Chapter I. Parasitism.

WOMAN AND LABOUR

by Olive Schreiner

Author of “Dreams,” “The Story of an African Farm,” “Trooper Peter

Halket,” “Dream Life and Real Life,” etc. etc.

Dedicated to Constance Lytton

“Glory of warrior, glory of orator, glory of song,

Paid with a voice flying by to be lost on an endless sea--

Glory of virtue, to fight, to struggle, to right the wrong--

Nay, but she aim’d not at glory, no lover of glory she:

Give her the glory of going on and still to be.”

Tennyson.

Olive Schreiner.

De Aar, Cape of Good Hope, South Africa. 1911.

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: that, wherever there is a general

attempt on the part of the women of any society to readjust their

position in it, a close analysis will always show that the changed or

changing conditions of that society have made woman’s acquiescence no

longer necessary or desirable.

Another point which it was attempted to deal with in this division of

the book was the probability, amounting almost to a certainty, that

woman’s physical suffering and weakness in childbirth and certain other

directions was the price which woman has been compelled to pay for the

passing of the race from the quadrupedal and four-handed state to the

erect; and which was essential if humanity as we know it was to exist

(this of course was dealt with by a physiological study of woman’s

structure); and also, to deal with the highly probable, though unproved

and perhaps unprovable, suggestion, that it was largely the necessity

which woman was under of bearing her helpless young in her arms while

procuring food for them and herself, and of carrying them when escaping

from enemies, that led to the entirely erect position being forced on

developing humanity.

These and many other points throwing an interesting light on the later

development of women (such as the relation between agriculture and the

subjection of women) were gone into in this division of the book dealing

with primitive and semi-barbarous womanhood.

When this division was ended, I had them type-written, and with the

first three chapters bound in one volume about the year 1888; and then

went on to work at the last division, which I had already begun.

This dealt with what is more popularly known as the women’s question:

with the causes which in modern European societies are leading women to

attempt readjustment in their relation to their social organism; with

the direction in which such readjustments are taking place; and with the

results which in the future it appears likely such readjustments will

produce.

After eleven years, 1899, these chapters were finished and bound in a

large volume with the first two divisions. There then only remained to

revise the book and write a preface. In addition to the prose argument

I had in each chapter one or more allegories; because while it is easy

clearly to express abstract thoughts in argumentative prose, whatever

emotion those thoughts awaken I have not felt myself able adequately

to express except in the other form. (The allegory “Three Dreams in a

Desert” which I published about nineteen years ago was taken from this

book; and I have felt that perhaps being taken from its context it was

not quite clear to every one.) I had also tried throughout to illustrate

the subject with exactly those particular facts in the animal and human

world, with which I had come into personal contact and which had helped

to form the conclusions which were given; as it has always seemed to

me that in dealing with sociological questions a knowledge of the exact

manner in which any writer has arrived at his view is necessary in

measuring its worth. The work had occupied a large part of my life, and

I had hoped, whatever its deficiencies, that it might at least stimulate

other minds, perhaps more happily situated, to an enlarged study of the

question.

In 1899 I was living in Johannesburg, when, owing to ill-health, I was

ordered suddenly to spend some time at a lower level. At the end of

two months the Boer War broke out. Two days after war was proclaimed I

arrived at De Aar on my way back to the Transvaal; but Martial Law had

already been proclaimed there, and the military authorities refused to

allow my return to my home in Johannesburg and sent me to the Colony;

nor was I allowed to send any communication through, to any person, who

might have extended some care over my possessions. Some eight months

after, when the British troops had taken and entered Johannesburg; a

friend, who, being on the British side, had been allowed to go up, wrote

me that he had visited my house and found it looted, that all that was

of value had been taken or destroyed; that my desk had been forced open

and broken up, and its contents set on fire in the centre of the room,

so that the roof was blackened over the pile of burnt papers. He added

that there was little in the remnants of paper of which I could make any

use, but that he had gathered and stored the fragments till such time

as I might be allowed to come and see them. I thus knew my book had been

destroyed.

Some months later in the war when confined in a little up-country

hamlet, many hundreds of miles from the coast and from Johannesburg;

with the brunt of the war at that time breaking around us, de Wet having

crossed the Orange River and being said to have been within a few miles

of us, and the British columns moving hither and thither, I was living

in a little house on the outskirts of the village, in a single room,

with a stretcher and two packing-cases as furniture, and with my little

dog for company. Thirty-six armed African natives were set to guard

night and day at the doors and windows of the house; and I was only

allowed to go out during certain hours in the middle of the day to fetch

water from the fountain, or to buy what I needed, and I was allowed to

receive no books, newspapers or magazines. A high barbed wire fence,

guarded by armed natives, surrounded the village, through which it would

have been death to try to escape. All day the pompoms from the armoured

trains, that paraded on the railway line nine miles distant, could be

heard at intervals; and at night the talk of the armed natives as they

pressed against the windows, and the tramp of the watch with the endless

“Who goes there?” as they walked round the wire fence through the long,

dark hours, when one was allowed neither to light a candle nor strike

a match. When a conflict was fought near by, the dying and wounded were

brought in; three men belonging to our little village were led out to

execution; death sentences were read in our little market-place; our

prison was filled with our fellow-countrymen; and we did not know

from hour to hour what the next would bring to any of us. Under these

conditions I felt it necessary I should resolutely force my thought at

times from the horror of the world around me, to dwell on some abstract

question, and it was under these circumstances that this little book was

written; being a remembrance mainly drawn from one chapter of the larger

book. The armed native guards standing against the uncurtained windows,

it was impossible to open the shutters, and the room was therefore

always so dark that even the physical act of writing was difficult.

A year and a half after, when the war was over and peace had been

proclaimed for above four months, I with difficulty obtained a permit to

visit the Transvaal. I found among the burnt fragments the leathern back

of my book intact, the front half of the leaves burnt away; the back

half of the leaves next to the cover still all there, but so browned and

scorched with the flames that they broke as you touched them; and there

was nothing left but to destroy it. I even then felt a hope that at some

future time I might yet rewrite the entire book. But life is short; and

I have found that not only shall I never rewrite the book, but I

shall not have the health even to fill out and harmonise this little

remembrance from it.

