Page:The Feminist Movement - Snowden - 1912.djvu/18

10 and custom to undersell their male competitors that the admission of women to a trade or profession becomes a serious menace to the father of a family. There are those who see in feminism something which will make for the deterioration, or for the extinction, in men, of those physical and moral qualities which have come to be regarded as purely masculine. It is suggested that the women of the future will have to maintain the men in idleness if they themselves insist on working, and that the inevitable result will be the weakening of the so-called manly qualities—strength and courage and the power of domination, with corresponding diminution in stature, brain-power, and nervous energy.

This would probably be true if the men of the future chose to live as idle parasites on the life and labour of women; exactly as it is true of many women to-day, who, from choice or compulsion, are living parasitically upon men; but the suggestion of the argument, that men are kept active and virile only because of the need to satisfy their hunger and the hunger of those dependent upon them, is a slander upon male mankind which no mother of stalwart sons will allow for a moment. Where men require compulsion to work, it is very often because they are forced to work at tasks for which they have no taste, because they are overworked, or because