Woman and labour / by Olive Schreiner.

  • Olive Schreiner
Date:
1914
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Woman and labour / by Olive Schreiner. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    development on earth : a point of development to which no human race as a whole has yet reached, and which represents the realisation of the highest sexual ideal which haunts humanity. When these three chapters were ended I went on to deal, as far as possible, with woman’s condition in the most primitive, in the savage and in the semi- savage states. I had always been strangely interested from childhood in watching the condition ot the native African women in their primitive society about me. When 1 was eighteen I had a conversation with a Kafir woman still in her untouched primitive condition, a conversation which made a more profound impression on my mind than any but one other incident connected with the position of woman has ever done. She was a woman whom I cannot think of otherwise than as a person of genius. In language more eloquent and intense than I have ever heard from the lips of any other woman, she painted the condition of the women of her race; the labour of women, the anguish of woman as she grew older, and the limitations of her life closed in about her, her sufferings under the condition of polygamy and subjection; all this she painted with a passion and intensity I have not known equalled ; and i3