It is therefore with considerable pain that I give out this fragment. I

am only comforted by the thought that perhaps, all sincere and earnest

search after truth, even where it fails to reach it, yet, often comes

so near to it, that other minds more happily situated may be led, by

pointing out its very limitations and errors, to obtain a larger view.

I have dared to give this long and very uninteresting explanation, not

at all because I have wished by giving the conditions under which this

little book was written, to make excuse for any repetitions or lack of

literary perfection, for these things matter very little; but, because

(and this matters very much) it might lead to misconception on the

subject-matter itself if its genesis were not exactly understood.

Not only is this book not a general view of the whole vast body

of phenomena connected with woman’s position; but it is not even a

bird’s-eye view of the whole question of woman’s relation to labour.

In the original book the matter of the parasitism of woman filled only

one chapter out of twelve, and it was mainly from this chapter that this

book was drawn. The question of the parasitism of woman is, I think,

very vital, very important; it explains many phenomena which nothing

else explains; and it will be of increasing importance. But for the

moment there are other aspects of woman’s relation to labour practically

quite as pressing. In the larger book I had devoted one chapter entirely

to an examination of the work woman has done and still does in the

modern world, and the gigantic evils which arise from the fact that

her labour, especially domestic labour, often the most wearisome and

unending known to any section of the human race, is not adequately

recognised or recompensed. Especially on this point I have feared this

book might lead to a misconception, if by its great insistence on the

problem of sex parasitism, and the lighter dealing with other aspects,

it should lead to the impression that woman’s domestic labour at the

present day (something quite distinct from, though indirectly connected

with, the sexual relation between man and woman) should not be highly

and most highly recognised and recompensed. I believe it will be in the

future, and then when woman gives up her independent field of labour for

domestic or marital duty of any kind, she will not receive her share

of the earnings of the man as a more or less eleemosynary benefaction,

placing her in a position of subjection, but an equal share, as the fair

division, in an equal partnership. (It may be objected that where a man

and woman have valued each other sufficiently to select one another from

all other humans for a lifelong physical union, it is an impertinence

to suppose there could be any necessity to adjust economic relations. In

love there is no first nor last! And that the desire of each must be to

excel the other in service. That this should be so is true; that it is

so now, in the case of union between two perfectly morally developed

humans, is also true, and that this condition may in a distant future be

almost universal is certainly true. But dealing with this matter as a

practical question today, we have to consider not what should be, or

what may be, but what, given traditions and institutions of our

societies, is, today.) Especially I have feared that the points dealt

with in this little book, when taken apart from other aspects of the

question, might lead to the conception that it was intended to express

the thought, that it was possible or desirable that woman in addition to

her child-bearing should take from man his share in the support and care

of his offspring or of the woman who fulfilled with regard to himself

domestic duties of any kind. In that chapter in the original book

devoted to the consideration of man’s labour in connection with woman

and with his offspring more than one hundred pages were devoted to

illustrating how essential to the humanising and civilising of man, and

therefore of the whole race, was an increased sense of sexual and

paternal responsibility, and an increased justice towards woman as a

domestic labourer. In the last half of the same chapter I dealt at great

length with what seems to me an even more pressing practical sex

question at this moment--man’s attitude towards those women who are not

engaged in domestic labour; toward that vast and always increasing body

of women, who as modern conditions develop are thrown out into the

stream of modern economic life to sustain themselves and often others by

their own labour; and who yet are there bound hand and foot, not by the

intellectual or physical limitations of their nature, but by artificial

constrictions and conventions, the remnants of a past condition of

society. It is largely this maladjustment, which, deeply studied in all

its ramifications, will be found to lie as the taproot and central

source of the most terrible of the social diseases that afflict us.

The fact that for equal work equally well performed by a man and by

a woman, it is ordained that the woman on the ground of her sex alone

shall receive a less recompense, is the nearest approach to a wilful

and unqualified “wrong” in the whole relation of woman to society today.

That males of enlightenment and equity can for an hour tolerate the

existence of this inequality has seemed to me always incomprehensible;

and it is only explainable when one regards it as a result of the

blinding effects of custom and habit. Personally, I have felt so

profoundly on this subject, that this, with one other point connected

with woman’s sexual relation to man, are the only matters connected with

woman’s position, in thinking of which I have always felt it necessary

almost fiercely to crush down indignation and to restrain it, if I would

maintain an impartiality of outlook. I should therefore much regret if

the light and passing manner in which this question has been touched on

in this little book made it seem of less vital importance than I hold

it.

In the last chapter of the original book, the longest, and I believe the

most important, I dealt with the problems connected with marriage and

the personal relations of men and women in the modern world. In it I

tried to give expression to that which I hold to be a great truth, and

one on which I should not fear to challenge the verdict of long future

generations--that, the direction in which the endeavour of woman to

readjust herself to the new conditions of life is leading today, is

not towards a greater sexual laxity, or promiscuity, or to an increased

self-indulgence, but toward a higher appreciation of the sacredness of

all sex relations, and a clearer perception of the sex relation between

man and woman as the basis of human society, on whose integrity, beauty

and healthfulness depend the health and beauty of human life, as a

whole. Above all, that it will lead to a closer, more permanent, more

emotionally and intellectually complete and intimate relation between

the individual man and woman. And if in the present disco-ordinate

transitional stage of our social growth it is found necessary to

allow of readjustment by means of divorce, it will not be because

such readjustments will be regarded lightly, but rather, as when, in a

complex and delicate mechanism moved by a central spring, we allow

in the structure for the readjustment and regulation of that spring,

because on its absolute perfection of action depends the movement of the

whole mechanism. In the last pages of the book, I tried to express what

seems to me a most profound truth often overlooked--that as humanity

and human societies pass on slowly from their present barbarous and

semi-savage condition in matters of sex into a higher, it will be found

increasingly, that over and above its function in producing and sending

onward the physical stream of life (a function which humanity shares

with the most lowly animal and vegetable forms of life, and which even

by some noted thinkers of the present day seems to be regarded as its

only possible function,) that sex and the sexual relation between man

and woman have distinct aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual functions

and ends, apart entirely from physical reproduction. That noble as is

the function of the physical reproduction of humanity by the union of

man and woman, rightly viewed, that union has in it latent, other, and

even higher forms, of creative energy and life-dispensing power, and

that its history on earth has only begun. As the first wild rose when it

hung from its stem with its centre of stamens and pistils and its single

whorl of pale petals, had only begun its course, and was destined, as

the ages passed, to develop stamen upon stamen and petal upon petal,

till it assumed a hundred forms of joy and beauty.

