the figure ofa solitary woman climbing the mountain-side, on her broad shoulders amighty burden of fodder or manure she is bearing up for the cattle, orto some patch of cultivated land. Steady, unshrinking eyes look outat 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 isseamed and seared with the stern marks of toil and endurance, as themountain-side is with marks of storm and avalanche. It is the face ofone who has brought men into the world in labour and sorrow, and toiledmightily to sustain them; and dead must be the mind to the phases ofhuman existence, who does not see in that toilworn figure one of themighty pillars, which have in the long ages of the past sustained thelife of humanity on earth, and made possible its later development; andmuch must the tinsel of life have dazzled him, who fails to mark it withreverence and, metaphorically, to bow his head before it--the type ofthe mighty labouring woman who has built up life. 

But, it may be said, what if, in the ages to come, it should never againbe possible for any man to stand bowed with the same respect in thepresence of any other of earth's mighty toilers, who should also bemother and woman? What, if she, who could combine motherhood with themost unending muscular toil, will fall flaccid and helpless where thelabour becomes mental? What if, struggle as she will, she can becomenothing in the future but the pet pug-dog of the race, lying on itssofa, or the Italian greyhound, shivering in its silken coat? Whatif woman, in spite of her most earnest aspirations and determinedstruggles, be destined to failure in the new world that is risingbecause of inherent mental incapacity?

There are many replies which may be made to such a suggestion. It isoften said with truth, that the ordinary occupations of woman in thepast and present, and in all classes of society in which she is notparasitic, do demand, and have always demanded, a very high versatilityand mental activity, as well as physical: that the mediaeval baron'swife who guided her large household probably had to expend far more pureintellect in doing so than the baron in his hunting and fighting; thatthe wife of the city accountant probably expends today more reason, imagination, forethought, and memory on the management of her smallhousehold, than he in his far simpler, monotonous arithmetical toil;that, as there is no cause for supposing that the tailor or shoemakerneeds less intellect in his calling than the soldier or prize-fighter, so there is nothing to suggest that, in the past, woman has not expendedas much pure intellect in the mass of her callings as the man in his;while in those highly specialised intellectual occupations, in whichlong and uninterrupted training tending to one point is necessary, such as the liberal professions and arts, that, although woman haspractically been excluded from the requisite training, and the freedomto place herself in the positions in which they can be pursued, thatyet, by force of innate genius and gifts in such directions, she hascontinually broken through the seemingly insuperable obstacles, andagain and again taken her place beside man in those fields of labour;showing thereby not merely aptitude but passionate and determinedinclination in those directions. With equal truth, it is often remarkedthat, when as an independent hereditary sovereign, woman has been placedin the only position in which she has ever been able freely and fullyto express her own individuality, and though selected at random by fatefrom the mass of women, by the mere accident of birth or marriage, shehas shown in a large percentage of cases that the female has the powerto command, organise, and succeed in one of the most exacting andcomplex of human employments, the government of nations; that from thedays of Amalasontha to Isabella of Spain, Elizabeth of England, andCatharine of Russia, women have not failed to grasp the large impersonalaspects of life, and successfully and powerfully to control them, whenplaced in the supreme position in which it was demanded. It may alsobe stated, and is sometimes, with so much iteration as to become almostwearisome, that women's adequacy in the modern fields of intellectual orskilled manual labour is no more today an open matter for debate, thanthe number of modern women who, as senior wranglers, doctors, &c. , have already successfully entered the new fields, and the high standardattained by women in all university examinations to which they areadmitted, and their universal success in the administration of parochialmatters, wherever they have been allowed to share it, proves theirintellectual and moral fitness for the new forms of labour. 

All these statements are certainly interesting, and may be unanswerable. And yet--if the truth be told, it is not ultimately on these groundsthat many of us base our hope and our certitude with regard to thefuture of woman. Our conviction as to the plenitude of her powers forthe adequate performance of lofty labours in these new fields, springsnot at all from a categorical enumeration of the attainments orperformances of individual women or bodies of women in the past orpresent; it has another source. 

There was a bird's egg once, picked up by chance upon the ground, andthose 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 bythe leg to a log, lest it should stray and be lost. And by and by theygathered round it, and speculated as to what the bird might be. Onesaid, "It is surely a waterfowl, a duck, or it may be a goose; if wetook it to the water it would swim and gabble. " But another said, "Ithas no webs to its feet; it is a barn-door fowl; should you let it looseit will scratch and cackle with the others on the dung-heap. " But athird 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!No one has ever seen it fly! Why should it fly? Can you suppose thata thing can do a thing which no one has ever seen it do?" And thebird--the bird--with its leg chained close to the log, preened its wing. So they sat about it, speculating, and discussing it: and one saidthis, and another that. And all the while as they talked the bird satmotionless, with its gaze fixed on the clear, blue sky above it. And onesaid, "Suppose we let the creature loose to see what it will do?"--andthe bird shivered. But the others cried, "It is too valuable; it mightget lost. If it were to try to fly it might fall down and break itsneck. " And the bird, with its foot chained to the log, sat lookingupward into the clear blue sky; the sky, in which it had never been--forthe 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 butone on earth; and it is upon our knowledge of that woman that we baseour certitude. 

For those who do not know her, and have not this ground, it is probablyprofitable and necessary that they painfully collect isolated facts andthen speculate upon them, and base whatever views they should form uponthese collections. It might even be profitable that they should form nodefinite opinions at all, but wait till the ages of practical experiencehave put doubt to rest. For those of us who have a ground of knowledgewhich we cannot transmit to outsiders, it is perhaps more profitable toact fearlessly than to argue. 

Finally, it may be objected to the entrance of woman to the new fieldsof labour, and in effect it is often said--"What, and if, all you havesought be granted you--if it be fully agreed that woman's ancient fieldsof toil are slipping from her, and that, if she do not find new, she must fall into a state of sexual parasitism, dependent on herreproductive functions alone; and granted, that, doing this, she mustdegenerate, and that from her degeneration must arise the degenerationand arrest of development of the males as well as of the females of herrace; and granting also, fully, that in the past woman has borne onefull half, and often more than one half, of the weight of the productivelabours of her societies, in addition to child-bearing; and allowingmore fully that she may be as well able to sustain her share in theintellectual labours of the future as in the more mechanical labours ofthe past; granting all this, may there not be one aspect of the questionleft out of consideration which may reverse all conclusions as to thedesirability, and the human good to be attained by woman's enlargedfreedom and her entering into the new fields of toil? What if, theincreased culture and mental activity of woman necessary for herentrance into the new fields, however desirable in other ways forherself and the race, should result in a diminution, or in an absoluteabolition of the sexual attraction and affection, which in all ages ofthe past has bound the two halves of humanity together? What if, thoughthe stern and unlovely manual labours of the past have never affectedher attractiveness for the male of her own society, nor his for her;yet the performance by woman of intellectual labours, or complex andinteresting manual labour, and her increased intelligence and width, should render the male objectionable to her, and the woman undesirableto the male; so that the very race itself might become extinct throughthe dearth of sexual affection? What, and if, the woman ceases to valuethe son she bears, and to feel desire for and tenderness to the man whobegets 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 tohumanity, anything which could result from the degeneration andparasitism of woman? Would it not be well, if there exist anypossibility of this danger, that woman, however conscious that she canperform social labour as nobly and successfully under the new conditionsof life as the old, should yet consciously, and deliberately, with hereyes open, sink into a state of pure intellectual torpor, with all itsattendant evils, rather than face the more irreparable loss which herdevelopment and the exercise of her gifts might entail? Would it not bewell she should deliberately determine, as the lesser of two evils, to dwarf herself and limit her activities and the expansion of herfaculties, rather than that any risk should be run of the bond of desireand emotion between the two sexual halves of humanity being severed? Ifthe race is to decay and become extinct on earth, might it not as wellbe through the parasitism and decay of woman, as through the decay ofthe sexual instinct?"

