The Left-Over Women
By Ethel Maud Colquhoun
(English contemporary. Author “The Vocation of Women,” “Two on Their Travels,” etc. From “The Vocation of Women.”)
It is practically certain that every discussion on the vocation of woman, whether among feminists or their opponents, will ultimately lead to the following problem: woman was obviously intended by nature to become a mother; modern social requirements make it obligatory that she should be legally married before doing so; there are not enough husbands to go round. What do you propose to do with the women who are left over?
Sex-Parasitism
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 between finding 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 passive sex 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.