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Woman and Labour by Olive Schreiner
page 37 of 168 (22%)

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!"


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