desire and emotion between the two sexual halves of humanity being severed?
If the race is to decay and become extinct on earth, might it not as well
be through the parasitism and decay of woman, as through the decay of the
sexual instinct?

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

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

When one considers the part which sexual attraction plays in the order of
sentient life on the globe, from the almost unconscious attractions which
draw amoeboid globule to amoeboid globule, on through the endless
progressive forms of life; till in monogamous birds it expresses itself in
song and complex courtship and sometimes in the life-long conjugal
affection of mates; and which in the human race itself, passing through
various forms, from the imperative but almost purely physical attraction of
savage male and female for each other, till in the highly developed male
and female it assumes its aesthetic and intellectual but not less
imperative form, couching itself in the songs of poet, and the sometimes