Is it to be, that, in the future, machinery and the captive motor-forces
of nature are largely to take the place of human hand and foot in
the labour of clothing and feeding the nations; are these branches
of industry to be no longer domestic labours?--then, we demand in the
factory, the warehouse, and the field, wherever machinery has usurped
our ancient labour-ground, that we also should have our place, as
guiders, controllers, and possessors. Is child-bearing to become the
labour of but a portion of our sex?--then we demand for those among
us who are allowed to take no share in it, compensatory and equally
honourable and important fields of social toil. Is the training of
human creatures to become a yet more and more onerous and laborious
occupation, their education and culture to become increasingly a high
art, complex and scientific?--if so, then, we demand that high and
complex culture and training which shall fit us for instructing the race
which we bring into the world. Is the demand for child-bearing to
become so diminished that, even in the lives of those among us who are
child-bearers, it shall fill no more than half a dozen years out of the
three-score-and-ten of human life?--then we demand that an additional
outlet be ours which shall fill up with dignity and value the tale
of the years not so employed. Is intellectual labour to take ever and
increasingly the place of crude muscular exertion in the labour of
life?--then we demand for ourselves that culture and the freedom
of action which alone can yield us the knowledge of life and the
intellectual vigour and strength which will enable us to undertake the
same share of mental which we have borne in the past in physical labours
of life. Are the rulers of the race to be no more its kings and queens,
but the mass of the peoples?--then we, one-half of the nations, demand
our full queens’ share in the duties and labours of government and
legislation. Slowly but determinately, as the old fields of labour close
up and are submerged behind us, we demand entrance into the new.
We make this demand, not for our own sakes alone, but for the succour of
the race.
A horseman, riding along on a dark night in an unknown land, may chance
to feel his horse start beneath him; rearing, it may almost hurl him to
the earth: in the darkness he may curse his beast, and believe its aim
is simply to cast him off, and free itself for ever of its burden.
But when the morning dawns and lights the hills and valleys he has
travelled, looking backward, he may perceive that the spot where his
beast reared, planting its feet into the earth, and where it refused to
move farther on the old road, was indeed the edge of a mighty precipice,
down which one step more would have precipitated both horse and rider.
And he may then see that it was an instinct wiser than his own which
lead his creature, though in the dark, to leap backward, seeking a
new path along which both might travel. (Is it not recorded that even
Balaam’s ass on which he rode saw the angel with flaming sword, but
Balaam saw it not?)
In the confusion and darkness of the present, it may well seem to
some, that woman, in her desire to seek for new paths of labour and
employment, is guided only by an irresponsible impulse; or that she
seeks selfishly only her own good, at the cost of that of the race,
which she has so long and faithfully borne onward. But, when a clearer
future shall have arisen and the obscuring mists of the present have
been dissipated, may it not then be clearly manifest that not for
herself alone, but for her entire race, has woman sought her new paths?
For let it be noted exactly what our position is, who today, as
women, are demanding new fields of labour and a reconstruction of our
relationship with life.
It is often said that the labour problem before the modern woman and
that before the unemployed or partially or almost uselessly employed
male, are absolutely identical; and that therefore, when the male labour
problem of our age solves itself, that of the woman will of necessity
have met its solution also.
This statement, with a certain specious semblance of truth, is yet, we
believe, radically and fundamentally false. It is true that both the
male and the female problems of our age have taken their rise largely
in the same rapid material changes which during the last centuries,
and more especially the last ninety years, have altered the face of the
human world. Both men and women have been robbed by those changes of
their ancient remunerative fields of social work: here the resemblance
stops. The male, from whom the changes of modern civilisation have taken
his ancient field of labour, has but one choice before him: he must find
new fields of labour, or he must perish. Society will not ultimately
support him in an absolutely quiescent and almost useless condition.
If he does not vigorously exert himself in some direction or other (the
direction may even be predatory) he must ultimately be annihilated.
Individual drones, both among the wealthiest and the poorest classes
(millionaires’ sons, dukes, or tramps), may in isolated cases be
preserved, and allowed to reproduce themselves without any exertion
or activity of mind or body, but a vast body of males who, having lost
their old forms of social employment, should refuse in any way to exert
themselves or seek for new, would at no great length of time become
extinct. There never has been, and as far as can be seen, there never
will be, a time when the majority of the males in any society will be
supported by the rest of the males in a condition of perfect mental and
physical inactivity. “Find labour or die,” is the choice ultimately put
before the human male today, as in the past; and this constitutes his
labour problem. (The nearest approach to complete parasitism on the part
of a vast body of males occurred, perhaps, in ancient Rome at the
time of the decay and downfall of the Empire, when the bulk of the
population, male as well as female, was fed on imported corn, wine,
and oil, and supplied even with entertainment, almost entirely without
exertion or labour of any kind; but this condition was of short
duration, and speedily contributed to the downfall of the diseased
Empire itself. Among the wealthy and so-called upper classes, the males
of various aristocracies have frequently tended to become completely
parasitic after a lapse of time, but such a condition has always been
met by a short and sharp remedy; and the class has fallen, or become
extinct. The condition of the males of the upper classes in France
before the Revolution affords an interesting illustration of this
point.)
