Woman and Labour | Page 6

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,