It is not easy to reply with rationality, or even gravity, to asupposition, which appears to be based on the conception that a suddenand entire subversion of the deepest of those elements on which human, and even animal, life on the globe is based, is possible from soinadequate a cause: and it might well be passed silently, were it notthat, under some form or other, this argument frequently recurs, nowin a more rational and then in a more irrational form; constitutingsometimes an objection in even moderately intelligent minds, to theentrance of woman into the new fields of labour. 

It must be at once frankly admitted that, were there the smallestpossible danger in this direction, the sooner woman laid aside allendeavour in the direction of increased knowledge and the attainment ofnew fields of activity, the better for herself and for the race. 

When one considers the part which sexual attraction plays in the orderof sentient life on the globe, from the almost unconscious attractionswhich draw amoeboid globule to amoeboid globule, on through the endlessprogressive forms of life; till in monogamous birds it expresses itselfin song and complex courtship and sometimes in the life-long conjugalaffection of mates; and which in the human race itself, passing throughvarious forms, from the imperative but almost purely physical attractionof savage male and female for each other, till in the highly developedmale and female it assumes its aesthetic and intellectual but not lessimperative form, couching itself in the songs of poet, and the sometimesdeathless fidelity of richly developed man and woman to each other, wefind it not only everywhere, but forming the very groundwork on which isbased sentient existence; never eradicable, though infinitely variedin its external forms of expression. When we consider that in the humanworld, from the battles and dances of savages to the intrigues andentertainments of modern Courts and palaces, the attraction of man andwoman for each other has played an unending part; and, that the mostfierce ascetic religious enthusiasm through the ages, the flagellationsand starvations in endless nunneries and monasteries, have never beenable to extirpate nor seriously to weaken for one moment the masterdominance of this emotion; that the lowest and most brutal ignorance, and the highest intellectual culture leave mankind, equally, though indifferent forms, amenable to its mastery; that, whether in the brutalguffaw of sex laughter which rings across the drinking bars of ourmodern cities, and rises from the comfortable armchairs in fashionableclubs; or in the poet's dreams, and the noblest conjugal relations ofmen and women linked together for life, it plays still today on earththe vast part it played when hoary monsters ploughed after each otherthrough Silurian slime, and that still it forms as ever the warp onwhich in the loom of human life the web is woven, and runs as a threadnever absent through every design and pattern which constitutes theindividual existence on earth, it appears not merely as ineradicable;but it is inconceivable to suppose that that attraction of sex towardssex, which, with hunger and thirst, lie, as the triune instincts, atthe base of animal life on earth, should ever be exterminable by thecomparatively superficial changes resulting from the performance of thisor that form of labour, or the little more or less of knowledge in onedirection or another. 

That the female who drives steam-driven looms, producing scores of yardsof linen in a day, should therefore desire less the fellowship of hercorresponding male than had she toiled at a spinning-wheel with handand foot to produce one yard; that the male should desire less of thecompanionship of the woman who spends the morning in doctoring babies inher consulting-room, according to the formularies of the pharmacopoeia, than she who of old spent it on the hillside collecting simples forremedies; that the woman who paints a modern picture or designs a modernvase should be less lovable by man, than her ancestor who shaped thefirst primitive pot and ornamented it with zigzag patterns was to theman of her day and age; that the woman who contributes to the supportof her family by giving legal opinions will less desire motherhood andwifehood than she who in the past contributed to the support ofher household by bending on hands and knees over her grindstone, orscrubbing floors, and that the former should be less valued by man thanthe latter--these are suppositions which it is difficult to regard asconsonant with any knowledge of human nature and the laws by which it isdominated. 

On the other hand, if it be supposed that the possession of wealth orthe means of earning it makes the human female objectionable to themale, all history and all daily experience negates it. The eager huntfor heiresses in all ages and social conditions, make it obviousthat the human male has a strong tendency to value the female who cancontribute to the family expenditure; and the case is yet, we believe, unrecorded of a male who, attracted to a female, becomes averse to heron finding she has material good. The female doctor or lawyer earning athousand a year will always, and today certainly does, find more suitorsthan had she remained a governess or cook, labouring as hard, earningthirty pounds. 

While, if the statement that the female entering on new fields of labourwill cease to be lovable to the male be based on the fact that she willthen be free, all history and all human experience yet more negates itstruth. The study of all races in all ages, proves that the greater thefreedom of woman in any society, the higher the sexual value put uponher by the males of that society. The three squaws who walk behind theIndian, and whom he has captured in battle or bought for a few axes orlengths of tobacco, and over whom he exercises the despotic right oflife and death, are probably all three of infinitesimal value in hiseyes, compared with the value of his single, free wife to one of ourancient, monogamous German ancestors; while the hundred wives andconcubines purchased by a Turkish pasha have probably not even anapproximate value in his eyes, when compared with the value whichthousands of modern European males set upon the one comparatively freewoman, whom they may have won, often only after a long and tediouscourtship. 

So axiomatic is the statement that the value of the female to the malevaries as her freedom, that, given an account of any human society inwhich the individual female is highly valued, it will be perfectly safeto infer the comparative social freedom of woman; and, given a statementas to the high degree of freedom of woman in a society, it will be safeto infer the great sexual value of the individual woman to man. 

Finally, if the suggestion, that men and women will cease to beattractive to one another if women enter modern fields of labour, bebased on the fact that her doing so may increase her intelligence andenlarge her intellectual horizon, it must be replied that the wholetrend of human history absolutely negates the supposition. There isabsolutely no ground for the assumption that increased intelligence andintellectual power diminishes sexual emotion in the human creature ofeither sex. The ignorant 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 dominatedhave been the most cultured, powerful, and highly differentiated maleintelligences that the race has produced. A Mill, a Shelley, a Goethe, a Schiller, a Pericles, have not been more noted for vast intellectualpowers, than for the depth and intensity of their sexual emotions. And, if possible, with the human female, the relation between intensity ofsexual emotion and high intellectual gifts has been yet closer. The lifeof a Sophia Kovalevsky, a George Eliot, an Elizabeth Browning have notbeen more marked by a rare development of the intellect than by deeppassionate sexual emotions. Nor throughout the history of the race hashigh intelligence and intellectual power ever tended to make either maleor female unattractive to those of the opposite sex. 

The merely brilliantly attired and unintelligent woman, probably neverawakened the same intensity of profound sex emotion even among the menof her own type, which followed a George Sand; who attracted to herselfwith deathless force some of the most noted men of her generation, evenwhen, nearing middle age, stout, and attired in rusty and inartisticblack, she was to be found rolling her cigarettes in a dingy office, scorning all the external adornments with which less attractive femalesseek to supply a hidden deficiency. Probably no more hopeless mistakecould be made by an ascetic seeking to extirpate sex emotion and theattraction of the sexes for one another, than were he to imagine thatin increasing virility, intelligence, and knowledge this end could beattained. He might thereby differentiate and greatly concentrate theemotions, but they would be intensified; as a widely spread, shallow, sluggish stream would not be annihilated but increased in force andactivity by being turned into a sharply defined, clear-cut course. 