The labour of the man may not always be useful in the highest sense to
his society, or it may even be distinctly harmful and antisocial, as in
the case of the robber-barons of the Middle Ages, who lived by capturing
and despoiling all who passed by their castles; or as in the case of
the share speculators, stock-jobbers, ring-and-corner capitalists, and
monopolists of the present day, who feed upon the productive labours of
society without contributing anything to its welfare. But even males so
occupied are compelled to expend a vast amount of energy and even a
low intelligence in their callings; and, however injurious to their
societies, they run no personal risk of handing down effete and
enervated constitutions to their race. Whether beneficially or
unbeneficially, the human male must, generally speaking, employ his
intellect, or his muscle, or die.
The position of the unemployed modern female is one wholly different.
The choice before her, as her ancient fields of domestic labour slip
from her, is not generally or often at the present day the choice
between finding new fields of labour, or death; but one far more serious
in its ultimate reaction on humanity as a whole--it is the choice
between finding new forms of labour or sinking slowly into a condition
of more or less complete and passive sex-parasitism! (It is not without
profound interest to note the varying phenomena of sex-parasitism as
they present themselves in the animal world, both in the male and in the
female form. Though among the greater number of species in the animal
world the female form is larger and more powerful rather than the male
(e.g., among birds of prey, such as eagles, falcons, vultures, &c., and
among fishes, insects, &c.), yet sex-parasitism appears among both sex
forms. In certain sea-creatures, for example, the female carries about
in the folds of her covering three or four minute and quite inactive
males, who are entirely passive and dependent upon her. Among termites,
on the other hand, the female has so far degenerated that she has
entirely lost the power of locomotion; she can no longer provide herself
or her offspring with nourishment, or defend or even clean herself; she
has become a mere passive, distended bag of eggs, without intelligence
or activity, she and her offspring existing through the exertions of
the workers of the community. Among other insects, such, for example, as
certain ticks, another form of female parasitism prevails, and while the
male remains a complex, highly active, and winded creature, the female,
fastening herself by the head into the flesh of some living animal
and sucking its blood, has lost wings and all activity, and power of
locomotion; having become a mere distended bladder, which when filled
with eggs bursts and ends a parasitic existence which has hardly been
life. It is not impossible, and it appears, indeed, highly probable,
that it has been this degeneration and parasitism on the part of the
female which has set its limitation to the evolution of ants, creatures
which, having reached a point of mental development in some respects
almost as high as that of man, have yet become curiously and immovably
arrested. The whole question of sex-parasitism among the lower animals
is one throwing suggestive and instructive side-lights on human social
problems, but is too extensive to be here entered on.)
Again and again in the history of the past, when among human creatures
a certain stage of material civilisation has been reached, a curious
tendency has manifested itself for the human female to become more
or less parasitic; social conditions tend to rob her of all forms
of active, conscious, social labour, and to reduce her, like the
field-tick, to the passive exercise of her sex functions alone. And the
result of this parasitism has invariably been the decay in vitality and
intelligence of the female, followed after a longer or shorter period by
that of her male descendants and her entire society.
Nevertheless, in the history of the past the dangers of the
sex-parasitism have never threatened more than a small section of the
females of the human race, those exclusively of some comparatively
small dominant race or class; the mass of women beneath them being
still compelled to assume many forms of strenuous activity. It is at
the present day, and under the peculiar conditions of our modern
civilisation, that for the first time sex-parasitism has become a
danger, more or less remote, to the mass of civilised women, perhaps
ultimately to all.
In the very early stages of human growth, the sexual parasitism and
degeneration of the female formed no possible source of social danger.
