Page:The cry for justice - an anthology of the literature of social protest. - (IA cryforjusticea00sinc).pdf/256

 Woman's Right

(From "Woman and Labor")

(South African novelist, born 1859. In the preface to this book one learns that it is only a faint sketch from memory of part of a great work, the manuscript of which was destroyed during the Boer war)

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 ancient 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 be again a childbearer (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 for ever; 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!"