“But the fact is that under equal conditions the influence that each exerts on the other is equal, and they are mutually benefitted. The nearest to a golden age your race has ever come was during the one hundred years from the middle of the 20th to the middle of the 21st century, and that is the period of the most complete equality of the sexes in all respects—numbers, liberty, similarity of occupations and equal duties and responsibilities, and the total ignoring and rejection of the notion of any difference of ‘spheres’ for the activities of the two. The reciprocal and essentially exclusive functions involved are peculiar to each, but these do not essentially, and at the present, do not really interfere in any of the active employments people choose to engage in.” “Nursing the children is essentially the woman’s business is it not?” I inquired. “Not at all,” he answered. “Mammary glands belong to the male as well as the female.” “Functionless ones,” said I. “Only functionless,” he replied, “because they are not used. In your day there were occasional cases of well developed male mammae and professional male wet nurses, now they are common and it is doubtful if there are as many female as male nurses. There are and always were women who could not nurse their children, and these are more numerous now than ever. It is simply because there are other things they prefer to do, and so the accommodating function suppresses itself just as it did in the male because he for ages suppressed its use. So you see that even in nursing and rearing the children there is no exclusive female “sphere” any more than a male “sphere.” In the golden age I have just spoken of there was greater harmony and happiness than ever before, one of the essential conditions of which was the almost perfect equality of the sexes. But the termination of this golden age and the beginning of the social anarchy that commenced about the middle of the 21st century was traceable chiefly to the disparity in numbers between the sexes brought about by the operation of the “Option of Sex.” If we are to charge it to the corrupt influence of one sex on the other it was the corrupt assault of the unavoidably unmarried of the male sex on the institution of wedlock. If the women were willful arrogant and naughty, it was only because there were men about them in the proportion of three to one—for which they were not to blame—nor the men either, but the limited capacity of this globe, and nobody was to blame for that. Thus whatever they are or do in either sex is traceable to their environment.” “Well,” said I, “since there has been such a failure, I am glad after all that my day was ended long before these evil times came. But what is to become of the race now! Will they discover a way to hold their own?”