Woman and Labour

n that clamour which has arisen in the modern world, where now this, andthen that, is demanded for and by large bodies of modern women, he wholistens carefully may detect as a keynote, beneath all the clamour, a demandwhich may be embodied in such a cry as this: Give us labour and the trainingwhich fits for labour! We demand this, not for ourselves alone, but for therace.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 wewere contented!Then a change came.We ceased from our wanderings, and, camping upon one spot of earth, again3 OLIVE SCHREINERthe 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 labouredon 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 linesupon them, which were humanity's first attempt at domestic art; we studiedthe 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 wasshaped, fed, and clothed. Labour more toilsome and unending than that ofman was ours; yet did we never cry out that it was too heavy for us. Whilesavage man lay in the sunshine on his skins, resting, that he might be fittedfor war or the chase, or while he shaped his weapons of death, he ate anddrank that which our hands had provided for him; and while we knelt overour 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? Didwe not know that the woman who threw down her burden was as a manwho cast away his shield in battle-a coward and a traitor to his race? Manfought-that was his work; we fed and nurtured the race-that was ours. Weknew 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 hiswounds, silently; and we were content.Then again a change came.Ages passed, and time was when it was no longer necessary that all menshould go to the hunt or the field of war; and when only one in five, or onein ten, or but one in twenty, was needed continually for these labours. Thenour 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