And, it would indeed almost seem, that, on the path toward the higher

development of sexual life on earth, as man has so often had to lead

in other paths, that here it is perhaps woman, by reason of those very

sexual conditions which in the past have crushed and trammelled her, who

is bound to lead the way, and man to follow. So that it may be at last,

that sexual love--that tired angel who through the ages has presided

over the march of humanity, with distraught eyes, and feather-shafts

broken, and wings drabbled in the mires of lust and greed, and golden

locks caked over with the dust of injustice and oppression--till those

looking at him have sometimes cried in terror, “He is the Evil and

not the Good of life!” and have sought, if it were not possible, to

exterminate him--shall yet, at last, bathed from the mire and dust of

ages in the streams of friendship and freedom, leap upwards, with white

wings spread, resplendent in the sunshine of a distant future--the

essentially Good and Beautiful of human existence.

I have given this long and very wearisome explanation of the scope and

origin of this little book, because I feel that it might lead to grave

misunderstanding were it not understood how it came to be written.

I have inscribed it to my friend, Lady Constance Lytton; not because

I think it worthy of her, nor yet because of the splendid part she

has played in the struggle of the women fighting today in England for

certain forms of freedom for all women. It is, if I may be allowed

without violating the sanctity of a close personal friendship so to

say, because she, with one or two other men and women I have known, have

embodied for me the highest ideal of human nature, in which intellectual

power and strength of will are combined with an infinite tenderness and

a wide human sympathy; a combination which, whether in the person of the

man or the woman, is essential to the existence of the fully rounded and

harmonised human creature; and which an English woman of genius summed

in one line when she cried in her invocation of her great French

sister:--

“Thou large-brained woman and large-hearted man!”

One word more I should like to add, as I may not again speak or write

on this subject. I should like to say to the men and women of the

generations which will come after us--“You will look back at us with

astonishment! You will wonder at passionate struggles that accomplished

so little; at the, to you, obvious paths to attain our ends which we did

not take; at the intolerable evils before which it will seem to you we

sat down passive; at the great truths staring us in the face, which we

failed to see; at the truths we grasped at, but could never quite

get our fingers round. You will marvel at the labour that ended in so

little--but, what you will never know is how it was thinking of you and

for you, that we struggled as we did and accomplished the little which

we have done; that it was in the thought of your larger realisation and

fuller life, that we found consolation for the futilities of our own.”

“What I aspired to be, and was not, comforts me.”

O.S.

Chapter I. Parasitism.

In 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.

If this demand be logically expanded, it will take such form as this:

Give us labour! For countless ages, for thousands, millions it may be,

we have laboured. When first man wandered, the naked, newly-erected

savage, and hunted and fought, we wandered with him: each step of

his was ours. Within our bodies we bore the race, on our shoulders we

carried it; we sought the roots and plants for its food; and, when man’s

barbed arrow or hook brought the game, our hands dressed it. Side by

side, the savage man and the savage 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 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 physicians 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 the house, to grind the corn (or make

his male slaves do it); and the hoe, and the potter’s tools, and the

thatching-needle, and at last even the grindstones which we first had

picked up and smoothed to grind the food for our children, began to pass

from our hands into his. The old, sweet life of the open fields was ours

no more; we moved within the gates, where the time passes more slowly

and the world is sadder than in the air outside; but we had our own work

still, and were content.

If, indeed, we might no longer grow the food for our people, we were

still its dressers; if we did not always plant and prepare the flax and

hemp, we still wove the garments for our race; if we did no longer raise

the house walls, the tapestries that covered them were the work of our

hands; we brewed the ale, and the simples which were used as medicines

we distilled and prescribed; and, close about our feet, from birth

to manhood, grew up the children whom we had borne; their voices

were always in our ears. At the doors of our houses we sat with our

spinning-wheels, and we looked out across the fields that were once ours

to labour in--and were contented. Lord’s wife, peasant’s, or burgher’s,

we all still had our work to do!

A thousand years ago, had one gone to some great dame, questioning her

why she did not go out a-hunting or a-fighting, or enter the great hall

to dispense justice and confer upon the making of laws, she would have

answered: “Am I a fool that you put to me such questions? Have I not a

hundred maidens to keep at work at spinning-wheels and needles? With my

own hands daily do I not dispense bread to over a hundred folk? In the

great hall go and see the tapestries I with my maidens have created by

the labour of years, and which we shall labour over for twenty more,

that my children’s children may see recorded the great deeds of their

forefathers. In my store-room are there not salves and simples, that my

own hands have prepared for the healing of my household and the sick in

the country round? Ill would it go indeed, if when the folk came home

from war and the chase of wild beasts, weary or wounded, they found all

the womenfolk gone out a-hunting and a-fighting, and none there to dress

their wounds, or prepare their meat, or guide and rule the household!

Better far might my lord and his followers come and help us with our

work, than that we should go to help them! You are surely bereft of all

wit. What becomes of the country if the women forsake their toil?”

And the burgher’s wife, asked why she did not go to labour in her

husband’s workshop, or away into the market-place, or go a-trading to

foreign countries, would certainly have answered: “I am too busy to

speak with such as you! The bread is in the oven (already I smell it

a-burning), the winter is coming on, and my children lack good woollen

hose and my husband needs a warm coat. I have six vats of ale all

a-brewing, and I have daughters whom I must teach to spin and sew, and

the babies are clinging round my knees. And you ask me why I do not go

abroad to seek for new labours! Godsooth! Would you have me to leave my

household to starve in summer and die of cold in winter, and my children

to go untrained, while I gad about to seek for other work? A man must

have his belly full and his back covered before all things in life. Who,

think you, would spin and bake and brew, and rear and train my babes,

if I went abroad? New labour, indeed, when the days are not long enough,

and I have to toil far into the night! I have no time to talk with

fools! Who will rear and shape the nation if I do not?”