Where the conditions of life rendered it inevitable that all the labour
of a community should be performed by the members of that community for
themselves, without the assistance of slaves or machinery, the tendency
has always been rather to throw an excessive amount of social labour on
the female. Under no conditions, at no time, in no place, in the history
of 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
industry not having taken its place, she bedecked and scented her
person, or had it bedecked and scented for her, she lay upon her sofa,
or drove or was carried out in her vehicle, and, loaded with jewels, she
sought by dissipations and amusements to fill up the inordinate blank
left by the lack of productive activity. And as the hand whitened and
frame softened, till, at last, the very duties of motherhood, which were
all the constitution of her life left her, became distasteful, and, from
the instant when her infant came damp from her womb, it passed into the
hands of others, to be tended and reared by them; and from youth to age
her offspring often owed nothing to her personal toil. In many cases so
complete was her enervation, that at last the very joy of giving life,
the glory and beatitude of a virile womanhood, became distasteful;
and she sought to evade it, not because of its interference with more
imperious duties to those already born of her, or to her society,
but because her existence of inactivity had robbed her of all joy in
strenuous exertion and endurance in any form. Finely clad, tenderly
housed, life became for her merely the gratification of her own physical
and sexual appetites, and the appetites of the male, through the
stimulation of which she could maintain herself. And, whether as kept
wife, kept mistress, or prostitute, she contributed nothing to the
active and sustaining labours of her society. She had attained to the
full development of that type which, whether in modern Paris or New York
or London, or in ancient Greece, Assyria, or Rome, is essentially one in
its features, its nature, and its results. She was the “fine lady,”
the human female parasite--the most deadly microbe which can make its
appearance on the surface of any social organism. (The relation of
female parasitism generally, to the peculiar phenomenon of prostitution,
is fundamental. Prostitution can never be adequately dealt with, either
from the moral or the scientific standpoint, unless its relation to the
general phenomenon of female parasitism be fully recognised. It is the
failure to do this which leaves so painful a sense of abortion on the
mind, after listening to most modern utterances on the question,
whether made from the emotional platform of the moral reformer, or the
intellectual platform of the would-be scientist. We are left with a
feeling that the matter has been handled but not dealt with: that the
knife has not reached the core.)
Wherever in the history of the past this type has reached its full
development and has comprised the bulk of the females belonging to any
dominant class or race, it has heralded its decay. In Assyria, Greece,
Rome, Persia, as in Turkey today, the same material conditions have
produced the same social disease among wealthy and dominant races; and
again and again when the nation so affected has come into contact
with nations more healthily constituted, this diseased condition has
contributed to its destruction.
In ancient Greece, in its superb and virile youth, its womanhood was
richly and even heavily endowed with duties and occupations. Not the
mass of the woman alone, but the king’s wife and the prince’s daughter
do we find going to the well to bear water, cleansing the household
linen in the streams, feeding and doctoring their households,
manufacturing the clothing of their race, and performing even a share
of the highest social functions as priestesses and prophetesses. It was
from the bodies of such women as these that sprang that race of heroes,
thinkers, and artists who laid the foundations of Grecian greatness.
These females underlay their society as the solid and deeply buried
foundations underlay the more visible and ornate portions of a great
temple, making its structure and persistence possible. In Greece, after
a certain lapse of time, these virile labouring women in the upper
classes were to be found no more. The accumulated wealth of the dominant
race, gathered through the labour of slaves and subject people, had so
immensely increased that there was no longer a call for physical labour
on the part of the dominant womanhood; immured within the walls of their
houses as wives or mistresses, waited on by slaves and dependents, they
no longer sustained by their exertion either their own life or the life
of their people. The males absorbed the intellectual labours of life;
slaves and dependents the physical. For a moment, at the end of the
fifth and beginning of the fourth century, when the womanhood of
Greece had already internally decayed, there was indeed a brilliant
intellectual efflorescence among her males, like to the gorgeous colours
in the sunset sky when the sun is already sinking; but the heart
of Greece was already rotting and her vigour failing. Increasingly,
division and dissimilarity arose between male and female, as the male
advanced in culture and entered upon new fields of intellectual toil
while the female sank passively backward and lower in the scale of life,
and thus was made ultimately a chasm which even sexual love could not
bridge. The abnormal institution of avowed inter-male sexual relations
upon the highest plane was one, and the most serious result, of this
severance. The inevitable and invincible desire of all highly developed
human natures, to blend with their sexual relationships their highest
intellectual interests and sympathies, could find no satisfaction or
response in the relationship between the immured, comparatively ignorant
and helpless females of the upper classes, in Greece, and the brilliant,
cultured, and many-sided males who formed its dominant class in the
fifth and fourth centuries. Man turned towards man; and parenthood, the
divine gift of imparting human life, was severed from the loftiest and
profoundest phases of human emotion: Xanthippe fretted out her ignorant
and miserable little life between the walls of her house, and Socrates
lay in the Agora, discussing philosophy and morals with Alcibiades;
and the race decayed at its core. (See Jowett’s translation of Plato’s
“Banquet”; but for full light on this important question the entire
literature of Greece in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. should be
studied.) Here and there an Aspasia, or earlier still a Sappho, burst
through the confining bonds of woman’s environment, and with the force
of irresistible genius broke triumphantly into new fields of action and
powerful mental activity, standing side by side with the male; but their
cases were exceptional. Had they, or such as they, been able to tread
down a pathway, along which the mass of Grecian women might have
followed them; had it been possible for the bulk of the women of the
dominant race in Greece at the end of the fifth century to rise from
their condition of supine inaction and ignorance and to have taken their
share in the intellectual labours and stern activities of their race,
Greece would never have fallen, as she fell at the end of the fourth
century, instantaneously and completely, as a rotten puff-ball falls in
at the touch of a healthy finger; first, before the briberies of Philip,
and then yet more completely before the arms of his yet more warlike
son, who was also the son of the fierce, virile, and indomitable
Olympia. (Like almost all men remarkable for either good or evil,
Alexander inherited from his mother his most notable qualities--his
courage, his intellectual activity, and an ambition indifferent to any
means that made for his own end. Fearless in her life, she fearlessly
met death “with a courage worthy of her rank and domineering character,
when her hour of retribution came”; and Alexander is incomprehensible
till we recognise him as rising from the womb of Olympia.) Nor could
she have been swept clean, a few hundred years later, from Thessaly to
Sparta, from Corinth to Ephesus, her temples destroyed, her effete women
captured by the hordes of the Goths--a people less skilfully armed
and less civilised than the descendants of the race of Pericles and
Leonidas, but who were a branch of that great Teutonic folk whose
monogamous domestic life was sound at the core, and whose fearless,
labouring, and resolute women yet bore for the men they followed to the
ends of the earth, what Spartan women once said they alone bore--men.
