intermediate class between poor and rich. During the next fifty years, so
rapid will undoubtedly be the spread of the material conditions of
civilisation, both in the societies at present civilised and in the
societies at present unpermeated by our material civilisation, that the
ancient forms of female, domestic, physical labour of even the women of the
poorest classes will be little required, their place being taken, not by
other females, but by always increasingly perfected labour-saving
machinery.

Thus, female parasitism, which in the past threatened only a minute section
of earth's women, under existing conditions threatens vast masses, and may,
under future conditions, threaten the entire body.

If woman is content to leave to the male all labour in the new and all-
important fields which are rapidly opening before the human race; if, as
the old forms of domestic labour slip from her for ever and evitably, she
does not grasp the new, it is inevitable, that, ultimately, not merely a
class, but the whole bodies of females in civilised societies, must sink
into a state of more or less absolute dependence on their sexual functions
alone. (How real is this apparently very remote danger is interestingly
illustrated by a proposition gravely made a few years ago by a man of note
in England. He proposed that a compulsory provision should be made for at
least the women of the upper and middle classes, by which they might be
maintained through life entirely without regard to any productive labour
they might perform, not even the passive labour of sexual reproduction
being of necessity required of them. That this proposal was received by
the women striving to reconstruct the relation of the modern woman to life
without acclamation and with scorn, may have surprised its maker; but with
no more reason than that man would have for feeling surprise who, seeing a
number of persons anxious to escape the infection of some contagious