We have seen that, in the past, no such thing as the parasitism of the
entire body or large majority of the females inhabiting any territory was
possible. Beneath that body of women of the dominant class or race, who
did not labour either mentally or physically, there has always been of
necessity a far more vast body of females who not only performed the crude
physical toil essential to the existence of society before the introduction
of mechanical methods of production, but who were compelled to labour the
more intensely because there was a parasite class above them to be
maintained by their physical toil. The more the female parasite flourished
of old, in one class or race, the more certainly all women of other classes
or races were compelled to labour only too excessively; and ultimately
these females and their descendants were apt to supplant the more enervated
class or race. In the absence of machinery and of a vast employment of the
motor-forces of nature, parasitism could only threaten a comparatively
small section of any community, and a minute section of the human race as a
whole. Female parasitism in the past resembled gout--a disease dangerous
only to the over-fed, pampered, and few, never to the population of any
society as a whole.

At the present day, so enormous has been the advance made in the
substitution of mechanical force for crude, physical, human exertion
(mechanical force being employed today even in the shaping of feeding-
bottles and the creation of artificial foods as substitutes for mother's
milk!), that it is now possible not only for a small and wealthy section of
women in each civilised community to be maintained without performing any
of the ancient, crude, physical labours of their sex, and without depending
on the slavery of, or any vast increase in the labour of, other classes of
females; but this condition has already been reached, or is tending to be
reached, by that large mass of women in civilised societies, who form the