And if, further, we turn to those secondary manifestations of sexualemotion, which express themselves in the relations of human progenitorsto their offspring, we shall find, if possible more markedly, thatincrease of intelligence and virility does not diminish but increasesthe strength of the affections. As the primitive, ignorant male, oftenwillingly selling his offspring or exposing his female infants to death, often develops, with the increase of culture and intelligence, intothe extremely devoted and self-sacrificing male progenitor of civilisedsocieties; so, yet even more markedly, does the female relation with heroffspring, become intensified and permanent, as culture and intelligenceand virility increase. The Bushwoman, like the lowest female barbariansin our own societies, will often readily dispose of her infant son fora bottle of spirits or a little coin; and even among somewhat morementally developed females, strong as is the affection of the averagefemale for her new born offspring, the closeness of the relation betweenmother and child tends rapidly to shrink as time passes, so that bythe time of adolescence is reached the relation between mother and sonbecomes little more than a remembrance of a close inter-union whichonce existed. It is, perhaps, seldom, till the very highest point ofintellectual growth and mental virility has been reached by the humanfemale, that her relation with her male offspring becomes a permanentand active and dominant factor in the lives of both. The concentratedand all-absorbing affection and fellowship which existed between thegreatest female intellect France has produced and the son she bore, dominating both lives to the end, the fellowship of the Englishhistorian with his mother, who remained his chosen companion and thesharer of all his labours through life, the relation of St. Augustineto his mother, and those of countless others, are relations almostinconceivable where the woman is not of commanding and activeintelligence, and where the passion of mere physical instinct iscompleted by the passion of the intellect and spirit. 

There appears, then, from the study of human nature in the past, noground for supposing that if, as a result of woman's adopting new formsof labour, she should become more free, more wealthy, or more activelyintelligent, that this could in any way diminish her need of thephysical and mental comradeship of man, nor his need of her; nor thatit would affect their secondary sexual relations as progenitors, saveby deepening, concentrating, and extending throughout life the parentalemotions. The conception that man's and woman's need of each other couldbe touched, or the emotions binding the sexes obliterated, by any merechange in the form of labour performed by the woman of the race, is asgrotesque in its impossibility, as the suggestion that the placing of ashell on the seashore this way or that might destroy the action of theearth's great tidal wave. 

But, it may be objected, "If there be absolutely no ground for theformation 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 womaninto new or intellectual fields of labour? Where there is smoke mustthere not also be fire?" To which it must be replied, "Without fire, nosmoke; but very often the appearance of smoke where neither smoke norfire exist!"

The fact that a statement is frequently made or a view held forms nopresumptive ground of its truth; but it is undoubtedly a ground forsupposing that there is an appearance or semblance which makes it appeartruth, and which suggests it. The universally entertained conceptionthat the sun moved round the world was not merely false, but the reverseof the truth; all that was required for its inception was a fallaciousappearance suggesting it. 

When we examine narrowly the statement, that the entrance of woman intothe new fields of labour, with its probably resulting greater freedomof action, economic independence and wider culture, may result in aseverance between the sexes, it becomes clear what that fallaciousappearance is, which suggests this. 

The entrance of a woman into new fields of labour, though bringing herincreased freedom and economic independence, and necessitating increasedmental training and wider knowledge, could not extinguish the primordialphysical instinct which draws sex to sex throughout all the orders ofsentient life; and still less could it annihilate that subtler mentalneed, which, as humanity develops, draws sex to sex for emotionalfellowship and close intercourse; but, it might, and undoubtedly would, powerfully react and readjust the relations of certain men with certainwomen!

While the attraction, physical and intellectual, which binds sex to sexwould remain the same in volume and intensity, the forms in which itwould express itself, and, above all, the relative power of individualsto command the gratification of their instincts and desires, would befundamentally altered, and in many cases inverted. 

In the barbarian state of societies, where physical force dominates, it is the most muscular and pugilistically and brutally and animallysuccessful male who captures and possesses the largest number offemales; and no doubt he would be justified in regarding any socialchange which gave to woman a larger freedom of choice, and which wouldso perhaps give to the less brutal but perhaps more intelligent male, whom the woman might select, an equal opportunity for the gratificationof his sexual wishes and for the producing of offspring, as a seriousloss. And, from the purely personal standpoint, he would undoubtedlybe right in dreading anything which tended to free woman. But he wouldmanifestly not have been justified in asserting, that woman's increasedfreedom of choice, or the fact that the other men would share hisadvantage in the matter of obtaining female companionship, would in anyway lessen the amount of sexual emotion or the tenderness of relationbetween the two halves of humanity. He would not by brute force possesshimself of so many females, nor have so large a circle of choice, under the new conditions; but what he lost, others would gain; andthe intensity of the sex emotions and the nearness and passion of therelation between the sexes be in no way touched. 

In our more civilised societies, as they exist today, woman possesses(more often perhaps in appearance than reality!) a somewhat greaterfreedom of sexual selection; she is no longer captured by muscularforce, but there are still conditions entirely unconnected withsex attractions and affections, which yet largely dominate the sexrelations. 

It is not the man of the strong arm, but the man of the long purse, who unduly and artificially dominates in the sexual world today. Practically, wherever in the modern world woman is wholly or partiallydependent for her means of support on the exercise of her sexualfunctions, she is dependent more or less on the male's power to supporther in their exercise, and her freedom of choice is practically so farabsolutely limited. Probably three-fourths of the sexual unions in ourmodern European societies, whether in the illegal or recognised legalforms, are dominated by or largely influenced by the sex purchasingpower of the male. With regard to the large and savage institution ofprostitution, which still lies as the cancer embedded in the heart ofall our modern civilised societies, this is obviously and nakedly thecase; the wealth of the male as compared to the female being, withhideous obtrusiveness, its foundation and source of life. But thepurchasing power of the male as compared with the poverty of the femaleis not less painfully, if a little less obtrusively, displayed in thoselayers of society lying nearer the surface. From the fair, effete younggirl of the wealthier classes in her city boudoir, who weeps copiouslyas she tells you she cannot marry the man she loves, because he says hehas only two hundred a year and cannot afford to keep her; to the fatherwho demands frankly of his daughter's suitor how much he can settle onher before consenting to his acceptance, the fact remains, that, underexisting conditions, not the amount of sex affection, passion, andattraction, but the extraneous question of the material possessions ofthe male, determines to a large extent the relation of the sexes. Theparasitic, helpless youth who has failed in his studies, who possessesneither virility, nor charm of person, nor strength of mind, but whopossesses wealth, has a far greater chance of securing unlimited sexualindulgence and the life companionship of the fairest maid, than herbrother's tutor, who may be possessed of every manly and physical graceand mental gift; and the ancient libertine, possessed of nothing butmaterial good, has, especially among the so-called upper classes of oursocieties, a far greater chance of securing the sex companionship ofany woman he desires as wife, mistress, or prostitute, than the mostphysically attractive and mentally developed male, who may have nothingto offer to the dependent female but affection and sexual companionship. 

To the male, whenever and wherever he exists in our societies, whodepends mainly for his power for procuring the sex relation he desires, not on his power of winning and retaining personal affection, but, onthe purchasing power of his possessions as compared to the poverty ofthe females of his society, the personal loss would be seriously andat once felt, of any social change which gave to the woman a largereconomic independence and therefore greater freedom of sexual choice. Itis not an imaginary danger which the young dude, of a certain type whichsits often in the front row of the stalls in a theatre, with slopingforehead and feeble jaw, watching the unhappy women who dance forgold--sees looming before him, as he lisps out his deep disapprovalof increased knowledge and the freedom of obtaining the means ofsubsistence in intellectual fields by woman, and expresses his vastpreference for the uncultured ballet-girl over all types of cultured andproductive labouring womenhood in the universe. A subtle and profoundinstinct warns him, that with the increased intelligence and economicfreedom of woman, he, and such as he, might ultimately be left sexuallycompanionless; the undesirable, the residuary, male old-maids of thehuman race. 

