it, while the welfare and persistence of
society requires their submission; that whenever 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 society have made women's acquiescence no
longer necessary or desirable."

If this be so, it can only be accepted as the application to women of
a statement which could be made equally of all the down-trodden races
and classes of humanity. The one reason that makes me hesitate about
accepting it as a complete explanation of the age-long submission
of the oppressed is that we are all rather too ready to accept an
explanation that explains away (shall I say?) or at least justifies
the suffering of others. The explanation fits so well. Does it not
fit too well? Probably Olive Schreiner did not intend it to cover the
whole ground.

In one detail, in any case, I take exception to it. An oppressed class
or race or sex may often suffer intensely and go on suffering and
submitting, but not _after_ they have gained a clear perception of the
intensity of those sufferings, for then the first stage of rebellion
has already begun. Not one of us who has grown to middle age but can
remember, looking back to her own girlhood, how meekly and as a matter
of course women of all classes accepted every sort of suffering as
part of the lot of woman, especially of the married woman, whether it
was excessive child-bearing, pain in childbirth, physical overwork,
or the mental suffering arising out of a penniless and dependent
condition, with the consequent absolute right of the husband to the
custody and control of the children of the union. And in all nations
and classes where this state of affairs still continues, the women
have as yet no clear intellectual perception of the keenness and
unfairness of their suffering. They still try to console themselves
with believing and allowing others to suppose that after all, things
are not so bad; they might be worse. These poor women actually
hypnotize themselves into such a belief.

Have you not heard a mother urge a daughter or a friend to submit
uncomplainingly to the most outrageous domestic tyranny, for is not
hers after all the common fate of woman?

No clear perception there!

This argument in no way touches the exceptional woman or man,
belonging to an oppressed class. Such a woman, for instance, as the
Kaffir woman spoken