Marcel Prévost has said that when men find women competing with them in fields of Labour, to degrees injurious to masculine interests, they will turn and strike them in the face. There are indications to the contrary, however. Among decadent races and savages, the emasculate sons of deteriorate mothers assert their masculine authority otherwise.
Far from combating their women's right to work, they force them to work—and to work in support of the males!
More and more every day, civilised men, indeed, released by working-wives from their natural obligation to maintain the family, are seen so to have lapsed from their sense of virile responsibility as to be coming further and further to shelve upon such working-wives the burden of the family support. Among the labouring and artisan classes, the wife's contribution to the exchequer leaves the husband more money to spend on drink or on gambling; or on both. In superior classes, too, it leaves husbands with more money to spend on amusement—of one sort or another.
Responsibility and effort are natural spurs to masculine development. Relieve the male of these and he degenerates. As woman released from child-bearing and the duties entailed by the family, degenerates rapidly. We can no more improve on The Plan than we can improve without each and every appointed factor of it.
V
Another disastrous blunder of Feminism is to make for equal wage for men and women.
The higher wage of men springs, economically, from the fact that the industrial output of women is, normally, less than that of men. But there is a deeper, and a biological significance involved. Which is, that men's greater output of work results from more of their energy of brain and body being available to them for work, because far less of their vital power is locked-up in them for Race-perpetuation and nurture. There is the implication also that man being the natural breadwinner of the family, his wage should suffice for its support.
A system of equal wages for the sexes would press as cruelly upon women as it would be disastrous to the Race. Because it would compel woman, despite the biological disabilities that handicap her economically, to force her powers to masculine standards of work and output. It would, moreover, by qualifying her to support the family, serve as cogent excuse for her husband to shirk his bounden duty.
The crux of the demand for equal pay for equal work is that, because of her natural lesser strength and endurance, when a woman is doing work identical in nature and equal in quantum to that of a man, it means that she is doing more than a woman's work, and is overtaxing and injuring her constitution, therefore; or it means that he is doing less than a man's work, and is "slacking," therefore.