of compelling herself to do anything which was at the moment fatiguing or
displeasing, as all labour is apt to be, however great its ultimate reward.
In a life of twenty-eight years this woman had probably not contributed one
hour's earnest toil, mental or physical, to the increase of the sum total
of productive human labour. Surrounded with acres of cultivable land, she
would possibly have preferred to lie down and die of hunger rather than
have cultivated half an acre for food. This is an extreme case; but the
ultimate effect of parasitism is always a paralysis of the will and an
inability to compel oneself into any course of action for the moment
unpleasurable and exhaustive.)

That the two problems are not identical is shown, if indeed evidence were
needed, by the fact that those males most actively employed in attempting
to readjust the relations of the mass of labouring males to the new
conditions of life, are sometimes precisely those males who are most
bitterly opposed to woman in her attempt to readjust her own position. Not
even by the members of those professions, generally regarded as the
strongholds of obstructionism and prejudice, has a more short-sighted
opposition often been made to the attempts of woman to enter new fields of
labour, than have again and again been made by male hand-workers, whether
as isolated individuals or in their corporate capacity as trade unions.
They have, at least in some certain instances, endeavoured to exclude
women, not merely from new fields of intellectual and social labour, but
even from those ancient fields of textile manufacture and handicraft, which
have through all generations of the past been woman's. The patent and
undeniable fact, that where the male labour movement flourishes the woman
movement also flourishes, rises not from the fact that they are identical,
but that the same healthy and virile condition in a race or society gives
rise to both.