Woman and Labour

n that clamour which has arisen in the modern world, where now this, and

then that, is demanded for and by large bodies of modern women, he who

listens carefully may detect as a keynote, beneath all the clamour, a demand

which may be embodied in such a cry as this: Give us labour and the training

which fits for labour! We demand this, not for ourselves alone, but for the

race.

the game, our hands dressed it. Side by side, the savage man and the sav-

age woman, we wandered free together and laboured free together. And we

were contented!

Then a change came.

We ceased from our wanderings, and, camping upon one spot of earth, again

3 OLIVE SCHREINER

the labours of life were divided between us. While man went forth to hunt,

or to battle with the foe who would have dispossessed us of all, we laboured

on the land. We hoed the earth, we reaped the grain, we shaped the dwellings,

we wove the clothing, we modelled the earthen vessels and drew the lines

upon them, which were humanity's first attempt at domestic art; we studied

the properties and uses of plants, and our old women were the first physi-

cians of the race, as, often, its first priests and prophets.

We fed the race at our breast, we bore it on our shoulders; through us it was

shaped, fed, and clothed. Labour more toilsome and unending than that of

man was ours; yet did we never cry out that it was too heavy for us. While

savage man lay in the sunshine on his skins, resting, that he might be fitted

for war or the chase, or while he shaped his weapons of death, he ate and

drank that which our hands had provided for him; and while we knelt over

our grindstone, or hoed in the fields, with one child in our womb, perhaps,

and one on our back, toiling till the young body was old before its time-

did we ever cry out that the labour allotted to us was too hard for us? Did

we not know that the woman who threw down her burden was as a man

who cast away his shield in battle-a coward and a traitor to his race? Man

fought-that was his work; we fed and nurtured the race-that was ours. We

knew that upon our labours, even as upon man's, depended the life and well-

being of the people whom we bore. We endured our toil, as man bore his

wounds, silently; and we were content.

Then again a change came.

Ages passed, and time was when it was no longer necessary that all men

should go to the hunt or the field of war; and when only one in five, or one

in ten, or but one in twenty, was needed continually for these labours. Then

our fellow-man, having no longer full occupation in his old fields of labour,

began to take his share in ours. He too began to cultivate the field, to build