And the young maiden at the cottage door, beside her wheel, asked why

she was content and did not seek new fields of labour, would surely have

answered: “Go away, I have no time to listen to you. Do you not see that

I am spinning here that I too may have a home of my own? I am weaving

the linen garments that shall clothe my household in the long years to

come! I cannot marry till the chest upstairs be full. You cannot hear

it, but as I sit here alone, spinning, far off across the hum of my

spinning-wheel I hear the voices of my little unborn children calling to

me--‘O mother, mother, make haste, that we may be!’--and sometimes, when

I seem to be looking out across my wheel into the sunshine, it is the

blaze of my own fireside that I see, and the light shines on the faces

round it; and I spin on the faster and the steadier when I think of what

shall come. Do you ask me why I do not go out and labour in the fields

with the lad whom I have chosen? Is his work, then, indeed more needed

than mine for the raising of that home that shall be ours? Oh, very hard

I will labour, for him and for my children, in the long years to come.

But I cannot stop to talk to you now. Far off, over the hum of my

spinning-wheel, I hear the voices of my children calling, and I must

hurry on. Do you ask me why I do not seek for labour whose hands are

full to bursting? Who will give folk to the nation if I do not?”

Such would have been our answer in Europe in the ages of the past, if

asked the question why we were contented with our field of labour and

sought no other. Man had his work; we had ours. We knew that we upbore

our world on our shoulders; and that through the labour of our hands it

was sustained and strengthened--and we were contented.

But now, again a change has come.

Something that is entirely new has entered into the field of human

labour, and left nothing as it was.

In man’s fields of toil, change has accomplished, and is yet more

quickly accomplishing, itself.

On lands where once fifty men and youths toiled with their cattle, today

one steam-plough, guided by but two pair of hands, passes swiftly; and

an automatic reaper in one day reaps and binds and prepares for the

garner the produce of fields it would have taken a hundred strong male

arms to harvest in the past. The iron tools and weapons, only one

of which it took an ancient father of our race long months of stern

exertion to extract from ore and bring to shape and temper, are now

poured forth by steam-driven machinery as a millpond pours forth its

water; and even in war, the male’s ancient and especial field of labour,

a complete reversal of the ancient order has taken place. Time was when

the size and strength of the muscles in a man’s legs and arms, and the

strength and size of his body, largely determined his fighting powers,

and an Achilles or a Richard Coeur de Lion, armed only with his spear

or battle-axe, made a host fly before him; today the puniest mannikin

behind a modern Maxim gun may mow down in perfect safety a phalanx of

heroes whose legs and arms and physical powers a Greek god might have

envied, but who, having not the modern machinery of war, fall powerless.

The day of the primary import to humanity of the strength in man’s

extensor and flexor muscles, whether in labours of war or of peace, is

gone by for ever; and the day of the all-importance of the culture and

activity of man’s brain and nerve has already come.

The brain of one consumptive German chemist, who in his laboratory

compounds a new explosive, has more effect upon the wars of the modern

peoples than ten thousand soldierly legs and arms; and the man who

invents one new labour-saving machine may, through the cerebration of

a few days, have performed the labour it would otherwise have taken

hundreds of thousands of his lusty fellows decades to accomplish.

Year by year, month by month, and almost hour by hour, this change is

increasingly showing itself in the field of the modern labour; and crude

muscular force, whether in man or beast, sinks continually in its value

in the world of human toil; while intellectual power, virility, and

activity, and that culture which leads to the mastery of the inanimate

forces of nature, to the invention of machinery, and to that delicate

manipulative skill often required in guiding it, becomes ever of greater

and greater importance to the race. Already today we tremble on the

verge of a discovery, which may come tomorrow or the next day, when,

through the attainment of a simple and cheap method of controlling

some widely diffused, everywhere accessible, natural force (such, for

instance, as the force of the great tidal wave) there will at once and

for ever pass away even that comparatively small value which still, in

our present stage of material civilisation, clings to the expenditure

of mere crude, mechanical, human energy; and the creature, however

physically powerful, who can merely pull, push, and lift, much after the

manner of a machine, will have no further value in the field of human

labour.

Therefore, even today, we find that wherever that condition which we

call modern civilisation prevails, and in proportion as it tends to

prevail--wherever steam-power, electricity, or the forces of wind

and water, are compelled by man’s intellectual activity to act as the

motor-powers in the accomplishment of human toil, wherever the delicate

adaptions of scientifically constructed machinery are taking the place

of the simple manipulation of the human hand--there has arisen, all the

world over, a large body of males who find that their ancient fields of

labour have slipped or are slipping from them, and who discover that

the modern world has no place or need for them. At the gates of

our dockyards, in our streets, and in our fields, are to be found

everywhere, in proportion as modern civilisation is really dominant,

men whose bulk and mere animal strength would have made them as warriors

invaluable members of any primitive community, and who would have been

valuable even in any simpler civilisation than our own, as machines

of toil; but who, owing to lack of intellectual or delicate manual

training, have now no form of labour to offer society which it stands

really in need of, and who therefore tend to form our Great Male

Unemployed--a body which finds the only powers it possesses so little

needed by its fellows that, in return for its intensest physical labour,

it hardly earns the poorest sustenance. The material conditions of life

have been rapidly modified, and the man has not been modified with them;

machinery has largely filled his place in his old field of labour, and

he has found no new one.

It is from these men, men who, viewed from the broad humanitarian

standpoint, are often of the most lovable and interesting type, and

who might in a simpler state of society, where physical force was the

dominating factor, have been the heroes, leaders, and chiefs of their

people, that there arises in the modern world the bitter cry of the male

unemployed: “Give us labour or we die!” (The problem of the unemployed

male is, of course, not nearly so modern as that of the unemployed

female. It may be said in England to have taken its rise in almost its

present form as early as the fifteenth century, when economic changes

began to sever the agricultural labourer from the land, and rob him of

his ancient forms of social toil. Still, in its most acute form, it may

be called a modern problem.)