On the other hand, there is undoubtedly a certain body of females whowould lose, or imagine they would lose, heavily by the advance of womanas a whole to a condition of free labour and economic independence. Thatfemale, wilfully or organically belonging to the parasite class, havingneither the vigour of intellect nor the vitality of body to undertakeany form of productive labour, and desiring to be dependent only uponthe passive performance of sex function merely, would, whether asprostitute or wife, undoubtedly lose heavily by any social change whichdemanded of woman increased knowledge and activity. (She would losein two directions: by the social disapprobation which, as the newconditions became general, would rest on her; and yet more by thecompetition of the more developed forms. She would practically becomenon-existent. )

It is exactly by these two classes of persons that the objection israised that the entrance of woman into the new fields of labour and herincreased freedom and intelligence will dislocate the relations ofthe sexes; and, while from the purely personal standpoint, theyare undoubtedly right, viewing human society as a whole they arefundamentally wrong. The loss of a small and unhealthy section will bethe gain of human society as a whole. 

In the male voluptuary of feeble intellect and unattractiveindividuality, who depends for the gratification of his sexualinstincts, not on his power of winning and retaining the personalaffection and admiration of woman, but on her purchaseable condition, either in the blatantly barbarous field of sex traffic that lies beyondthe pale of legal marriage, or the not less barbarous though more veiledtraffic within that pale, the entrance of woman into the new fields oflabour, with an increased intellectual culture and economic freedom, means little less than social extinction. But, to those males who, evenat the present day, constitute the majority in our societies, and whodesire the affection and fellowship of woman rather than a mere materialpossession; for the male who has the attributes and gifts of mind orbody, which, apart from any weight of material advantage, would fit himto hold the affection of woman, however great her freedom of choice, the gain will be correspondingly great. Given a society in which themajority of women should be so far self-supporting, that, having theirfree share open to them in the modern fields of labour, and reaping thefull economic rewards of their labour, marriage or some form of sexualsale was no more a matter of necessity to them; so far from thiscondition causing a diminution in the number of permanent sex unions, one of the heaviest bars to them would be removed. It is universallyallowed that one of the disease spots in our modern social condition isthe increasing difficulty which bars conscientious men from enteringon marriage and rearing families, if limited means would in the case oftheir death or disablement throw the woman and their common offspringcomparatively helpless into the fierce stream of our modern economiclife. If the woman could justifiably be looked to, in case of the man'sdisablement or death, to take his place as an earner, thousands ofvaluable marriages which cannot now be contracted could be entered on;and the serious social evil, which arises from the fact that while theself-indulgent and selfish freely marry and produce large families, the restrained and conscientious are often unable to do so, wouldbe removed. For the first time in the history of the modern world, prostitution, using that term in its broadest sense to cover all forcedsexual relationships based, not on the spontaneous affection of thewoman for the man, but on the necessitous acceptance by woman ofmaterial good in exchange for the exercise of her sexual functions, would be extinct; and the relation between men and women become aco-partnership between freemen. 

So far from the economic freedom and social independence of the womanexterminating sexual love between man and woman, it would for the firsttime fully enfranchise it. The element of physical force and capturewhich dominated the most primitive sex relations, the more degradingelement of seduction and purchase by means of wealth or material goodoffered to woman in our modern societies, would then give place to theuntrammelled action of attraction and affection alone between the sexes, and sexual love, after its long pilgrimage in the deserts, would beenabled to return at last, a king crowned. 

But, apart from the two classes of persons whose objection to theentrance of woman to new fields of labour is based more or lessinstinctively on the fear of personal loss, there is undoubtedly asmall, if a very small, number of sincere persons whose fear as toseverance between the sexes to result from woman's entrance into the newfield, is based upon a more abstract and impersonal ground. 

It is not easy to do full justice in an exact statement to views heldgenerally rather nebulously and vaguely, but we believe we should notmistake this view, by saying that there are a certain class of perfectlysincere and even moderately intelligent folk who hold a view which, expressed exactly, would come to something like this--that the entranceof woman into new fields would necessitate so large a mental culture andsuch a development of activity, mental and physical, in the woman, thatshe might ultimately develop into a being so superior to the male andso widely different from the man, that the bond of sympathy between thesexes might ultimately be broken and the man cease to be an object ofaffection and attraction to the woman, and the woman to the man throughmere dissimilarity. The future these persons seem to see, more or lessvaguely, is of a social condition, in which, the males of the raceremaining precisely as they are today, the corresponding females shallhave advanced to undreamed of heights of culture and intelligence; acondition in which the hand-worker, and the ordinary official, andsmall farmer, shall be confronted with the female astronomer or Greekprofessor of astonishing learning and gifts as his only possiblecomplementary sex companion; and the vision naturally awakens in thesegood folk certain misgivings as to sympathy between and suitability foreach other, of these two widely dissimilar parts of humanity. 

It must of course at once be admitted, that, were the two sexual halvesof humanity distinct species, which, having once entered on a courseof evolution and differentiation, might continue to develop along thosedistinct lines for countless ages or even for a number of generations, without reacting through inheritance on each other, the consequences ofsuch development might ultimately almost completely sever them. 

The development of distinct branches of humanity has already broughtabout such a severance between races and classes which are in totallydistinct stages of evolution. So wide is the hiatus between them often, that the lowest form of sex attraction can hardly cross it; and the morehighly developed mental and emotional sex passion cannot possibly bridgeit. In the world of sex, kind seeks kind, and too wide a dissimilaritycompletely bars the existence of the highest forms of sex emotion, andoften even the lower and more purely animal. 

Were it possible to place a company of the most highly evolved humanfemales--George Sands, Sophia Kovalevskys, or even the average culturedfemales of a highly evolved race--on an island where the only maleswere savages of the Fugean type, who should meet them on the shoreswith matted hair and prognathous jaws, and with wild shouts, brandishingtheir implements of death, to greet and welcome them, it is an undoubtedfact that, so great would be the horror felt by the females towardsthem, that not only would the race become extinct, but if it dependedfor its continuance on any approach to sex affection on the part of thewomen, that death would certainly be accepted by all, as the lesser oftwo evils. Hardly less marked would be the sexual division if, in placeof cultured and developed females, we imagine males of the same highlyevolved class thrown into contact with the lowest form of primitivefemales. A Darwin, a Schiller, a Keats, though all men capable of thestrongest sex emotion and of the most durable sex affections, wouldprobably be untouched by any emotion but horror, cast into the companyof 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 meredivision in culture and mental habits, dividing individuals of the samerace but of different classes, tends largely to exclude the possibilityof at least the nobler and more enduring forms of sex emotion. Thehighly cultured denizen of a modern society, though he may enter intopassing and temporary and animal relations with the uncultured peasantor woman of the street, seldom finds awakened within him in such casesthe depth of emotion and sympathy which is necessary for the enjoymentof the closer tie of conjugal life; and it may be doubted whether thehighest, most permanent, and intimate forms of sexual affection everexist except among humans very largely identical in tastes, habitsof thought, and moral and physical education. (In Greece at a certainperiod (as we have before noted) there does appear to have been atemporary advance of the male, so far in advance of the female as tomake the difference between them almost immeasurable; but he quicklyfell back to the level of the woman. ) Were it possible that the entranceof woman into the new fields of labour should produce any increaseddivergence between man and woman in ideals, culture, or tastes, therewould undoubtedly be a dangerous responsibility incurred by any whofostered such a movement. 

