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Woman and Labour-Part7_Oliver Schreiner(1855-1920)_English Literature(文学名著)-第2页

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clearly the end to which the enervation of the female was tending, and who

were not sparing in their denunciations. "Time was," cries one Roman



writer of that age, "when the matron turned the spindle with the hand and

kept at the same time the pot in her eye that the pottage might not be



singed, but now," he adds bitterly, "when the wife, loaded with jewels,

reposes among pillows, or seeks the dissipation of baths and theatres, all



things go downward and the state decays." Yet neither he nor that large

body of writers and thinkers who saw the condition towards which the



parasitism of woman was tending to reduce society, preached any adequate

remedy. (Indeed, must not the protest and the remedy in all such cases, if



they are to be of any avail, take their rise within the diseased class

itself?)



Thoughtful men sighed over the present and yearned for the past, nor seem

to have perceived that it was irrevocably gone; that the Roman lady who,



with a hundred servants standing idle about her, should, in imitation of

her ancestress, have gone out with her pitcher on her head to draw water



from the well, while in all her own courtyards pipe-led streams gushed

forth, would have acted the part of the pretender; that had she insisted on



resuscitating her loom and had sat up all night to spin, she could never

have produced those fabrics which alone her household demanded, and would



have been but a puerile actor; that it was not by attempting to return to

the ancient and for ever closed fields of toil, but by entering upon new,



that she could alone serve her race and retain her own dignity and

virility. That not by bearing water and weaving linen, but by so training



and disciplining herself that she should be fitted to bear her share in the

labour necessary to the just and wise guidance of a great empire, and be



capable of training a race of men adequate to exercise an enlightened,

merciful, and beneficent rule over the vast masses of subject people--that



so, and so only, could she fulfil her duty toward the new society about

her, and bear its burden together with man, as her ancestresses of bygone



generations had borne the burden of theirs.

That in this direction, and this alone, lay the only possible remedy for



the evils of woman's condition, was a conceptionapparently grasped by

none; and the female sank lower and lower, till the image of the parasitic



woman of Rome (with a rag of the old Roman intensity left even in her

degradation!)--seeking madly by pursuit of pleasure and sensuality to fill



the void left by the lack of honourable activity; accepting lust in the

place of love, ease in the place of exertion, and an unlimited consumption



in the place of production; too enervated at last to care even to produce

offspring, and shrinking from every form of endurance--remains, even to the



present day, the most perfect, and therefore the most appalling, picture of

the parasitefemale that earth has produced--a picture only less terrible



than it is pathetic.

We recognise that it was inevitable that this womanhood--born it would seem



from its elevation to guide and enlighten a world, and in place thereof

feeding on it--should at last have given birth to a manhood as effete as



itself, and that both should in the end have been swept away before the

march of those Teutonic folk, whose women were virile and could give birth



to men; a folk among whom the woman received on the morning of her

marriage, from the man who was to be her companion through life, no



contemptible trinket to hang about her throat or limbs, but a shield, a

spear, a sword, and a yoke of oxen, while she bestowed on him in return a



suit of armour, in token that they two were henceforth to be one in toil

and in the facing of danger; that she too should dare with him in war and



suffer with him in peace; and of whom another writer tells us, that their

women not only bore the race and fed it at their breasts without the help






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