In Rome, in the days of her virtue and vigour, the Roman matron laboured
mightily, and bore on her shoulders her full half of the social burden,
though her sphere of labour and influence was even somewhat smaller
than that of the Teutonic sisterhood whose descendants were finally to
supplant her own. From the vestal virgin to the matron, the Roman woman
in the days of the nation’s health and growth fulfilled lofty functions
and bore the whole weight of domestic toil. From the days of Lucretia,
the great Roman dame whom we find spinning with her handmaidens deep
into the night, and whose personal dignity was so dear to her that,
violated, she sought only death, to those of the mother of the Gracchi,
one of the last of the great line, we find everywhere, erect, labouring,
and resolute, the Roman woman who gave birth to the men who built up
Roman greatness. A few centuries later, and Rome also had reached that
dangerous spot in the order of social change which Greece had reached
centuries before her. Slave labour and the enjoyment of the unlimited
spoils of subject races had done away for ever with the demand for
physical labour on the part of the members of the dominant race. Then
came the period when the male still occupied himself with the duties
of war and government, of legislation and self-culture; but the Roman
matron had already ceased for ever from her toils. Decked in jewels and
fine clothing, brought at the cost of infinite human labour from the
ends of the earth, nourished on delicate victuals, prepared by others’
hands, she sought now only with amusement to pass away a life that no
longer offered her the excitement and joy of active productive exertion.
She frequented theatres or baths, or reclined on her sofa, or drove in
her chariot; and like more modern counterparts, painted herself, wore
patches, affected an artistic walk, and a handshake with the elbow
raised and the fingers hanging down. Her children were reared by
dependents; and in the intellectual labour and government of her age
she took small part, and was fit to take none. There were not wanting
writers and thinkers who saw clearly the end to which the enervation of
the female was tending, and who were not sparing in their denunciations.
“Time was,” cries one Roman writer of that age, “when the matron turned
the spindle with the hand and kept at the same time the pot in her eye
that the pottage might not be singed, but now,” he adds bitterly,
“when the wife, loaded with jewels, reposes among pillows, or seeks the
dissipation of baths and theatres, all things go downward and the state
decays.” Yet neither he nor that large body of writers and thinkers who
saw the condition towards which the parasitism of woman was tending
to reduce society, preached any adequate remedy. (Indeed, must not
the protest and the remedy in all such cases, if they are to be of any
avail, take their rise within the diseased class itself?)
Thoughtful men sighed over the present and yearned for the past, nor
seem to have perceived that it was irrevocably gone; that the Roman
lady who, with a hundred servants standing idle about her, should, in
imitation of her ancestress, have gone out with her pitcher on her head
to draw water from the well, while in all her own courtyards pipe-led
streams gushed forth, would have acted the part of the pretender; that
had she insisted on resuscitating her loom and had sat up all night
to spin, she could never have produced those fabrics which alone her
household demanded, and would have been but a puerile actor; that it was
not by attempting to return to the ancient and for ever closed fields of
toil, but by entering upon new, that she could alone serve her race
and retain her own dignity and virility. That not by bearing water and
weaving linen, but by so training and disciplining herself that she
should be fitted to bear her share in the labour necessary to the just
and wise guidance of a great empire, and be capable of training a race
of men adequate to exercise an enlightened, merciful, and beneficent
rule over the vast masses of subject people--that so, and so only,
could she fulfil her duty toward the new society about her, and bear its
burden together with man, as her ancestresses of bygone generations had
borne the burden of theirs.
