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