Meanwhile, owing to health having suffered a further decline, owing to motherhood having become more and more distressing, and owing to sexual and bodily joys having become more completely suspect, celibacy among women will be more common than it is at present, and legislation may have to be passed to compel a greater percentage of wage-earners to marry. To help increase the population, greater benefits will be conferred on parents than ever before. But, as by this time it will be becoming more and more plain that man is growing superfluous except as a fertilizer and a soldier, and as, through his contemptible condition, the feeling will be gaining ground that it is an indignity for a free female citizen to live in intimacy with him simply in order to provide the state with children, there may be an attempt to legalize marriage by proxy, accompanied by scientific fertilization without actual congress with any man personally known to the woman. Artificial impregnation will tend to become common, and women—the wealthiest and most embittered foremost—will soon give up ordinary marriage altogether and choose to have children without concourse with the other sex. The whole act of fertilization will be consummated in the surgery, just as vaccination is now. There are signs even to-day that this revolt against cohabitation is spreading, and there are not a few women who, either in their Puritanism or jealousy of their happier sisters, would be glad to see it become more common.
Keeping pace with these changes, lactation will wholly disappear, and, even among the lowest women, it will be regarded very much as cannibalism is to-day. Pictures and statues of women in the act of suckling will be mutilated, destroyed, or hidden from the public view, just as a certain class of Greek statues are now mutilated and concealed; while the ideal of beauty in the female will be a creature completely flat-chested and with the hips of a youth. Girls and women who happen to throw back to the ancestral type will be pitied, and may even be operated upon, just as people with facial blemishes are now.
Meanwhile modifications will have occurred in the relations of the sexes. The congress of male and female will have begun to seem much more guilty and disgusting even than it is to-day, and as the male will still be looked upon (as he is now) as the principal culprit in the matter, the age of consent will probably be extended to thirty-five or forty, if not to the menopause. Seduction and rape will be punished brutally, probably by means of emasculation; and men of vigorous sexuality will be eliminated in order to make way for a generation of low-sexed, meek, and sequacious lackeys.
It will not be long before even the necessity for male soldiers will vanish. When the manipulation of the engines of war becomes as simple as typing or making tea, girls and women will make just as efficient soldiers as men; and, since war will then be carried on without visualizing the enemy, all that will be required will be an army of obedient operatives, who will not need the traditional courage and endurance of the male in the face of the foe.
When once artificial impregnation is an every-day occurrence, a Parliament of women will doubtless pass legislation to make it illegal for any man to procreate a child naturally, if it is the wife’s desire to have one by the intermediation of science; and, no matter how many children she may wish to have in this way, he will be compelled to support them. This, however, will be the final blow to marriage. Hundreds of thousands of women will still be naturally fertilized, but they will be despised, and form a class apart. Social prejudice will be against them, and movements will be started to emancipate and rescue them, just as there are movements to-day to rescue harem-women. Jealousy will still play a part in this movement; but, owing to the deplorable degeneration of men as lovers and mates, it will be fainter than ever before.
There will, of course, be fluctuations in this development, and some decades will reveal shameful lapses into matrimony and natural fertilization. Then the Lysistratas of the Feminist world, burning with indignation once more, will be heard crying aloud, just as Lysistrata cried over two thousand years ago in Greece:
“ἐγὼ μὲν οὖν αὐτὰς ἀποσχεῖν οὐκέτι οἵα τ᾽ ἀπὸ τῶν ἀνδρῶν· διαδιδράσκουσι γάρ.”
(I can no longer hold the minxes. They are running to the men; they are deserting).—Aristophanes, Lysistrata, ll. 718-9.
But the aggravated horrors of childbirth, and the alarming increase in the performance of the Cæsarian section, together with the general surfeit of the body and the intensified loathing of men, will cause these retrograde movements to diminish, and very soon such a clamour will arise for extra-corporeal gestation that science will be allowed no rest until a technique is discovered that will meet the public demand. The results achieved by men like Alexis Carrel, Ebleing, and Fische, all of whom are now working with success on tissue-culture and the transplantation of anatomical structures from one living organism to another, will be improved upon, and a means will be discovered by which the fertilized ovum will be matured outside the female body.
At first, we venture to predict, this will occur by again enlisting the cow or the ass into our service. Science already suspects that vital fluids are not specific, and it is probable, therefore, that in the early days of extra-corporeal gestation, the fertilized human ovum will be transferred to the uterus of a cow or an ass, and left to mature as a parasite on the animal’s tissues, very much as the newborn baby is now made the parasite of the cow’s udder. And, with this innovation, we shall probably suffer increased besotment, and intensified bovinity or asininity, according to the nature of the quadruped chosen. Thus extra-corporeal gestation, or “ectogenesis” (to use a word coined by Mr J. B. S. Haldane for the purpose) will become a possibility, and the Feminist ideal of complete emancipation from the thraldom of sex will be realized.