That in this direction, and this alone, lay the only possible remedy for
the evils of woman’s condition, was a conception apparently grasped
by none; and the female sank lower and lower, till the image of the
parasitic woman of Rome (with a rag of the old Roman intensity left
even in her degradation!)--seeking madly by pursuit of pleasure and
sensuality to fill the void left by the lack of honourable activity;
accepting lust in the place of love, ease in the place of exertion, and
an unlimited consumption in the place of production; too enervated at
last to care even to produce offspring, and shrinking from every form
of endurance--remains, even to the present day, the most perfect, and
therefore the most appalling, picture of the parasite female that earth
has produced--a picture only less terrible than it is pathetic.
We recognise that it was inevitable that this womanhood--born it would
seem from its elevation to guide and enlighten a world, and in place
thereof feeding on it--should at last have given birth to a manhood as
effete as itself, and that both should in the end have been swept away
before the march of those Teutonic folk, whose women were virile and
could give birth to men; a folk among whom the woman received on the
morning of her marriage, from the man who was to be her companion
through life, no contemptible trinket to hang about her throat or limbs,
but a shield, a spear, a sword, and a yoke of oxen, while she bestowed
on him in return a suit of armour, in token that they two were
henceforth to be one in toil and in the facing of danger; that she too
should dare with him in war and suffer with him in peace; and of whom
another writer tells us, that their women not only bore the race and
fed it at their breasts without the help of others’ hands, but that they
undertook the whole management of house and lands, leaving the males
free for war and chase; of whom Suetonius tells us, that when Augustus
Caesar demanded hostages from a tribe, he took women, not men, because
he found by experience that the women were more regarded than men, and
of whom Strabo says, that so highly did the Germanic races value the
intellect of their women that they regarded them as inspired, and
entered into no war or great undertaking without their advice and
counsel; while among the Cimbrian women who accompanied their husbands
in the invasion of Italy were certain who marched barefooted in the
midst of the lines, distinguished by their white hair and milk-white
robes, and who were regarded as inspired, and of whom Florus, describing
an early Roman victory, says, “The conflict was not less fierce and
obstinate with the wives of the vanquished; in their carts and wagons
they formed a line of battle, and from their elevated situation, as from
so many turrets, annoyed the Romans with their poles and lances. (The
South African Boer woman after two thousand years appears not wholly to
have forgotten the ancestral tactics.) Their death was as glorious as
their martial spirit. Finding that all was lost, they strangled their
children, and either destroyed themselves in one scene of mutual
slaughter, or with the sashes that bound up their hair suspended
themselves by the neck to the boughs of trees or the tops of their
wagons.” It is of these women that Valerius Maximus says, that, “If the
gods on the day of battle had inspired the men with equal fortitude,
Marius would never have boasted of his Teutonic victory;” and of whom
Tacitus, speaking of those women who accompanied their husbands to war,
remarks, “These are the darling witnesses of his conduct, the applauders
of his valour, at once beloved and valued. The wounded seek their
mothers and their wives; undismayed at the sight, the women count each
honourable scar and suck the gushing blood. They are even hardy enough
to mix with the combatants, administering refreshment and exhorting them
to deeds of valour,” and adds moreover, that “To be contented with one
wife was peculiar to the Germans; while the woman was contented with one
husband, as with one life, one mind, one body.”
It was inevitable that before the sons of women such as these, the sons
of the parasitic Roman should be swept from existence, as the offspring
of the caged canary would fall in conflict with the offspring of the
free.
Again and again with wearisome reiteration, the same story repeats
itself. Among the Jews in the days of their health and growth, we find
their women bearing the major weight of agricultural and domestic toil,
full always of labour and care--from Rachel, whom Jacob met and loved
as she watered her father’s flocks, to Ruth, the ancestress of a line of
kings and heroes, whom her Boas noted labouring in the harvest-fields;
from Sarah, kneading and baking cakes for Abraham’s prophetic visitors,
to Miriam, prophetess and singer, and Deborah, who judging Israel
from beneath her palm-tree, “and the land had rest for forty years.”
Everywhere the ancient Jewish woman appears, an active sustaining power
among her people; and perhaps the noblest picture of the labouring
woman to be found in any literature is contained in the Jewish writings,
indited possibly at the very time when the labouring woman was for the
first time tending among a section of the Jews to become a thing of the
past; when already Solomon, with his seven hundred parasitic wives and
three hundred parasitic concubines, loomed large on the horizon of the
national life, to take the place of flock-tending Rachel and gleaning
Ruth, and to produce amid their palaces of cedar and gold, among them
all, no Joseph or David, but in the way of descendant only a Rehoboam,
under whose hand the kingdom was to totter to its fall. (The picture
of the labouring as opposed to the parasitic ideal of womanhood appears
under the heading, “The words of King Lemuel; the oracle which his
mother taught him.”) At risk of presenting the reader with that with
which he is already painfully familiar, we here transcribe the
passage; which, allowing for differences in material and intellectual
surroundings, paints also the ideal of the labouring womanhood of the
present and of the future:--
“Her price is far above rubies,
The heart of her husband trusteth in her,
And he shall have no lack of gain,
She doeth him good and not evil
All the days of her life,
She seeketh wool and flax,
And worketh willingly with her hands,
She is like the merchant ships;
She bringeth her food, from afar,
She riseth up while it is yet night
And giveth meat to her household,
And their task to her maidens,
She considereth a field, and buyeth it;
With the fruit of her hands she planteth a vineyard.
