the world have the males of any period, of any nation, or of any class,
shown the slightest inclination to allow their own females to become
inactive or parasitic, so long as the actual muscular labour of feeding and
clothing them would in that case have devolved upon themselves!

The parasitism of the human female becomes a possibility only when a point
in civilisation is reached (such as that which was attained in the ancient
civilisations of Greece, Rome, Persia, Assyria, India, and such as today
exists in many of the civilisations of the East, such as those of China and
Turkey), when, owing to the extensive employment of the labour of slaves,
or of subject races or classes, the dominant race or class has become so
liberally supplied with the material goods of life, that mere physical toil
on the part of its own female members has become unnecessary. It is when
this point has been reached, and never before, that the symptoms of female
parasitism have in the past almost invariably tended to manifest
themselves, and have become a social danger. The males of the dominant
class have almost always contrived to absorb to themselves the new
intellectual occupations, with the absence of necessity for the old forms
of physical toil made possible in their societies; and the females of the
dominant class or race, for whose muscular labours there was now also no
longer any need, not succeeding in grasping or attaining to these new forms
of labour, have sunk into a state in which, performing no species of active
social duty, they have existed through the passive performance of sexual
functions alone, with how much or how little of discontent will now never
be known, since no literary record has been made by the woman of the past,
of her desires or sorrows. Then, in place of the active labouring woman,
upholding society by her toil, has come the effete wife, concubine, or
prostitute, clad in fine raiment, the work of others' fingers; fed on
luxurious viands, the result of others' toil, waited on and tended by the
labour of others. The need for her physical labour having gone, and mental