Women -- Economic conditions; Women -- Employment; Women -- Social and moral questions
It is from these men, men who, viewed from the broad humanitarian
standpoint, are often of the most lovable and interesting type, and
who might in a simpler state of society, where physical force was the
dominating factor, have been the heroes, leaders, and chiefs of their
people, that there arises in the modern world the bitter cry of the male
unemployed: “Give us labour or we die!” (The problem of the unemployed
male is, of course, not nearly so modern as that of the unemployed
female. It may be said in England to have taken its rise in almost its
present form as early as the fifteenth century, when economic changes
began to sever the agricultural labourer from the land, and rob him of
his ancient forms of social toil. Still, in its most acute form, it may
be called a modern problem.)
Yet it is only upon one, and a comparatively small, section of the
males of the modern civilised world that these changes in the material
conditions of life have told in such fashion as to take all useful
occupation from them and render them wholly or partly worthless to
society. If the modern man’s field of labour has contracted at one end
(the physical), at the other (the intellectual) it has immeasurably
expanded! If machinery and the command of inanimate motor-forces
have rendered of comparatively little value the male’s mere physical
motor-power, the demand upon his intellectual faculties, the call
for the expenditure of nervous energy, and the exercise of delicate
manipulative skill in the labour of human life, have immeasurably
increased.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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