She girdeth her loins with strength,
And maketh strong her arms.
She perceiveth that her merchandise is profitable;
Her lamp goeth not out by night,
She layeth her hands to the distaff,
And her hands hold the spindle.
She spreadeth out her hand to the poor:
Yea, she reacheth forth her hands to the needy,
She is not afraid of the snow for her household,
For all her household are clothed with scarlet.
She maketh herself carpets of tapestry;
Her clothing is fine and purple.
Her husband is known in the gates,
When he sitteth among the elders of the land,
She maketh linen garments and selleth them,
And delivereth girdles unto the merchant.
Strength and dignity are her clothing;
And she laugheth at the time to come.
She openeth her mouth with wisdom,
And the law of kindness is on her tongue,
She looketh well to the ways of her household,
And eateth not the bread of idleness.
Her children rise up and call her blessed,
Her husband also, and he praiseth her, saying,
Many daughters have done virtuously,
But thou excellest them all,
Give her the fruit of her hand,
And let her works praise her in the gate.”
In the East today the same story has wearisomely written itself: in
China, where the present vitality and power of the most ancient of
existing civilisations may be measured accurately by the length of its
woman’s shoes; in Turkish harems, where one of the noblest dominant
Aryan races the world has yet produced, is being slowly suffocated in
the arms of a parasite womanhood, and might, indeed, along ago have been
obliterated, had not a certain virility and strength been continually
reinfused into it through the persons of purchased wives, who in early
childhood and youth had been themselves active labouring peasants.
Everywhere, in the past as in the present, the parasitism of the female
heralds the decay of a nation or class, and as invariably indicates
disease as the pustules of smallpox upon the skin indicate the existence
of a purulent virus in the system.
We are, indeed, far from asserting that the civilisations of the past
which have decayed, have decayed alone through the parasitism of their
females. Vast, far-reaching social phenomena have invariably causes and
reactions immeasurably too complex to be summed up under one so simple a
term. Behind the phenomenon of female parasitism has always lain another
and yet larger social phenomenon; it has invariably been preceded, as we
have seen, by the subjugation of large bodies of other human creatures,
either as slaves, subject races, or classes; and as the result of the
excessive labours of those classes there has always been an accumulation
of unearned wealth in the hands of the dominant class or race. It has
invariably been by feeding on this wealth, the result of forced or
ill-paid labour, that the female of the dominant race or class has in
the past lost her activity and has come to exist purely through the
passive performance of her sexual functions. Without slaves or subject
classes to perform the crude physical labours of life and produce
superfluous wealth, the parasitism of the female would, in the past,
have been an impossibility.
There is, therefore, a profound truth in that universal saw which states
that the decay of the great nations and civilisations of the past has
resulted from the enervation caused by excessive wealth and luxury; and
there is a further, and if possible more profound, truth underlying the
statement that their destruction has ultimately been the result of the
enervation of the entire race, male and female.
But when we come further to inquire how, exactly, this process of decay
took place, we shall find that the part which the parasitism of the
female has played has been fundamental. The mere use of any of the
material products of labour, which we term wealth, can never in itself
produce that decay, physical or mental, which precedes the downfall of
great civilised nations. The eating of salmon at ten shillings a pound
can in itself no more debilitate and corrupt the moral, intellectual,
and physical constitution of the man consuming it, than it could
enervate his naked forefathers who speared it in their rivers for food;
the fact that an individual wears a robe made from the filaments of a
worm, can no more deteriorate his spiritual or physical fibre, than
were it made of sheep’s wool; an entire race, housed in marble palaces,
faring delicately, and clad in silks, and surrounded by the noblest
products of literature and plastic art, so those palaces, viands,
garments, and products of art were the result of their own labours,
could never be enervated by them. The debilitating effect of wealth
sets in at that point exactly (and never before) at which the supply of
material necessaries and comforts, and of aesthetic enjoyments, clogs
the individuality, causing it to rest satisfied in the mere passive
possession of the results of the labour of others, without feeling any
necessity or desire for further productive activity of its own. (Of the
other deleterious effects of unearned wealth on the individual or class
possessing it, such as its power of lessening human sympathy, &c., &c.,
we do not now speak, as while ultimately and indirectly, undoubtedly,
tending to disintegrate a society, they do not necessarily and
immediately enervate it, which enervation is the point we are here
considering.)