But the most superficial study of human life and the relation of thesexes 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 through inheritance, andreproducing and blending with each other in each generation. The humanfemale is bound organically in two ways to the males of her society:collaterally they are her companions and the co-progenitors with herof the race; but she is also the mother of the males of each succeedinggeneration, bearing, shaping, and impressing her personality upon them. The males and females of each human society resemble two oxen tetheredto one yoke: for a moment one may move slightly forward and the otherremain stationary; but they can never move farther from each other thanthe length of the yoke that binds them; and they must ultimatelyremain stationary or move forward together. That which the women of onegeneration are mentally or physically, that by inheritance and educationthe males of the next tend to be: there can be no movement or change inone sex which will not instantly have its co-ordinating effect upon theother; the males of tomorrow are being cast in the mould of the women oftoday. If new ideals, new moral conceptions, new methods of action arefound permeating the minds of the women of one generation, they willreappear in the ideals, moral conceptions, methods of action of the menof thirty years hence; and the idea that the males of a society can everbecome permanently farther removed from its females than the individualman is from the mother who bore and reared him, is at variance withevery law of human inheritance. 

If, further, we turn from an abstract consideration of this supposition, and examine practically in the modern world men and women as they existtoday, the irrationality of the supposition is yet more evident. 

Not merely is the Woman's Movement of our age not a sporadic andabnormal growth, like a cancer bearing no organic relation to thedevelopment of the rest of the social organism, but it is essentiallybut one important phase of a general modification which the whole ofmodern life is undergoing. Further, careful study of the movement willshow that, not only is it not a movement on the part of woman leading toseverance and separation between the woman and the man, but that itis essentially a movement of the woman towards the man, of the sexestowards closer union. 

Much is said at the present day on the subject of the "New Woman" (who, as we have seen, is essentially but the old non-parasitic woman of theremote past, preparing to draw on her new twentieth-century garb):and it cannot truly be said that her attitude finds a lack of socialattention. On every hand she is examined, praised, blamed, mistaken forher counterfeit, ridiculed, or deified--but nowhere can it be said, thatthe phenomenon of her existence 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 itseffects on the present and future, which yet attracts little consciousattention or animadversion, though it makes itself everywhere felt; asthe shade of a growing tree may be sat under year after year by personswho never remark its silent growth. 

Side by side with the "New Woman, " corresponding to her, as the twosides of a coin cast in one mould, though differing from each other insuperficial detail, are yet of one metal, one size, and one value; oldin the sense in which she is old, being merely the reincarnation underthe pressure of new conditions of the ancient forms of his race; new inthe sense in which she is new, in that he is an adaptation to materialand social conditions which have no exact counterpart in the past; morediverse from his immediate progenitors than even the woman is from hers, side by side with her today in every society and in every class in whichshe is found, stands--the New Man!

If it be asked, How comes it to pass, if, under the pressure of socialconditions, man shows an analogous change of attitude toward life, that the change in woman should attract universal attention, whilethe corresponding change in the man of her society passes almostunnoticed?--it would seem that the explanation lies in the fact that, owing to woman's less independence of action in the past, any attemptat change or readaptation on her part has had to overcome greaterresistance, and it is the noise and friction of resistance, more thanthe amount of actual change which has taken place, which attractsattention; as when an Alpine stream, after a long winter frost, breaksthe ice, and with a crash and roar sweeps away the obstructions whichhave gathered in its bed, all men's attention is attracted to it, thoughwhen later a much larger body of water silently forces its way down, noman observes it. (An interesting practical illustration of this factis found in the vast attention and uproar created when the first threewomen in England, some thirty odd years ago, sought to enter the medicalprofession. At the present day scores of women prepare to enter ityearly without attracting any general attention; not that the changewhich is going on is not far more in volume and social importance, butthat, having overcome the first obstruction, it is now noiseless. )

Between the Emilias and Sophy Westerns of a bygone generation and themost typical of modern women, there exists no greater gap (probably notso great a one) as that which exists between the Tom Joneses and SquireWesterns 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, clergyman, lawyer, and politician who headed the social organism of thepast, are at least as distinct from the ideals which dominate thousandsof their male descendants holding corresponding positions in thesocieties of today, as are the ideals of her great-great-grand mother'sremote from those dominating the most modern of New Women. 

That which most forces itself upon us as the result of a close personalstudy of those sections of modern European societies in which changeand adaptation to the new conditions of life are now most rapidlyprogressing, is, not merely that equally large bodies of men and womenare being rapidly modified as to their sexual and social ideals and asto their mode of life, but that this change is strictly complementary. 

If the ideal of the modern woman becomes increasingly one inconsistentwith the passive existence of woman on the remuneration which her sexualattributes may win from man, and marriage becomes for her increasinglya fellowship of comrades, rather than the relationship of the owner andthe bought, the keeper and the kept; the ideal of the typically modernman departs quite as strongly from that of his forefathers in thedirection of finding in woman active companionship and co-operationrather than passive submission. If the New Woman's conception ofparenthood differs from the old in the greater sense of the gravity andobligation resting on those who are responsible for the production ofthe individual life, making her attitude toward the production of herrace widely unlike the reckless, unreasoning, maternal reproduction ofthe woman of the past, the most typical male tends to feel in at leastthe same degree the moral and social obligation entailed by awakeninglifehood: if the ideal which the New Woman shapes for herself of a malecompanion excludes the crudely animal hard-drinking, hard-swearing, licentious, even if materially wealthy gallant of the past; the mosttypically modern male's ideal for himself excludes at least equallythis type. The brothel, the race-course, the gaming-table, and habitsof physical excess among men are still with us; but the most superficialstudy of our societies will show that these have fallen into a new placein the scale of social institutions and manners. The politician, theclergyman, or the lawyer does not improve his social or public standingby violent addictions in these directions; to drink his companionsunder the table, to be known to have the largest number of illicit sexrelations, to be recognised as an habitual visitant of the gamblingsaloon, does not, even in the case of a crowned head, much enhance hisreputation, and with the ordinary man may ultimately prove a bar to allsuccess. If the New Woman's conception of love between the sexes is onemore largely psychic and intellectual than crudely and purely physical, and wholly of an affection between companions; the New Man's conceptionas expressed in the most typical literature and art, produced bytypically modern males, gives voice with a force no woman has surpassedto the same new ideal. If to the typical modern woman the lifelongcompanionship of a Tom Jones or Squire Western would be more intolerablethan death or the most complete celibacy, not less would the mosttypical of modern men shrink from the prospect of a lifelong fettermentto the companionship of an always fainting, weeping, and terrifiedEmilia or a Sophia of a bygone epoch. 

If anywhere on earth exists the perfect ideal of that which the modernwoman desires to be--of a labouring and virile womanhood, free, strong, fearless and tender--it will probably be found imaged in the heart ofthe New Man; engendered there by his own highest needs and aspirations;and nowhere would the most highly developed modern male find an image ofthat which forms his ideal of the most fully developed manhood, than inthe ideal of man which haunts the heart of the New Woman. 

Those have strangely overlooked some of the most important phenomenaof our modern world, who see in the Woman's Movement of our day anyemotional movement of the female against the male, of the woman awayfrom the man. 

