action, economic independence and wider culture, may result in a severance
between the sexes, it becomes clear what that fallacious appearance is,
which suggests this.

The entrance of a woman into new fields of labour, though bringing her
increased freedom and economic independence, and necessitating increased
mental training and wider knowledge, could not extinguish the primordial
physical instinct which draws sex to sex throughout all the orders of
sentient life; and still less could it annihilate that subtler mental need,
which, as humanity develops, draws sex to sex for emotional fellowship and
close intercourse; but, it might, and undoubtedly would, powerfully react
and readjust the relations of certain men with certain women!

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

In the barbarian state of societies, where physical force dominates, it is
the most muscular and pugilistically and brutally and animally successful
male who captures and possesses the largest number of females; and no doubt
he would be justified in regarding any social change which gave to woman a
larger freedom of choice, and which would so perhaps give to the less
brutal but perhaps more intelligent male, whom the woman might select, an
equal opportunity for the gratification of his sexual wishes and for the
producing of offspring, as a serious loss. And, from the purely personal
standpoint, he would undoubtedly be right in dreading anything which tended
to free woman. But he would manifestly not have been justified in
asserting, that woman's increased freedom of choice, or the fact that the