Sex-ParasitismBy Olive Schreiner(From “Woman and Labor.”)
By Olive Schreiner
(From “Woman and Labor.”)
The position of the unemployed modern female is one wholly different. The choice before her, as her ancient fields of domestic labor slip from her, is not generally or often at the present day the choice betweenfinding new fields of labor, 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 labor or sinking slowly into a condition of more or less complete and passivesex parasitism!
Again and again in the history of the past, when among human creatures a certain stage of material civilization 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 labor, and to reduce her, like the field-bug, 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 by a longer or shorter period by that of her male descendants and her entire society.