Woman’s Right
By Olive Schreiner
(South African novelist. Contemporary. Author of “An African Farm,” “Three Dreams in a Desert,” “Woman and Labor,” etc. The following is from “Woman and Labor.”[3])
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 province of war and the chase, leaving to us all domestic and civil labor. We do not even demand that society shall immediately so reconstruct itself that every woman may again be a child bearer (deep and overmastering as lies the hunger for motherhood in every virile woman’s heart!); neither do we demand that the children 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 forever; 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 honored and socially useful human toil, our full half of the labor of the Children of Woman. We demand nothing more than this, and will take nothing less. This is our WOMAN’S RIGHT!
[3] Frederick A. Stokes Co.
From “The Convert”
By Elizabeth Robins
(English contemporary. Actress, playwright, novelist. Author of “Way Stations,” “The Convert,” etc. The following is from a suffrage speech by one of her characters, Miss Claxton, in “The Convert.”)
What, women don’t want it? Are you worrying about a handful who think because they have been trained to like subservience everybody else ought to like subservience, too?... The women who are made to work over hours—they want the vote. To compel them to work over hours is illegal. But who troubles to see that laws are fairly interpreted for the unrepresented.... I know a factory where a notice went up yesterday to say that the women employed there will be required to work 12 hours a day for the next few weeks.... Much of woman’s employment is absolutely unrestricted except that they may not be worked on Sunday. And while all this is going on, comfortable gentility sit in arm chairs and write alarmist articles on the falling birth-rate and the horrible amount of infant mortality. Here and there we find a man who realizes that the main concern of the State should be its children, and that you can’t get worthy citizens when the mothers are sickly and enslaved. The question of statecraft rightly considered always reaches back to the mother. That State is most prosperous that most considers her. No State that forgets her can survive. The future is rooted in the real being of women. If you rob the women, your children and your child’s children pay. Men haven’t realized it—your boasted logic has never yet reached so far. Of all the community the women who give the next generation birth, and who form its character, during the most impressionable years of its life—of all the community, these mothers now, or mothers to be, ought to be set free from the monstrous burden that lies upon the shoulders of millions of women.