We have called the Woman's Movement of our age an endeavour on the partof women among modern civilised races to find new fields of labour asthe old slip from them, as an attempt to escape from parasitism and aninactive dependence upon sex function alone; but, viewed from anotherside, the Woman's Movement might not less justly be called a part ofa great movement of the sexes towards each other, a movement towardscommon occupations, common interests, common ideals, and towards anemotional sympathy between the sexes more deeply founded and moreindestructible than any the world has yet seen. 

But it may be suggested, and the perception of a certain profound truthunderlies this suggestion; How is it, if there be this close reciprocitybetween the lines along which the advanced and typical modern males andfemales are developing, that there does exist in our modern societies, and often among the very classes forming our typically advancedsections, so much of pain, unrest, and sexual disco-ordination at thepresent day?

The reply to this pertinent suggestion is, that the disco-ordination, struggle, and consequent suffering which undoubtedly do exist whenwe regard the world of sexual relationships and ideals in our modernsocieties, do not arise in any way from a disco-ordination between thesexes as such, but are a part of the general upheaval, of the conflictbetween old ideals and new; a struggle which is going on in every branchthe human life in our modern societies, and in which the determiningelement is not sex, but the point of evolution which the race or theindividual has reached. 

It cannot be too often repeated, even at the risk of the most wearisomereiteration, that our societies are societies in a state of rapidevolution and change. The continually changing material conditions oflife, with their reaction on the intellectual, emotional, and moralaspects of human affairs, render our societies the most complex andprobably the most mobile and unsettled which the world has ever seen. As the result of this rapidity of change and complexity, there mustcontinually exist a large amount of disco-ordination, and consequently, of suffering. 

In a stationary society where generation has succeeded generation forhundreds, or it may be for thousands, of years, with little or no changein the material conditions of life, the desires, institutions, and moralprinciples of men, their religious, political, domestic, and sexualinstitutions, have gradually shaped themselves in accordance with theseconditions; and a certain harmony, and homogeneity, and tranquillity, pervades the society. 

In societies in that rapid state of change in which our modern societiesfind themselves, where not merely each decade, but each year, and almostday brings new forces and conditions to bear on life, not only is theamount of suffering and social rupture, which all rapid, excessive, and sudden change entails on an organism, inevitable; but, the newconditions, acting at different angles of intensity on the differentindividual members composing the society, according to their positionsand varying intelligence, are producing a society of such marvellouscomplexity and dissimilarity in the different individual parts, thatthe intensest rupture and disco-ordination between individuals isinevitable; and sexual ideals and relationships must share in theuniversal condition. 

In a primitive society (if a somewhat prolix illustration may beallowed) where for countless generations the conditions of life hadremained absolutely unchanged; where for ages it had been necessary thatall males should employ themselves in subduing wild beasts and meetingdangerous foes, polygamy might universally have been a necessity, if therace were to exist and its numbers be kept up; and society, recognisingthis, polygamy would be an institution universally approved andsubmitted to, however much suffering it entailed. If food were scarce, the destruction of superfluous infants and of the aged might also alwayshave been necessary for the good of the individuals themselves as wellas of society, and the whole society would acquiesce in it without anymoral doubt. If an eclipse of the sun had once occurred in connectionwith the appearance of a certain new insect, they mighty universallyregard that insect as a god causing it; and ages might pass withoutanything arising to disprove their belief. There would be no social orreligious problem; and the view of one man would be the view of allmen; and all would be more or less in harmony with the establishedinstitution and customs. 

But, supposing the sudden arrival of strangers armed with superiorweapons and knowledge, who should exterminate all wild beasts and renderwar and the consequent loss of male life a thing of the past; not onlywould the male be driven to encroach on the female's domain of domesticagriculture and labour generally, but the males, not being so largelydestroyed, they would soon equal and surpass in numbers the females; andnot only would it then become a moot matter, "a problem, " which labourswere or were not to be performed by man and which by woman, but verysoon, not the woman alone nor the man alone, but both, would be drivento speculate as to the desirability or necessity of polygamy, which, were men as numerous as women, would leave many males without sexcompanions. The more intelligent and progressive individuals in thecommunity would almost at once arrive at the conclusion that polygamywas objectionable; the most fearless would seek to carry their theoryinto action; the most ignorant and unprogressive would determinatelystick to the old institutions as inherited from the past, without reasonor question; differences of ideal would cause conflict and dissensionin all parts of the body social, and suffering would ensue, where allbefore was fixed and determinate. So also if the strangers introducednew and improved methods of agriculture, and food became abundant, itwould then at once strike the most far-seeing and readily adaptablemembers of the community, both male and female, that there was nonecessity for the destruction of their offspring; old men and womenwould begin seriously to object to being hastened to death when theyrealised that starvation did not necessarily stare them in the faceif they survived to an extreme old age; the most stupid and hide-boundmembers of the community would still continue to sacrifice parents andoffspring long after the necessity had ceased, under the influence oftraditional bias; many persons would be in a state of much moral doubtas to which course of action to pursue, the old or the new; and bitterconflict might rage in the community on all these points. Were thestrangers to bring with them telescopes, looking through which it mightat once clearly be seen that an eclipse of the sun was caused merely bythe moon's passing over its face, the more intelligent members of thecommunity would at once come to the conclusion that the insect was notthe cause of eclipses, would cease to regard it as a god, and might evenkill it; the more stupid and immobile section of the community mightrefuse to look through the telescope, or looking might refuse to seethat it was the moon which caused the eclipse, and their deep-seatedreverence for the insect, which was the growth of ages, would lead themto regard as impious those individuals who denied its godhead, and mighteven lead to the physical destruction of the first unbelievers. Thesociety, once so homogeneous and co-ordinated in all its parts, wouldbecome at once a society rent by moral and social problems; and endlesssuffering must arise to individuals in the attempt to co-ordinate theideals, manners, and institutions of the society to the new conditions!There might be immense gain in many directions; lives otherwisesacrificed would be spared, a higher and more satisfactory stage ofexistence might be entered on; but the disco-ordination and strugglewould be inevitable until the society had established an equilibriumbetween its knowledge, its material conditions, and its social, sexual, and religious ideals and institutions. 

An analogous condition, but of a far more complex kind, exists at thepresent day in our own societies. Our material environment differs inevery respect from that of our grandparents, and bears little or noresemblance to that of a few centuries ago. Here and there, even in ourcivilised societies in remote agricultural districts, the old socialconditions may remain partly undisturbed; but throughout the bulk ofour societies the substitution of mechanical for hand-labour, thewide diffusion of knowledge through the always increasing cheapprinting-press; the rapidly increasing gathering of human creatures intovast cities, where not merely thousands but millions of individuals arecollected together under physical and mental conditions of life whichinvert every social condition of the past; the increasingly rapid meansof locomotion; the increasing intercourse between distant races andlands, brought about by rapid means of intercommunication, wideningand changing in every direction the human horizon--all these produce asociety, so complex and so rapidly altering, that social co-ordinationbetween all its parts is impossible; and social unrest, and the strifeof ideals of faiths, of institutions, and consequent human suffering isinevitable. 

If the ancient guns and agricultural implements which our fatherstaught us to use are valueless in the hands of their descendants, if thesamplers our mothers worked and the stockings they knitted are becomesuperfluous through the action of the modern loom, yet more are theirsocial institutions, faiths, and manners of life become daily andincreasingly unfitted to our use; and friction and suffering inevitable, especially for the most advanced and modified individuals in oursocieties. This suffering, if we analyse it closely, rises from threecauses. 

Firstly, it is caused by the fact that mere excessive rapidity of changetends always easily to become painful, by rupturing violently alreadyhardened habits and modes of thought, as a very rapidly growing treeruptures its bark and exudes its internal juices. 