The exact material condition at which this point will be reached will
vary, not only with the race and the age, but with the individual. A
Marcus Aurelius in a palace of gold and marble was able to retain
his simplicity and virility as completely as though he had lived in a
cow-herd’s hut; while on the other hand, it is quite possible for the
wife of a savage chief who has but four slaves to bring her her corn
and milk and spread her skins in the sun, to become almost as purely
parasitic as the most delicately pampered female of fashion in ancient
Rome, or modern Paris, London, or New York; while the exact amount of
unearned material wealth which will emasculate individuals in the same
society, will vary exactly as their intellectual and moral fibre and
natural activity are strong or weak. (It is not uncommon in modern
societies to find women of a class relatively very moderately wealthy,
the wives and daughters of shopkeepers or professional men, who if their
male relations will supply them with a very limited amount of money
without exertion on their part, will become as completely parasitic and
useless as women with untold wealth at their command.)
The debilitating effect of unlaboured-for wealth lies, then, not in the
nature of any material adjunct to life in itself, but in the power it
may possess of robbing the individual of all incentive to exertion, thus
destroying the intellectual, the physical, and finally, the moral fibre.
In all the civilisations of the past examination will show that almost
invariably it has been the female who has tended first to reach this
point, and we think examination will show that it has almost invariably
been from the woman to the man that enervation and decay have spread.
Why this should be so is obvious. Firstly, it is in the sphere of
domestic labour that slave or hired labour most easily and insidiously
penetrates. The force of blows or hireling gold can far more easily
supply labourers as the preparers of food and clothing, and even as the
rearers of children, than it can supply labourers fitted to be entrusted
with the toils of war and government, which have in the past been the
especial sphere of male toil. The Roman woman had for generations been
supplanted in the sphere of her domestic labours and in the toil of
rearing and educating her offspring, and had long become abjectly
parasitic, before the Roman male had been able to substitute the labour
of the hireling and barbarian for his own, in the army, and in the
drudgeries of governmental toil.
Secondly, the female having one all-important though passive function
which cannot be taken from her, and which is peculiarly connected
with her own person, in the act of child-bearing, and her mere sexual
attributes being an object of desire and cupidity to the male, she is
liable in a peculiarly insidious and gradual manner to become dependent
on this one sexual function alone for her support. So much is this the
case, that even when she does not in any way perform this function there
is still a curious tendency for the kudos of the function still to hang
about her, and for her mere potentiality in the direction of a duty
which she may never fulfil, to be confused in her own estimation and
that of society with the actual fulfilment of that function. Under the
mighty aegis of the woman who bears and rears offspring and in other
directions labours greatly and actively for her race, creeps in
gradually and unnoticed the woman who does none of these things. From
the mighty labouring woman who bears human creatures to the full extent
of her power, rears her offspring unaided, and performs at the same
time severe social labour in other directions (and who is, undoubtedly,
wherever found, the most productive toiler known to the race); it is but
one step, though a long one, from this woman to the woman who produces
offspring freely but does not herself rear them, and performs no
compensatory social labour. While from this woman, again, to the one who
bears few or no children, but who, whether as a wife or mistress, lives
by the exercise of her sex function alone, the step is short. There
is but one step farther to the prostitute, who affects no form of
productive labour, and who, in place of life, is recognised as producing
disease and death, but who exists parasitically through her sexual
attribute. Enormous as is the distance between the women at the two
extremes of this series, and sharply opposed as their relation to the
world is, there is yet, in actual life, no sharp, clear, sudden-drawn
line dividing the women of the one type from those of the other. They
shade off into each other by delicate and in sensible degrees. And it
is down this inclined plane that the women of civilised races are
peculiarly tempted, unconsciously, to slip; from the noble height of
a condition of the most strenuous social activity, into a condition of
complete, helpless, and inactive parasitism, without being clearly aware
of the fact themselves, and without society’s becoming so--the woman
who has ceased to rear her own offspring, or who has ceased to bear
offspring at all, and who performs no other productive social function,
yet shields the fact from her own eyes by dwelling on the fact that she
is a woman, in whom the capacity is at least latent. (There is, indeed,
an interesting analogous tendency on the part of the parasitic male,
wherever found, to shield his true condition from his own eyes and those
of the world by playing at the ancient ancestral forms of male labour.
He is almost always found talking loudly of the protection he affords to
helpless females and to society, though he is in truth himself protected
through the exertion of soldiers, policemen, magistrates, and society
generally; and he is almost invariably fond of dangling a sword or
other weapon, and wearing some kind of uniform, for the assumption of
militarism without severe toil delights him. But it is in a degenerate
travesty of the ancient labour of hunting where, at terrible risk to
himself, and with endless fatigue, his ancestors supplied the race with
its meat and defended it from destruction by wild beasts) that he finds
his greatest satisfaction; it serves to render the degradation and
uselessness of his existence less obvious to himself and to others than
if he passed his life reclining in an armchair.
