Woman and Labour

Olive Schreiner had written a much longer book on women’s work, and British troops burned the manuscript with her house during the Boer War. What she reconstructed in 1911 became the argument suffragists carried around like scripture. Her case is economic. Machines and servants had stripped middle-class women of the spinning, brewing, and tending that once made them producers, leaving them ornamental and dependent, a condition she called sex parasitism. Her answer was blunt: give us all labour, every field of work, and let us take our share of it. Written with the force of a woman who had spent years as a governess in the Karoo, it argues rather than pleads. Free PDF and EPUB editions are available here.