Woman and labour / by Olive Schreiner.

  • Olive Schreiner
Date:
[1911]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

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

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    sex problem. Such facts as this ; that, in the great majority of species on the earth the female form exceeds the male in size and strength and often in predatory instinct ; and that sex relationships may assume almost any form on earth as the conditions of life vary ; and that, even in their sexual relations towards offspring, those differences which we, con- ventionally, are apt to suppose are inherent in the paternal or the maternal sex form, are not inherent —as when one studies the lives of certain toads, where the female deposits her eggs in cavities on the back of the male, where the eggs are preserved and hatched ; or, of certain sea animals, in which the male carries the young about with him and rears them in a pouch formed of his own substance ; and countless other such. And above all, this important fact, which had first impressed me when as a child I wandered alone in the African bush and watched cock-o-veets singing their inter-knit love-songs, and small singing birds building their nests together, and caring for and watching over, not only their young, but each other, and which has powerfully influenced all I have thought and felt on sex matters since ;— the fact that, along the line of bird life and among certain of its species sex has attained its highest and aesthetic, and one might almost say intellectual,
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