question of sex-parasitism among the lower animals is one throwing
suggestive and instructive side-lights on human social problems, but is too
extensive to be here entered on.)

Again and again in the history of the past, when among human creatures a
certain stage of material civilisation has been reached, a curious tendency
has manifested itself for the human female to become more or less
parasitic; social conditions tend to rob her of all forms of active,
conscious, social labour, and to reduce her, like the field-tick, to the
passive exercise of her sex functions alone. And the result of this
parasitism has invariably been the decay in vitality and intelligence of
the female, followed after a longer or shorter period by that of her male
descendants and her entire society.

Nevertheless, in the history of the past the dangers of the sex-parasitism
have never threatened more than a small section of the females of the human
race, those exclusively of some comparatively small dominant race or class;
the mass of women beneath them being still compelled to assume many forms
of strenuous activity. It is at the present day, and under the peculiar
conditions of our modern civilisation, that for the first time sex-
parasitism has become a danger, more or less remote, to the mass of
civilised women, perhaps ultimately to all.

In the very early stages of human growth, the sexual parasitism and
degeneration of the female formed no possible source of social danger.
Where the conditions of life rendered it inevitable that all the labour of
a community should be performed by the members of that community for
themselves, without the assistance of slaves or machinery, the tendency has
always been rather to throw an excessive amount of social labour on the
female. Under no conditions, at no time, in no place, in the history of