Yet it is only upon one, and a comparatively small, section of the

males of the modern civilised world that these changes in the material

conditions of life have told in such fashion as to take all useful

occupation from them and render them wholly or partly worthless to

society. If the modern man’s field of labour has contracted at one end

(the physical), at the other (the intellectual) it has immeasurably

expanded! If machinery and the command of inanimate motor-forces

have rendered of comparatively little value the male’s mere physical

motor-power, the demand upon his intellectual faculties, the call

for the expenditure of nervous energy, and the exercise of delicate

manipulative skill in the labour of human life, have immeasurably

increased.

In a million new directions forms of honoured and remunerative social

labour are opening up before the feet of the modern man, which his

ancestors never dreamed of; and day by day they yet increase in

numbers and importance. The steamship, the hydraulic lift, the patent

road-maker, the railway-train, the electric tram-car, the steam-driven

mill, the Maxim gun and the torpedo boat, once made, may perform their

labours with the guidance and assistance of comparatively few hands; but

a whole army of men of science, engineers, clerks, and highly-trained

workmen is necessary for their invention, construction, and maintenance.

In the domains of art, of science, of literature, and above all in the

field of politics and government, an almost infinite extension has taken

place in the fields of male labour. Where in primitive times woman was

often the only builder, and patterns she daubed on her hut walls or

traced on her earthen vessels the only attempts at domestic art; and

where later but an individual here and there was required to design

a king’s palace or a god’s temple or to ornament it with statues or

paintings, today a mighty army of men, a million strong, is employed in

producing plastic art alone, both high and low, from the traceries on

wall-paper and the illustrations in penny journals, to the production

of the pictures and statues which adorn the national collections, and

a mighty new field of toil has opened before the anciently hunting and

fighting male. Where once one ancient witch-doctress may have been the

only creature in a whole district who studied the nature of herbs and

earths, or a solitary wizard experimenting on poisons was the only

individual in a whole territory interrogating nature; and where later,

a few score of alchemists and astrologers only were engaged in examining

the structure of substances, or the movement of planets, today thousands

of men in every civilised community are labouring to unravel the

mysteries of nature, and the practical chemist, the physician, the

anatomist, the engineer, the astronomer, the mathematician, the

electrician, form a mighty and always increasingly important army of

male labourers. Where once an isolated bard supplied a nation with its

literatures, or where later a few thousand priests and men of letters

wrote and transcribed for the few to read, today literature gives labour

to a multitude almost as countless as a swarm of locusts. From the

penny-a-liner to the artist and thinker, the demand for their labour

continually increases. Where one town-crier with stout legs and lusty

lungs was once all-sufficient to spread the town and country news, a

score of men now sit daily pen in hand, preparing the columns of the

morning’s paper, and far into the night a hundred compositors are

engaged in a labour which requires a higher culture of brain and finger

than most ancient kings and rulers possessed. Even in the labours of

war, the most brutal and primitive of the occupations lingering on into

civilised life from the savage state, the new demand for labour of an

intellectual kind is enormous. The invention, construction, and working

of one Krupp gun, though its mere discharge hardly demands more crude

muscular exertion than a savage expends in throwing his boomerang, yet

represents an infinitude of intellectual care and thought, far greater

than that which went to the shaping of all the weapons of a primitive

army. Above all, in the domain of politics and government, where once a

king or queen, aided by a handful of councillors, was alone practically

concerned in the labours of national guidance or legislation; today,

owing to the rapid means of intercommunication, printing, and the

consequent diffusion of political and social information throughout a

territory, it has become possible, for the first time, for all adults

in a large community to keep themselves closely informed on all national

affairs; and in every highly-civilised state the ordinary male has been

almost compelled to take his share, however small, in the duties and

labours of legislation and government. Thus there has opened before the

mass of men a vast new sphere of labour undreamed of by their ancestors.

In every direction the change which material civilisation has wrought,

while it has militated against that comparatively small section of males

who have nothing to offer society but the expenditure of their untrained

muscular energy (inflicting much and often completely unmerited

suffering upon them), has immeasurably extended the field of male labour

as a whole. Never before in the history of the earth has the man’s field

of remunerative toil been so wide, so interesting, so complex, and in

its results so all-important to society; never before has the male sex,

taken as a whole, been so fully and strenuously employed.

So much is this the case, that, exactly as in the earlier conditions of

society an excessive and almost crushing amount of the most important

physical labour generally devolved upon the female, so under modern

civilised conditions among the wealthier and fully civilised classes,

an unduly excessive share of labour tends to devolve upon the male. That

almost entirely modern, morbid condition, affecting brain and nervous

system, and shortening the lives of thousands in modern civilised

societies, which is vulgarly known as “overwork” or “nervous breakdown,”

is but one evidence of the even excessive share of mental toil devolving

upon the modern male of the cultured classes, who, in addition to

maintaining himself, has frequently dependent upon him a larger or

smaller number of entirely parasitic females. But, whatever the result

of the changes of modern civilisation may be with regard to the male,

he certainly cannot complain that they have as a whole robbed him of

his fields of labour, diminished his share in the conduct of life, or

reduced him to a condition of morbid inactivity.

In our woman’s field of labour, matters have tended to shape themselves

wholly otherwise! The changes which have taken place during the last

centuries, and which we sum up under the compendious term “modern

civilisation,” have tended to rob woman, not merely in part but almost

wholly, of the more valuable of her ancient domain of productive and

social labour; and, where there has not been a determined and conscious

resistance on her part, have nowhere spontaneously tended to open out to

her new and compensatory fields.

It is this fact which constitutes our modern “Woman’s Labour Problem.”

Our spinning-wheels are all broken; in a thousand huge buildings

steam-driven looms, guided by a few hundred thousands of hands (often

those of men), produce the clothings of half the world; and we dare no

longer say, proudly, as of old, that we and we alone clothe our peoples.

