disease, should propose as a cure to inoculate them all with it in its most
virulent form!)

As new forms of natural force are mastered and mechanical appliances
perfected, it will be quite possible for the male half of all civilised
races (and therefore ultimately of all) to absorb the entire fields of
intellectual and highly trained manual labour; and it would be entirely
possible for the female half of the race, whether as prostitutes, as kept
mistresses, or as kept wives, to cease from all forms of active toil, and,
as the passive tools of sexual reproduction, or, more decadently still, as
the mere instruments of sexual indulgence, to sink into a condition of
complete and helpless sex-parasitism.

Sex-parasitism, therefore, presents itself at the end of the nineteenth
century and beginning of the twentieth in a guise which it has never before
worn. We, the European women of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
stand therefore in a position the gravity and importance of which was not
equalled by that of any of our forerunners in the ancient civilisation. As
we master and rise above, or fall and are conquered by, the difficulties of
our position, so also will be the future, not merely of our own class, or
even of our own race alone, but also of those vast masses who are following
on in the wake of our civilisation. The decision we are called on to make
is a decision for the race; behind us comes on the tread of incalculable
millions of feet.

There is thus no truth in the assertion so often made, even by thoughtful
persons, that the male labour question and the woman's question of our day
are completely one, and that, would the women of the European race of today
but wait peacefully till the males alone had solved their problem, they
would find that their own had been solved at the same time.