This Parasitism is seen in its worst guise in the vast armies of prostitutes, who in every clime and epoch ravage the fair fruits of human life and achievement.
Against this Parasitism in herself, self-absorbing, self-indulgent, enervating—defect of her reposefulness, of her æstheticism and vital self-consciousness—every woman needs to be upon her guard; to repress with firmness the smooth easy lapse it prompts toward sloth and pleasure; to exorcise the soft dry-rot of it, by power of aspiration and by prayer of ministry. (For noble truth it is that Laborare est orare.)
The Woman's Movement did good service for the sex in the early chapters of its history, when it made for due education of woman's higher masculine inherences; intelligence, application, self-reliance; as also in finding further fields of usefulness and self-expression for her.
But unfortunately in the later chapters, over-cultivation of these traits has increasingly annulled and extinguished her own. And this with the unforeseen, disquieting resultant that a compensatory movement has set in apace among that other faction of the sex. So that the more mannish the Feminists become in mode and aim, the more womanish become the Effeminates. Thus, albeit sincerely despising and decrying this, Feminism has nevertheless indirectly fostered the growth of Effeminacy. While, by supplying it with ever further liberty and scope for the indulgence of its freaks and failings, Feminist propaganda has directly played into its hands. Motherhood strikes deeper roots of attribute even in the Ultra-Feminine; brings thin streams of altruism to her neurasthenic breasts. In her children she forgets clothes, grows less greedy of masculine tribute, forgoes pleasures and excitements that had been the breath of life to her.
The increasing emancipation of the sex from home-functions and from womanly and mother-duties, however—claimed and obtained with a view to further economic scope and application of its powers—has been exultantly hailed and exploited by the Ultra-Feminines for ever further indulgence of and wider range of action for their dangerous defects. And Feminism will find—and this soon to its dismay—that the battle it has waged against the other sex has been as nothing to the battle it has yet to wage against its own, in the person of the Eternal Effeminate; idle, luxurious, parasitic and effete, who, with her brood, engenders the dry-rot which crumbles mighty civilisations, or topples them in Revolution.
V
Of the two camps, the vast majority of masculines will always seek their loves and wives among the Ultra-Feminines; frail and erratic, but attractive and more or less womanly. So long as men are men, the feminine graces, even in their spurious forms of Effeminacy, will possess more vital appeal for them than do the intelligences and utilities.
The Feminist camp, further and further commandeering the intelligent and self-reliant, the worthy and purposeful of the sex, while more and more discarding the charms and the softness thereof, will be further and further deserted by men. And of the happy mean—the well-balanced woman, at once tender and intelligent, devoted and charming—there will be ever fewer available.
What then is the future, biological and sociological, of Races whose wives and mothers will have been drawn mainly from the shallow-brained and shallow-hearted, from the less dutiful, the less high and right-minded? To say nothing of the less constitutionally-sound, the Ultra-Feminine being, for the most part, a neurotic? The great majority of such will decline part, indeed, in functions so dull and distasteful as the mothering and rearing of children.
The Feminist wife, with her intelligent grip of economics and her stern sense of citizen-duty, would fulfil her racial function (in accordance with Malthusius) during intervals of more absorbing and strenuous activities. But when once the novelty—which gives a certain piquancy for some men to a mannishness some women are able to wear quite prettily and attractively in early youth—shall have worn away, the poor Feminist's chances of marriage will be few, indeed; save with men-weaklings, requiring the virile support of a strong-minded, muscular wife.