Our hoes and our grindstones passed from us long ago, when the ploughman

and the miller took our place; but for a time we kept fast possession of

the kneading-trough and the brewing-vat. Today, steam often shapes our

bread, and the loaves are set down at our very door--it may be by a

man-driven motor-car! The history of our household drinks we know no

longer; we merely see them set before us at our tables. Day by day

machine-prepared and factory-produced viands take a larger and larger

place in the dietary of rich and poor, till the working man’s wife

places before her household little that is of her own preparation; while

among the wealthier classes, so far has domestic change gone that men

are not unfrequently found labouring in our houses and kitchens, and

even standing behind our chairs ready to do all but actually place the

morsels of food between our feminine lips. The army of rosy milkmaids

has passed away for ever, to give place to the cream-separator and the,

largely, male-and-machinery manipulated butter pat. In every direction

the ancient saw, that it was exclusively the woman’s sphere to prepare

the viands for her household, has become, in proportion as civilisation

has perfected itself, an antiquated lie.

Even the minor domestic operations are tending to pass out of the circle

of woman’s labour. In modern cities our carpets are beaten, our windows

cleaned, our floors polished, by machinery, or extra domestic, and often

male labour. Change has gone much farther than to the mere taking

from us of the preparation of the materials from which the clothing is

formed. Already the domestic sewing-machine, which has supplanted almost

entirely the ancient needle, begins to become antiquated, and a thousand

machines driven in factories by central engines are supplying not only

the husband and son, but the woman herself, with almost every article of

clothing from vest to jacket; while among the wealthy classes, the

male dress-designer with his hundred male-milliners and dressmakers

is helping finally to explode the ancient myth, that it is woman’s

exclusive sphere, and a part of her domestic toil, to cut and shape the

garments she or her household wear.

Year by year, day by day, there is a silently working but determined

tendency for the sphere of woman’s domestic labours to contract itself;

and the contraction is marked exactly in proportion as that complex

condition which we term “modern civilisation” is advanced.

It manifests itself more in England and America than in Italy and Spain,

more in great cities than in country places, more among the wealthier

classes than the poorer, and is an unfailing indication of advancing

modern civilisation. (There is, indeed, often something pathetic in the

attitude of many a good old mother of the race, who having survived,

here and there, into the heart of our modern civilisation, is sorely

puzzled by the change in woman’s duties and obligations. She may be

found looking into the eyes of some ancient crone, who, like herself,

has survived from a previous state of civilisation, seeking there a

confirmation of a view of life of which a troublous doubt has crept

even into her own soul. “I,” she cries, “always cured my own hams, and

knitted my own socks, and made up all the linen by hand. We always did

it when we were girls--but now my daughters object!” And her old

crone answers her? “Yes, we did it; it’s the right thing; but it’s so

expensive. It’s so much cheaper to buy things ready made!” And they

shake their heads and go their ways, feeling that the world is strangely

out of joint when duty seems no more duty. Such women are, in truth,

like a good old mother duck, who, having for years led her ducklings to

the same pond, when that pond has been drained and nothing is left but

baked mud, will still persist in bringing her younglings down to it, and

walks about with flapping wings and anxious quack, trying to induce them

to enter it. But the ducklings, with fresh young instincts, hear far off

the delicious drippings from the new dam which has been built higher up

to catch the water, and they smell the chickweed and the long grass that

is growing up beside it; and absolutely refuse to disport themselves on

the baked mud or to pretend to seek for worms where no worms are. And

they leave the ancient mother quacking beside her pond and set out to

seek for new pastures--perhaps to lose themselves upon the way?--perhaps

to find them? To the old mother one is inclined to say, “Ah, good old

mother duck, can you not see the world has changed? You cannot bring the

water back into the dried-up pond! Mayhap it was better and pleasanter

when it was there, but it has gone for ever; and, would you and yours

swim again, it must be in other waters.” New machinery, new duties.)

But it is not only, nor even mainly, in the sphere of women’s material

domestic labours that change has touched her and shrunk her ancient

field of labour.

Time was, when the woman kept her children about her knees till adult

years were reached. Hers was the training and influence which shaped

them. From the moment when the infant first lay on her breast, till her

daughters left her for marriage and her sons went to take share in man’s

labour, they were continually under the mother’s influence. Today,

so complex have become even the technical and simpler branches of

education, so mighty and inexorable are the demands which modern

civilisation makes for specialised instruction and training for all

individuals who are to survive and retain their usefulness under modern

conditions, that, from the earliest years of its life, the child is of

necessity largely removed from the hands of the mother, and placed

in those of the specialised instructor. Among the wealthier classes,

scarcely is the infant born when it passes into the hands of the trained

nurse, and from hers on into the hands of the qualified teacher; till,

at nine or ten, the son in certain countries often leaves his home for

ever for the public school, to pass on to the college and university;

while the daughter, in the hands of trained instructors and dependents,

owes in the majority of cases hardly more of her education or formation

to maternal toil. While even among our poorer classes, the infant

school, and the public school; and later on the necessity for manual

training, takes the son and often the daughter as completely, and always

increasingly as civilisation advances, from the mother’s control. So

marked has this change in woman’s ancient field of labour become, that a

woman of almost any class may have borne many children and yet in early

middle age be found sitting alone in an empty house, all her offspring

gone from her to receive training and instruction at the hands of

others. The ancient statement that the training and education of her

offspring is exclusively the duty of the mother, however true it

may have been with regard to a remote past, has become an absolute

misstatement; and the woman who should at the present day insist on

entirely educating her own offspring would, in nine cases out of ten,

inflict an irreparable injury on them, because she is incompetent.

But, if possible, yet more deeply and radically have the changes of

modern civilisation touched our ancient field of labour in another

direction--in that very portion of the field of human labour which is

peculiarly and organically ours, and which can never be wholly taken

from us. Here the shrinkage has been larger than in any other direction,

and touches us as women more vitally.