Secondly, it arises from the fact that individuals of the same humansociety, not adapting themselves at the same rate to the new conditions, or being exposed to them in different degrees, a wide and almostunparalleled dissimilarity has today arisen between the differentindividuals composing our societies; where, side by side with men andwomen who have rapidly adapted or are so successfully seeking to adaptthemselves to the new conditions of knowledge and new conditions oflife, that, were they to reappear in future ages in more co-ordinatedsocieties, they might perhaps hardly appear wholly antiquated, are to befound men and women whose social, religious, and moral ideals would notconstitute them out of harmony if returned to the primitive camps of theremote forbears of the human race; while, between these extreme classeslies that large mass of persons in an intermediate state of development. This diversity is bound to cause friction and suffering in theinteractions of the members of our societies; more especially, as theindividuals composing each type are not sorted out into classes andfamilies, but are found scattered through all classes and grades in oursocieties. (One of the women holding the most advanced and modern viewof the relation of woman to life whom we have met was the wife of aNorthamptonshire shoemaker; herself engaged in making her living by thesewing of the uppers of men's boots. ) Persons bound by the closest tiesof blood or social contiguity and compelled to a continual intercourse, are often those most widely dissevered in their amount of adaptationto the new conditions of life; and the amount of social friction andconsequent human suffering arising from this fact is so subtle andalmost incalculable, that perhaps it is impossible adequately to portrayit in dry didactic language: it is only truly describable in the mediumof art, where actual concrete individuals are shown acting and reactingon each other--as in the novel or the drama. We are like a company ofchess-men, not sorted out in kinds, pawns together, kings and queenstogether, and knights and rooks together, but simply thrown at haphazardinto a box, and jumbled side by side. In the stationary societies, whereall individuals were permeated by the same political, religious, moral, and social ideas; and where each class had its own hereditary and fixedtraditions of action and manners, this cause of friction and sufferinghad of necessity no existence; individual differences and discord mightbe occasioned by personal greeds, ambitions, and selfishnesses, butnot by conflicting conceptions of right and wrong, of the desirable andundesirable, in all branches of human life. (Only those who have beenthrown into contact with a stationary and homogeneous society suchas that of primitive African tribes before coming in contact withEuropeans; or such as the up-country Boers of South Africa were twentyyears ago, can realise adequately how wholly free from moral and socialproblems and social friction such a society can be. It is in studyingsuch societies that the truth is vividly forced on one, that the key tohalf, and more than half, of the phenomena in our own social condition, can be found only in our rapidly changing conditions necessitatingequally rapid change in our conceptions, ideals, and institutions. )

Thirdly, the unrest and suffering peculiar to our age is caused byconflict going on within the individual himself. So intensely rapid isthe change which is taking place in our environment and knowledge thatin the course of a single life a man may pass through half a dozenphases of growth. Born and reared in possession of certain ideas andmanners of action, he or she may, before middle life is reached, havehad occasion repeatedly to modify, enlarge, and alter, or completelythrow aside those traditions. Within the individuality itself of suchpersons, goes on, in an intensified form, that very struggle, conflict, and disco-ordination which is going on in society at large between itsdifferent members and sections; and agonising moments must arise, whenthe individual, seeing the necessity for adopting new courses of action, or for accepting new truths, or conforming to new conditions, will yetbe tortured by the hold of traditional convictions; and the man or womanwho attempts to adapt their life to the new material conditions and toharmony with the new knowledge, is almost bound at some time to rupturethe continuity of their own psychological existence. 

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 socialproblems, religious, political, and sexual, to which the art of the pastholds no parallel; and it is so inevitably, because the artist who wouldobey 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 inevitable in this age, as it wasinevitable that the artist of the eleventh century should portraytournaments, physical battles, and chivalry, because they were thedominant element in the life about him. 

It is also inevitable that this suffering and conflict must make itselffelt in its acutest form in the person of the most advanced individualof our societies. It is the swimmer who first leaps into the frozenstream who is cut sharpest by the ice; those who follow him find itbroken, and the last find it gone. It is the man or woman who firsttreads down the path which the bulk of humanity will ultimately follow, who must find themselves at last in solitudes where the silence isdeadly. The fact that any course of human action leading to adjustment, leads also to immediate suffering, by dividing the individual fromthe bulk of his fellows; is no argument against it; that solitude andsuffering is the crown of thorns which marks the kingship of earth'sMessiahs: 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 divisionof human life, religious, political, and domestic; and, if they are morenoticeable, and make themselves more keenly felt in the region of sexthan in any other, even the religious, it is because when we enter theregion of sex we touch, as it were, the spinal cord of human existence, its great nerve centre, where sensation is most acute, and pain andpleasure most keenly felt. It is not sex disco-ordination that is at theroot of our social unrest; it is the universal disco-ordination whichaffects even the world of sex phenomena. 

Also it is necessary to note that the line which divides the progressivesections of our communities, seeking to co-ordinate themselves to thenew conditions of life, from the retrogressive, is not a line runningcoincidentally with the line of sex. A George Sand and a Henrik Ibsenbelong more essentially to the same class in the order of moderndevelopment, than either belongs to any class composed entirely of theirown sex. If we divide humanity into classes according to type, in eachdivision will be found the male with his complementary female. Side byside with the old harlot at the street corner anxious to sell herself, stands the old aboriginal male, whether covered or not with a veneer ofcivilisation, eager and desiring to buy. Side by side with the parasiticwoman, seeking only increased pleasure and luxury from her relationswith man, stands the male seeking only pleasure and self-indulgence fromhis relations with her. Side by side with the New Woman, anxious forlabour and seeking from man only such love and fellowship 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 ourday are attempting to bring themselves into co-ordination with the newconditions of life, removes them immeasurably from certain types of theprimitive male; the same movement equally removes the new male from theold female. The sexual tragedy of modern life lies, not in the fact thatwoman as such is tending to differ fundamentally from man as such; butthat, in the unassorted confusion of our modern life, it is continuallythe modified type of man or woman who is thrown into the closestpersonal relations with the antiquated type of the opposite sex; thatbetween father and daughter, mother and son, brother and sister, husbandand wife, may sometimes be found to intervene not merely years, but evencenturies of social evolution. 

It is not man as man who opposes the attempt of woman to readjustherself to the new conditions of life: that opposition arises, perhapsmore often, from the retrogressive members of her own sex. And it is afact which will surprise no one who has studied the conditions of modernlife; that among the works of literature in all European languages, which most powerfully advocate the entrance of woman into the new fieldsof labour, and which most uncompromisingly demand for her the widesttraining and freedom of action, and which most passionately seek forthe breaking down of all artificial lines which sever the woman from theman, many of the ablest and most uncompromising are the works of males. 

The New Man and Woman do not resemble two people, who, standing on alevel plain, set out on two roads, which diverging at different anglesand continued in straight lines, must continue to take them farther andfarther from each other the longer they proceed in them; rather, theyresemble two persons who start to climb a spur of the same mountain fromopposite sides; where, the higher they climb the nearer they come toeach other, being bound ultimately to meet at the top. 

