The Project Gutenberg EBook of Woman and Labour, by Olive Schreiner

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Title: Woman and Labour

Author: Olive Schreiner

Posting Date: September 17, 2008 [EBook #1440]
Release Date: August, 1998

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WOMAN AND LABOUR ***

Produced by Sue Asscher

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 wh