Time was, and still is, among almost all primitive and savage folk, when

the first and all-important duty of the female to her society was

to bear, to bear much, and to bear unceasingly! On her adequate and

persistent performance of this passive form of labour, and of her

successful feeding of her young from her own breast, and rearing it,

depended, not merely the welfare, but often the very existence, of

her tribe or nation. Where, as is the case among almost all barbarous

peoples, the rate of infant mortality is high; where the unceasing

casualties resulting from war, the chase, and acts of personal violence

tend continually to reduce the number of adult males; where, surgical

knowledge being still in its infancy, most wounds are fatal; where,

above all, recurrent pestilence and famine, unfailing if of irregular

recurrence, decimated the people, it has been all important that woman

should employ her creative power to its very uttermost limits if the

race were not at once to dwindle and die out. “May thy wife’s womb never

cease from bearing,” is still today the highest expression of goodwill

on the part of a native African chief to his departing guest. For, not

only does the prolific woman in the primitive state contribute to the

wealth and strength of her nation as a whole, but to that of her own

male companion and of her family. Where the social conditions of life

are so simple that, in addition to bearing and suckling the child, it

is reared and nourished through childhood almost entirely through the

labour and care of the mother, requiring no expenditure of tribal

or family wealth on its training or education, its value as an adult

enormously outweighs, both to the state and the male, the trouble and

expense of rearing it, which falls almost entirely on the individual

woman who bears it. The man who has twenty children to become warriors

and labourers is by so much the richer and the more powerful than he who

has but one; while the state whose women are prolific and labour for and

rear their children stands so far insured against destruction. Incessant

and persistent child-bearing is thus truly the highest duty and the most

socially esteemed occupation of the primitive woman, equalling fully in

social importance the labour of the man as hunter and warrior.

Even under those conditions of civilisation which have existed in the

centuries which divide primitive savagery from high civilisation, the

demand for continuous, unbroken child-bearing on the part of the woman

as her loftiest social duty has generally been hardly less imperious.

Throughout the Middle Ages of Europe, and down almost to our own day,

the rate of infant mortality was almost as large as in a savage state;

medical ignorance destroyed innumerable lives; antiseptic surgery being

unknown, serious wounds were still almost always fatal; in the low

state of sanitary science, plagues such as those which in the reign

of Justinian swept across the civilised world from India to Northern

Europe, well nigh depopulating the globe, or the Black Death of 1349,

which in England alone swept away more than half the population of the

island, were but extreme forms of the destruction of population going on

continually as the result of zymotic disease; while wars were not

merely far more common but, owing to the famines which almost invariably

followed them, were far more destructive to human life than in our own

days, and deaths by violence, whether at the hands of the state or as

the result of personal enmity, were of daily occurrence in all lands.

Under these conditions abstinence on the part of woman from incessant

child-bearing might have led to almost the same serious diminution or

even extinction of her people, as in the savage state; while the very

existence of her civilisation depended on the production of an immense

number of individuals as beasts of burden, without the expenditure

of whose crude muscular force in physical labour of agriculture and

manufacture those intermediate civilisations would, in the absence of

machinery, have been impossible. Twenty men had to be born, fed at the

breast, and reared by women to perform the crude brute labour which is

performed today by one small, well-adjusted steam crane; and the demand

for large masses of human creatures as mere reservoirs of motor force

for accomplishing the simplest processes was imperative. So strong,

indeed, was the consciousness of the importance to society of continuous

child-bearing on the part of woman, that as late as the middle of the

sixteenth century Martin Luther wrote: “If a woman becomes weary or at

last dead from bearing, that matters not; let her only die from bearing,

she is there to do it;” and he doubtless gave expression, in a crude

and somewhat brutal form, to a conviction common to the bulk of his

contemporaries, both male and female.

Today, this condition has almost completely reversed itself.

The advance of science and the amelioration of the physical conditions

of life tend rapidly toward a diminution of human mortality. The infant

death-rate among the upper classes in modern civilisations has fallen

by more than one-half; while among poorer classes it is already, though

slowly, falling: the increased knowledge of the laws of sanitation has

made among all highly civilised peoples the depopulation by plague a

thing of the past, and the discoveries of the next twenty or thirty

years will probably do away for ever with the danger to man of zymotic

disease. Famines of the old desolating type have become an impossibility

where rapid means of transportation convey the superfluity of one land

to supply the lack of another; and war and deeds of violence, though

still lingering among us, have already become episodal in the lives of

nations as of individuals; while the vast advances in antiseptic surgery

have caused even the effects of wounds and dismemberments to become only

very partially fatal to human life. All these changes have tended to

diminish human mortality and protract human life; and they have today

already made it possible for a race not only to maintain its numbers,

but even to increase them, with a comparatively small expenditure of

woman’s vitality in the passive labour of child-bearing.

But yet more seriously has the demand for woman’s labour as child-bearer

been diminished by change in another direction.

