Upon the remaining three men, one of whom be it noted is
over fifty-five, falls the bulk of the work of providing for
immediate needs and so releasing the others to provide for the
continuance of the race. A definite large share of all the present
activities of a people is required and, as it were, pledged to
provide for its renewal. If it fails to allow sufficient, it may,
just like a company or a municipal concern with an inadequate
depreciation fund, show large profits and great prosperity for a
time; it cannot be regarded as a sound concern."
The reader must decide whether there is more light and leading in the
interpretation that upon men falls the bulk of the work of providing for
immediate needs, and so enabling women to provide for the continuance
of the race, or, in Mrs. Gilman's version that woman is parasitic upon
the male. The future, if she likes to state it in that way, is parasitic
upon the present, always has been and always will be. The case which she
imagines to be unique and morbid, peculiar to civilized mankind, is
precisely the case of the hen bird who sits upon her eggs, incubating
the future, whilst the male goes and forages for her. She is parasitic
upon the male, as Mrs. Gilman would put it.
The truth is that, like many other women dominated by sex
antagonism--which glares ferociously from such paragraphs as that which
was quoted regarding "the brutal combative instinct or the intense
sex-vanity of the male"--Mrs.
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