Thus the modern woman stands with the prospect of shrinking fields of labour on every hand. She is brought face to face with two possibilities. Either, on the one hand, she may remain quiescent and, as her old fields of labour fall from her, seek no new: in which case, as modern civilization advances and her old forms of manual labour are absorbed by machinery made and guided by highly-trained males, and she fails to attain to the new complex mental training which would fit her for fields of mental labour, she is bound to become more or less parasitic, as vast bodies of women in our wealthier and even our middle classes have already become, depending on her sex functions for support, and returning nothing equivalent to society for that which it expends on her, leaving the major portion of all human labours to man, thus becoming slowly but surely enervate, as all parasitic peoples and classes tend to be, while the residual celibate portion of her sex, who perform no sex function and yet are not fitted by training to enter the new fields of labour, will be driven to seek in fierce competition with each other a pitiful livelihood in such remnants of woman's ancient fields of labour as without training they can retain a hold of. Such a condition already exists in our societies in certain classes, where millions of women live supported by males without performing any productive labour but occasional child-bearing, and often not that, supplied with the material comforts of life, and sucking in the results of the mental and physical labours of the race without any equal return, as the parasite bug or fungus sucks the blood or sap of its animal or vegetable host; while a large body of other women, often celibate and childless, are driven to perform the few labours still open to the untrained or little trained females, who are compelled so enormously to overcrowd those few occupations that her life can hardly be maintained by working in them. This condition, if woman remains quiescent, must tend in time, as civilization spreads and she does not seek new forms of labour as the old pass from her, to become universal. This is the one possibility.