Every mechanical invention which lessens the necessity for rough,

untrained, muscular, human labour, diminishes also the social demand

upon woman as the producer in large masses of such labourers. Already

throughout the modern civilised world we have reached a point at which

the social demand is not merely for human creatures in the bulk for use

as beasts of burden, but, rather, and only, for such human creatures as

shall be so trained and cultured as to be fitted for the performance of

the more complex duties of modern life. Not, now, merely for many men,

but, rather, for few men, and those few, well born and well instructed,

is the modern demand. And the woman who today merely produces twelve

children and suckles them, and then turns them loose on her society and

family, is regarded, and rightly so, as a curse and down draught, and

not the productive labourer, of her community. Indeed, so difficult and

expensive has become in the modern world the rearing and training of

even one individual, in a manner suited to fit it for coping with the

complexities and difficulties of civilised life, that, to the family as

well as to the state, unlimited fecundity on the part of the female has

already, in most cases, become irremediable evil; whether it be in the

case of the artisan, who at the cost of immense self-sacrifice must

support and train his children till their twelfth or fourteenth year,

if they are ever to become even skilled manual labourers, and who if his

family be large often sinks beneath the burden, allowing his offspring,

untaught and untrained, to become waste products of human life; or, in

that of the professional man, who by his mental toil is compelled to

support and educate, at immense expense, his sons till they are twenty

or older, and to sustain his daughters, often throughout their whole

lives should they not marry, and to whom a large family proves often no

less disastrous; while the state whose women produce recklessly large

masses of individuals in excess of those for whom they can provide

instruction and nourishment is a state, in so far, tending toward

deterioration. The commandment to the modern woman is now not simply

“Thou shalt bear,” but rather, “Thou shalt not bear in excess of thy

power to rear and train satisfactorily;” and the woman who should

today appear at the door of a workhouse or the tribunal of the

poor-law guardians followed by her twelve infants, demanding honourable

sustenance for them and herself in return for the labour she had

undergone in producing them, would meet with but short shrift. And the

modern man who on his wedding-day should be greeted with the ancient

good wish, that he might become the father of twenty sons and twenty

daughters, would regard it as a malediction rather than a blessing. It

is certain that the time is now rapidly approaching when child-bearing

will be regarded rather as a lofty privilege, permissible only to

those who have shown their power rightly to train and provide for their

offspring, than a labour which in itself, and under whatever conditions

performed, is beneficial to society. (The difference between the

primitive and modern view on this matter is aptly and quaintly

illustrated by two incidents. Seeing a certain Bantu woman who appeared

better cared for, less hard worked, and happier than the mass of

her companions, we made inquiry, and found that she had two impotent

brothers; because of this she herself had not married, but had borne by

different men fourteen children, all of whom when grown she had given

to her brothers. “They are fond of me because I have given them so many

children, therefore I have not to work like the other women; and my

brothers give me plenty of mealies and milk,” she replied, complacently,

when questioned, “and our family will not die out.” And this person,

whose conduct was so emphatically anti-social on all sides when viewed

from the modern standpoint, was evidently regarded as pre-eminently of

value to her family and to society because of her mere fecundity. On the

other hand, a few weeks back appeared an account in the London papers

of an individual who, taken up at the East End for some brutal offence,

blubbered out in court that she was the mother of twenty children.

“You should be ashamed of yourself!” responded the magistrate; “a woman

capable of such conduct would be capable of doing anything!” and the

fine was remorselessly inflicted. Undoubtedly, if somewhat brutally,

the magistrate yet gave true voice to the modern view on the subject of

excessive and reckless child-bearing.)

Further, owing partly to the diminished demand for child-bearing, rising

from the extreme difficulty and expense of rearing and education, and

to many other complex social causes, to which we shall return later,

millions of women in our modern societies are so placed as to be

absolutely compelled to go through life not merely childless, but

without sex relationship in any form whatever; while another mighty army

of women is reduced by the dislocations of our civilisation to accepting

sexual relationships which practically negate child-bearing, and whose

only product is physical and moral disease.

Thus, it has come to pass that vast numbers of us are, by modern social

conditions, prohibited from child-bearing at all; and that even those

among us who are child-bearers are required, in proportion as the class

of race to which we belong stands high in the scale of civilisation, to

produce in most cases a limited number of offspring; so that even for

these of us, child-bearing and suckling, instead of filling the entire

circle of female life from the first appearance of puberty to the end of

middle age, becomes an episodal occupation, employing from three or four

to ten or twenty of the threescore-and-ten-years which are allotted to

human life. In such societies the statement (so profoundly true when

made with regard to most savage societies, and even largely true with

regard to those in the intermediate stages of civilisation) that the

main and continuous occupation of all women from puberty to age is the

bearing and suckling of children, and that this occupation must fully

satisfy all her needs for social labour and activity, becomes an

antiquated and unmitigated misstatement.

Not only are millions of our women precluded from ever bearing a child,

but for those of us who do bear the demand is ever increasingly in

civilised societies coupled with the condition that if we would act

socially we must restrict our powers. (As regards modern civilised

nations, we find that those whose birthrate is the highest per woman are

by no means the happiest, most enlightened, or powerful; nor do we even

find that the population always increases in proportion to the births.

France, which in many respects leads in the van of civilisation, has

one of the lowest birthrates per woman in Europe; and among the free and

enlightened population of Switzerland and Scandinavia the birthrate is

often exceedingly low; while Ireland, one of the most unhappy and weak

of European nations, had long one of the highest birthrates, without

any proportional increase in population or power. With regard to the

different classes in one community, the same effect is observable. The

birthrate per woman is higher among the lowest and most ignorant classes

in the back slums of our great cities, than among the women of the upper

and cultured classes, mainly because the age at which marriages are

contracted always tends to become higher as the culture and intelligence

of individuals rises, but also because of the regulation of the number

of births after marriage. Yet the number of children reared to adult

years among the more intelligent classes probably equals or exceeds

those of the lowest, owing to the high rate of infant mortality where

births are excessive.)

Looking round, then, with the uttermost impartiality we can command,

on the entire field of woman’s ancient and traditional labours, we find

that fully three-fourths of it have shrunk away for ever, and that the

remaining fourth still tends to shrink.

It is this great fact, so often and so completely overlooked, which lies

as the propelling force behind that vast and restless “Woman’s Movement”

which marks our day. It is this fact, whether clearly and intellectually

grasped, or, as is more often the case, vaguely and painfully felt,

which awakes in the hearts of the ablest modern European women their

passionate, and at times it would seem almost incoherent, cry for new

forms of labour and new fields for the exercise of their powers.

Thrown into strict logical form, our demand is this: We do not ask that

the wheels of time should reverse themselves, or the stream of life

flow backward. We do not ask that our ancient spinning-wheels be again

resuscitated and placed in our hands; we do not demand that our old

grindstones and hoes be returned to us, or that man should again betake

himself entirely to his ancient province of war and the chase, leaving

to us all domestic and civil labour. We do not even demand that society

shall immediately so reconstruct itself that every woman may be again a

child-bearer (deep and over-mastering as lies the hunger for motherhood

in every virile woman’s heart!); neither do we demand that the children

whom we bear shall again be put exclusively into our hands to train.

This, we know, cannot be. The past material conditions of life have gone

for ever; no will of man can recall them; but this is our demand: We

demand that, in that strange new world that is arising alike upon

the man and the woman, where nothing is as it was, and all things are

assuming new shapes and relations, that in this new world we also shall

have our share of honoured and socially useful human toil, our full

half of the labour of the Children of Woman. We demand nothing more than

this, and we will take nothing less. This is our “WOMAN’S RIGHT!”