Even that opposition often made by males to the entrance of woman intothe new fields of labour, of which they at present hold the monopoly, is not fundamentally sexual in its nature. The male who opposes theentrance of woman into the trade or profession in which he holds moreor less a monopoly, would oppose with equal, and perhaps even greaterbitterness, the opening of its doors to numbers of his own sex whohad before been excluded, and who would limit his gains and share hisprivileges. It is the primitive brute instinct to retain as muchas possible for the ego, irrespective of justice or humanity, whichdominates all the lower moral types of humanity, both male and female, which acts here. The lawyer or physician who objects to the entrance ofwomen to his highly fenced professional enclosure, would probably objectyet more strenuously if it were proposed to throw down the barriers ofrestraint and monetary charges, which would result in the floodingof his profession by other males: while the mechanic, who resists theentrance of woman into his especial field, is invariably found evenmore persistently to oppose any attempt at entrance on the part of othermales, when he finds it possible to do so. 

This opposition of the smaller type of male, to the entrance of womaninto the callings hitherto apportioned to himself, is sometimes taken asimplying the impossibility of fellowship and affection existing betweenthe men and women employed in common labour, that the professionaljealousy of the man must necessitate his feeling a hatred and antagonismtowards any one who shares his fields of toil. But the most superficialstudy of human life negates such a supposition. Among men, in spiteof the occasional existence of the petty professional jealousies andantagonism, we find, viewing society as a whole, that common interests, and above all common labours, are the most potent means of bringing theminto close and friendly relations; and, in fact, they seem generallyessential for the formation of the closest and most permanent humanfriendships. In every walk of human life, whether trade, or profession, we find men associating by choice mainly with, and entertaining oftenthe profoundest and most permanent friendships for, men engaged intheir own callings. The inner circle of a barrister's friendships almostalways consists of his fellow-barristers; the city man, who is free toselect his society where he will, will be oftenest found in company withhis fellow-man of business; the medical man's closest friendship is, ina large number of cases, for some man who was once his fellow-studentand has passed through the different stages of his professional lifewith him; the friends and chosen companions of the actor are commonlyactors; of the savant, savants; of the farmer, farmers; of the sailor, sailors. So generally is this the case that it would almost attractattention and cause amusement were the boon companion of the sea captaina leading politician, and the intimate 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 owncalling are found, and especially as life advances and men sink deeperinto their professional grooves, they are found to seek fellowshipmainly among their fellow-workers. That this should be so is inevitable;common amusements may create a certain bond between the young, butthe performance of common labours, necessitating identical knowledge, identical habits, and modes of thought, forms a far stronger bond, drawing men far more powerfully towards social intercourse and personalfriendship and affection than the centrifugal force of professionaljealousies can divide them. 

That the same condition would prevail where women became fellow-workerswith men might be inferred on abstract grounds: but practical experienceconfirms this. The actor oftenest marries the actress, the male musicianthe female; the reception-room of the literary woman or femalepainter is found continually frequented by men of her own calling; thewoman-doctor associates continually with and often marries one of herown confreres; and as women in increasing numbers share the fields oflabour with men, which have hitherto been apportioned to them alone, thenature and strength of the sympathy arising from common labours will beincreasingly clear. 

The sharing by men and women of the same labours, necessitating a commonculture and therefore common habits of thought and interests, wouldtend to fill that painful hiatus which arises so continually in modernconjugal life, dividing the man and woman as soon as the first sheen ofphysical sexual attraction which glints only over the unknown begins tofade, and from which springs so large a part of the tragedy of modernconjugal relations. The primitive male might discuss with her hissuccess in hunting and her success in finding roots; as the primitivepeasant may discuss today with his wife the crops and cows in which bothare equally interested and which both understand; there is nothing intheir order of life to produce always increasingly divergent habits ofthought and interest. 

In modern civilised life, in many sections, the lack of any commonlabour and interests and the wide dissimilarity of the life led by theman and the woman, tend continually to produce increasing divergence; sothat, long before middle life is reached, they are left without anybond of co-cohesion but that of habit. The comradeship and continualstimulation, rising from intercourse with those sharing our closestinterests and regarding life from the same standpoint, the man tends toseek in his club and among his male companions, and the woman acceptssolitude, or seeks dissipations which tend yet farther to disrupt thecommon conjugal life. A certain mental camaraderie and community ofimpersonal interests is imperative in conjugal life in addition to apurely sexual relation, if the union is to remain a living and alwaysgrowing reality. It is more especially because the sharing by woman ofthe labours of man will tend to promote camaraderie and the existence ofcommon, impersonal interests and like habits of thought and life, thatthe entrance of women into the very fields shared by men, and not intoothers peculiarly reserved for her, is so desirable. (The reply oncegiven by the wife of a leading barrister, when reference was made to thefact 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 husband, " she said, "is always increasingly absorbed in his legalduties, of which I understand nothing, and which so do not interest me. My children are all growing up and at school. I have servants enough toattend to my house. When he comes home in the evening, if I try to amusehim by telling him of the things I have been doing during the day, ofthe bazaars I am working for, the shopping I have done, the visits Ihave paid, he is bored. He is anxious to get away to his study, hisbooks, and his men friends, and I am left utterly alone. If it were notfor 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 fellin love, we danced and rode together and seemed to have everything incommon; now we have nothing. I respect him and I believe he respects me, but that is all!" It is, perhaps, only in close confidences betweenman and man and woman and woman that this open sore, rising from thedivergence in training, habits of life, and occupation between menand women is spoken of; but it lies as a tragic element at the core ofmillions of modern conjugal relations, beneath the smooth superficialsurface of our modern life; breaking out to the surface onlyoccasionally in the revelations of our divorce courts. )

It is a gracious fact, to which every woman who has achieved success oraccomplished good work in any of the fields generally apportioned to menwill bear witness, whether that work be in the field of literature, ofscience, or the organised professions, that the hands which have beenmost eagerly stretched our to welcome her have been those of men; thatthe voices which have most generously acclaimed her success have beenthose of male fellow-workers in the fields into which she has entered. 

There is no door at which the hand of woman has knocked for admissioninto a new field of toil but there have been found on the other side thehands of strong and generous men eager to turn it for her, almost beforeshe knocks. 

To those of us who, at the beginning of a new century, stand with shadedeyes, gazing into the future, striving to descry the outlines of theshadowy figures which loom before us in the distance, nothing seems ofso gracious a promise, as the outline we seem to discern of a conditionof human life in which a closer union than the world has yet seen shallexist between the man and the woman: where the Walhalla of our oldNorthern ancestors shall find its realisation in a concrete reality, and the Walkurie and her hero feast together at one board, in a bravefellowship. 

Always in our dreams we hear the turn of the key that shall close thedoor of the last brothel; the clink of the last coin that pays for thebody and soul of a woman; the falling of the last wall that enclosesartificially the activity of woman and divides her from man; always wepicture 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. 

Today, as we row hard against the stream of life, is it only a blindnessin our eyes, which have been too long strained, which makes us see, farup the river where it fades into the distance, through all the miststhat rise from the river-banks, a clear, a golden light? Is it only adelusion of the eyes which makes us grasp our oars more lightly and bendour backs lower; though we know well that long before the boat reachesthose stretches, other hands than ours will man the oars and guide itshelm? Is it all a dream?

The ancient Chaldean seer had a vision of a Garden of Eden which lay ina remote past. It was dreamed that man and woman once lived in joy andfellowship, till woman ate of the tree of knowledge and gave to man toeat; 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. Wedream that woman shall eat of the tree of knowledge together with man, and that side by side and hand close to hand, through ages of much toiland labour, they shall together raise about them an Eden nobler than anythe Chaldean dreamed of; an Eden created by their own labour and madebeautiful by their own fellowship. 

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 andco-workers. 

It is because so wide and gracious to us are the possibilities of thefuture; so impossible is a return to the past, so deadly is a passiveacquiescence in the present, that today we are found everywhere raisingour strange new cry--"Labour and the training that fits us for labour!"