Women are =potential= parasites even if they never become real ones, and this is the gist of the matter we are discussing. Why are nearly all small farmers reactionary, individualistic, distrustful, competitive? Because they hope some day to become gentleman farmers. Why are most small business men narrow, egoistic, conservative? For the reason that they hope one day to become men of Big Business. The young woman in America today possesses the same psychology. Being young, she not only =hopes=, she =expects=, to rise into the leisure class when some young man asks her for the privilege of supporting her through life. We are making no claim that the lot of millions of housekeeping mothers, married to working men, is more enviable than is the condition of their husbands. We merely wish to point out that millions of women, potentially, actually, or psychologically, =are= "of the leisure class," and that =fact= and =expectation= keep women, as a sex, allied to the forces of reaction. When a woman is competing in a life and death struggle among a score of other young women, to make a permanent legal bargain which entails the promise of an income or support for life, she has little leisure or energy to spare in making over, or revolutionizing the present social system. The mind of the average woman today is that of the petty shop-keeper. Entertaining, ofttimes, impossible dreams, these dreams, are, nevertheless, productive of a conservative and bourgeois ideology of a life of leisure and non-productiveness. It was the machine process in production that permitted the rise of a parasitical, or leisure, class. As long as both men and women were forced to produce things in order to live, an exploiting class, that lives off the labor of others, was impossible. But as spinning, weaving, canning, soap-making, butter, bread, candle, clothes-making and a hundred other functions formerly performed by women in the home, were absorbed into the factories, the young girls often followed the old task into the new plant. This was also true of the boys on the farms, who turned toward the cities and entered factories, where hogs were slaughtered, farm machines manufactured, or where shoes were made. But the farm youths expected to become permanent producers in the shops and mills; they sought to become able to support a woman, and, perhaps, children. The girls entering the factories, on the other hand, did so to earn money to help pay their expenses at home until they married, or in order to buy gay and expensive clothes, unconsciously, perhaps, for advertising as well as decorative purposes. THE EVOLUTION OF THE FAMILY Undoubtedly the early savages drew together for self-protection against their forest enemies. And out of this necessity grew the love of society. Man became a gregarious animal. Promiscuity in sexual intercourse among these herds was another factor for holding the tribes, or groups together.