WOMAN AND LABOUR

by Olive Schreiner

Overview

Contents

Introduction

Chapter I. Parasitism

Chapter II. Parasitism (continued)

Chapter III. Parasitism (continued)

Chapter IV. Woman and War

Chapter V. Sex Differences

Chapter VI. Certain Objections





Introduction.

It is necessary to say a few words to explain this book. The original
title of the book was "Musings on Woman and Labour."

It is, what its name implies, a collection of musings on some of the
points connected with woman's work.

In my early youth I began a book on Woman. I continued the work till
ten years ago. It necessarily touched on most matters in which sex has a
part, however incompletely.

It began by tracing the differences of sex function to their earliest
appearances in life on the globe; not only as when in the animal world,
two amoeboid globules coalesce, and the process of sexual generation
almost unconsciously begins; but to its yet more primitive
manifestations in plant life. In the first three chapters I traced,
as far as I was able, the evolution of sex in different branches of
non-human life. Many large facts surprised me in following this line of
thought by their bearing on the whole modern sex problem. Such facts
as this; that, in the great majority of species on the earth the female
form exceeds the male in size and strength and often in predatory
instinct; and that sex relationships may assume almost any form on earth
as the conditions of life vary; and that, even in their sexual relations
towards offspring, those differences which we, conventionally, are apt
to suppose are inherent in the paternal or the maternal sex form, are
not inherent--as when one studies the lives of certain toads, where the
female deposits her eggs in cavities on the back of the male, where the
eggs are preserved and hatched; or, of certain sea animals, in which the
male carries the young about with him and rears them in a pouch formed
of his own substance; and countless other such. And above all, this
important fact, which had first impressed me when as a child I wandered
alone in the African bush and watched cock-o-veets singing their
inter-knit love-songs, and small singing birds building their nests
together, and caring for and watching over, not only their young, but
each other, and which has powerfully influenced all I have thought and
felt on sex matters since;--the fact that, along the line of bird
life and among certain of its species sex has attained its highest and
aesthetic, and one might almost say intellectual, development on
earth: a point of development to which no human race as a whole has
yet reached, and which represents the realisation of the highest sexual
ideal which haunts humanity.

When these three chapters we ended I went on to deal, as far as
possible, with woman's condition in the most primitive, in the savage
and in the semi-savage states. I had always been strangely interested
from childhood in watching the condition of the native African women
in their primitive society about me. When I was eighteen I had a
conversation with a Kafir woman still in her untouched primitive
condition, a conversation which made a more profound impression on my
mind than any but one other incident connected with the position of
woman has ever done. She was a woman whom I cannot think of otherwise
than as a person of genius. In language more eloquent and intense than
I have ever heard from the lips of any other woman, she painted the
condition of the women of her race; the labour of women, the anguish of
woman as she grew older, and the limitations of her life closed in about
her, her sufferings under the condition of polygamy and subjection; all
this she painted with a passion and intensity I have not known equalled;
and yet, and this was the interesting point, when I went on to question
her, combined with a deep and almost fierce bitterness against life
and the unseen powers which had shaped woman and her conditions as they
were, there was not one word of bitterness against the individual man,
nor any will or intention to revolt; rather, there was a stern and
almost majestic attitude of acceptance of the inevitable; life and the
conditions of her race being what they were. It was this conversation
which first forced upon me a truth, which I have since come to regard as
almost axiomatic, that, the women of no race or class will ever rise in
revolt or attempt to bring about a revolutionary readjustment of their
relation to their society, however intense their suffering and however
clear their perception of it, while the welfare and persistence of their
society requires their submission:

Product Details

BN ID:	2940013198807
Publisher:	SAP
Publication date:	08/06/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	144 KB