On Yorkshire moors today may be seen walls of sod, behind which hide
certain human males, while hard-labouring men are employed from early
dawn in driving birds towards them. As the birds are driven up to him,
the hunter behind his wall raises his deadly weapon, and the bird, which
it had taken so much human labour to rear and provide, falls dead at his
feet; thereby greatly to the increase of the hunter’s glory, when, the
toils of the chase over, he returns to his city haunts to record his
bag. One might almost fancy one saw arise from the heathery turf the
shade of some ancient Teutonic ancestor, whose dust has long reposed
there, pointing a finger of scorn at his degenerate descendant, as he
leers out from behind the sod wall. During the the later Roman Empire,
Commodus, in the degenerate days of Rome, at great expense had wild
beasts brought from distant lands that he might have the glory of
slaying them in the Roman circus; and medals representing himself as
Hercules slaying the Nemean lion were struck at his orders. We are not
aware that any representation has yet been made in the region of plastic
art of the hero of the sod wall; but history repeats itself--and that
also may come. It is to be noted that these hunters are not youths,
but often ripely adult men, before whom all the lofty enjoyments and
employments possible to the male in modern life, lie open.)
These peculiarities in her condition have in all civilised societies
laid the female more early and seriously open to the attacks of
parasitism than the male. And while the accumulation of wealth has
always been the antecedent condition, and the degeneracy and effeteness
of the male the final and obvious cause, of the decay of the great
dominant races of the past; yet, between these two has always lain, as a
great middle term, the parasitism of the female, without which the first
would have been inoperative and the last impossible.
Not slavery, nor the most vast accumulations of wealth, could destroy
a nation by enervation, whose women remained active, virile, and
laborious.
The conception which again and again appears to have haunted successive
societies, that it was a possibility for the human male to advance
in physical power and intellectual vigour, while his companion female
became stationary and inactive, taking no share in the labours of
society beyond the passive fulfilment of sexual functions, has always
been negated. It has ended as would end the experiment of a man
seeking to raise a breed of winning race-horses out of unexercised,
short-winded, knock-kneed mares. No, more disastrously! For while the
female animal transmits herself to her descendant only or mainly by
means of germinal inheritance, and through the influence she may
exert over it during gestation, the human female, by producing the
intellectual and moral atmosphere in which the early infant years
of life are passed, impresses herself far more indelibly on her
descendants. Only an able and labouring womanhood can permanently
produce an able and labouring manhood; only an effete and inactive male
can ultimately be produced by an effete and inactive womanhood. The
curled darling, scented and languid, with his drawl, his delicate
apparel, his devotion to the rarity and variety of his viands, whose
severest labour is the search after pleasure, and for whom even the
chase, which was for his remote ancestor an invigorating and manly toil
essential for the meat and life of his people, becomes a luxurious and
farcical amusement;--this male, whether found in the later Roman
Empire, the Turkish harem of today, or in our Northern civilisations, is
possible only because generations of parasitic women have preceded him.
More repulsive than the parasite female herself, because a yet further
product of decay, it is yet only the scent of his mother’s boudoir that
we smell in his hair. He is like to the bald patches and rotten wool on
the back of a scabby sheep; which indeed indicate that, deep beneath the
surface, a parasite insect is eating its way into the flesh, but which
are not so much the cause of disease, as its final manifestation.
As we have said it is the power of the human female to impress
herself on her descendants, male and female, not only through germinal
inheritance, through influence during the period of gestation, but
above all by producing the mental atmosphere in which the impressionable
infant years of life are passed, which makes the condition of the
child-bearing female one of paramount interest of the race. It is this
fact which causes even prostitution (in many other respects the most
repulsive of all the forms of female parasitism which afflicts humanity)
to be, probably, not more adverse to the advance and even to the
conservation of a healthy and powerful society, than the parasitism
of its child-bearing women. For the prostitute, heavily as she weights
society for her support, returning disease and mental and emotional
disintegration for what she consumes, does not yet so immediately affect
the next generation as the kept wife, or kept mistress, who impresses
her effete image indelibly on the generations succeeding. (It cannot be
too often repeated that the woman who merely bears and brings a child
into the world, and then leaves it to be fed and reared by the hands
of another, has performed very much less than half of the labour of
producing adult humans; in such cases it is the nurse and not the mother
who is the most important labourer.)
No man ever yet entered life farther than the length of one navel-cord
from the body of the woman who bore him. It is the woman who is the
final standard of the race, from which there can be no departure for any
distance for any length of time, in any direction: as her brain weakens,
weakens the man’s she bears; as her muscle softens, softens his; as she
decays, decays the people.
Other causes may, and do, lead to the enervation and degeneration of a
class or race; the parasitism of its child-bearing women must.
We, the European women of this age, stand today where again and again,
in the history of the past, women of other races have stood; but our
condition is yet more grave, and of wider import to humanity as a whole
than theirs ever was. Let us again consider more closely why this is so.