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
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