This woman could neither cook her own food nor make her own clothes, nor was she engaged in any social, political, or intellectual or artistic labour.

Though able to dance for a night or play tennis for an afternoon, she was yet hardly able to do her own hair or attire herself, and appeared absolutely to have lost all power of compelling herself to do anything which was at the moment fatiguing or displeasing, as all labour is apt to be, however great its ultimate reward.

In a life of twenty-eight years this woman had probably not contributed one hour's earnest toil, mental or physical, to the increase of the sum total of productive human labour.
Surrounded with acres of cultivable land, she would possibly have preferred to lie down and die of hunger rather than have cultivated half an acre for food.

This is an extreme case; but the ultimate effect of parasitism is always a paralysis of the will and an inability to compel oneself into any course of action for the moment unpleasurable and exhaustive.
That the two problems are not identical is shown, if indeed evidence were needed, by the fact that those males most actively employed in attempting to readjust the relations of the mass of labouring males to the new conditions of life, are sometimes precisely those males who are most bitterly opposed to woman in her attempt to readjust her own position.

Not even by the members of those professions, generally regarded as the strongholds of obstructionism and prejudice, has a more short-sighted opposition often been made to the attempts of woman to enter new fields of labour, than have again and again been made by male hand-workers, whether as isolated individuals or in their corporate capacity as trade unions.