Woman and Labour

Glossary

"

"Give Us Labour!": The book's recurring demand, framed by Schreiner as older and more basic than the vote: access to real, trained, socially valued work, not just political rights. Chapter II builds this demand through an extended historical narrative of women's labour receding, field by field, under industrial civilization.; Related: Sex-Parasitism, Woman's Right
"Three Dreams in a Desert": An allegory Schreiner published separately about nineteen years before this book, originally written as part of the lost larger manuscript on sex relations — one of several allegories she used throughout that work to convey emotion she felt prose argument alone could not carry.; Related: The Lost Manuscript
"Woman's Right": The formal demand with which Chapter II closes: not a return to old domestic labour or a rejection of motherhood, but a claim to a fair half-share of the new, honoured, socially useful labour opening up in the modern world — the phrase Schreiner sets in capitals as the book's rallying cry.; Related: "Give Us Labour!"

C

Connection to The Story of an African Farm: Schreiner's earlier novel, whose character Lyndall delivers speeches dramatizing, in fictional form, much of the same diagnosis of women's condition that this book argues discursively — the two works are widely read as companion pieces.
Constance Lytton: The militant suffragist to whom Schreiner dedicates this book, praising her combination of intellectual power and tenderness. The dedication situates the book squarely within the militant-suffrage moment of 1911, though Schreiner frames labour, not the vote, as the deeper foundation of women's freedom.

D

Declining Infant Mortality and the Demand for Child-Bearing: Schreiner's argument that advances in sanitation, medicine, and antiseptic surgery have sharply reduced infant and adult mortality, meaning fewer births are now needed to sustain a population — which she treats as one major cause of women's traditional 'occupation' of continuous childbearing becoming, for the first time in history, only an episodic rather than lifelong role.; Related: The Bantu Woman's Fourteen Children

L

Luther on Child-Bearing: A quotation from Martin Luther that Schreiner cites in Chapter II as representative of the premodern conviction that a woman's death from repeated childbearing simply did not matter, since bearing children was her whole social function — evidence, for Schreiner, of how completely that older view has since been overturned by declining infant mortality and the rising cost of rearing children.

M

Mechanization and the Shrinking of Woman's Field: The technological argument running through Chapter II: steam power, factory production, and labour-saving machinery have absorbed most of women's traditional productive tasks (spinning, weaving, food preparation) far more completely than they have absorbed men's, leaving women disproportionately without a productive role unless new fields are opened to them.; Related: Sex-Parasitism, The Great Male Unemployed

O

Objections to Woman's Claim to Labour: Chapter VII's subject: the standard objections raised against women entering new fields of labour — chiefly the claim that childbearing alone fully justifies and fulfills women's social role — which Schreiner systematically rebuts using the same evidence of declining birthrates and shrinking domestic duties developed earlier in the book.; Related: The Master and the Ass

P

Parasitism and the Dominant Class: Schreiner's historical claim in Chapter III that sex-parasitism becomes possible only at a certain stage of civilization — as it did in ancient Greece, Rome, Persia, and Assyria, and as she argues it existed in her own day in China and Turkey — when a society's wealth, typically built on slave or subject labour, allows a dominant class of women to be maintained without any productive labour of their own.; Related: Sex-Parasitism

S

Schreiner's Wartime Confinement: The circumstances under which this book was actually written: Schreiner, isolated in a small up-country village under martial law during the Boer War, guarded by armed sentries and forbidden books, newspapers, or correspondence, wrote this reconstruction from memory in a darkened room as a deliberate act of mental discipline against the surrounding horror.; Related: The Lost Manuscript
Sex-Differences: Chapter V's argument that many apparent differences between men and women in temperament, interest, and ability are the product of unequal training and social condition rather than fixed biology — echoing and extending earlier versions of the same claim made by John Stuart Mill and Margaret Fuller.
Sex-Parasitism: Schreiner's central term for a condition, most visible in economically 'advanced' classes, in which women lose productive labour and depend entirely on sex-attraction and male support for survival. She treats it as a biological and social danger — one that weakens women, their children, and the race as a whole — rather than a privilege.; Related: "Give Us Labour!", The Great Male Unemployed

T

The Bantu Woman's Fourteen Children: An anecdote in Chapter II about a Bantu woman who bore fourteen children by different men and gave them to her impotent brothers to raise, and was esteemed by her community for her fecundity alone — used by Schreiner to illustrate how starkly the primitive valuation of unlimited childbearing contrasts with the modern view, exemplified by a London magistrate's condemnation of a mother of twenty.; Related: The Great Male Unemployed
The Comparative Zoology Argument: The evolutionary-biology method Schreiner's introduction describes as the foundation of her original, larger manuscript: tracing sex differences back to their earliest appearances in plant and animal life, using examples like toads and pouched sea animals to show that traits conventionally assumed 'inherent' to one sex are not fixed across species.; Related: Sex-Differences
The Devaluation of Domestic Labour: Schreiner's account, in her introduction, of how modern civilization has stripped women of one productive task after another — spinning, weaving, brewing, baking, even childrearing — as machinery and specialized institutions absorbed functions once performed exclusively by women in the household.; Related: Sex-Parasitism, "Give Us Labour!"
The Equal Pay Injustice: Schreiner's description, in her introduction, of unequal pay for equal work as 'the nearest approach to a wilful and unqualified wrong' in women's whole relation to society — a wrong she says can only be explained by the blinding effect of custom, not by any rational justification.; Related: "Give Us Labour!"
The Great Male Unemployed: Schreiner's term, from Chapter II, for the growing body of men whose only asset — raw physical strength — has been made obsolete by machinery, leaving them without a place in an economy that increasingly rewards intellectual and technical skill instead. She distinguishes this male unemployment crisis sharply from the female labour problem, arguing the two are not simply the same struggle.; Related: Sex-Parasitism
The Kafir Woman's Testimony: A conversation Schreiner recounts having at age eighteen with an African woman she describes as a person of genius, whose eloquent but unresentful account of women's suffering under polygamy and subjection shaped Schreiner's lifelong conviction that women accept their conditions only so long as those conditions remain socially necessary.
The Lost Manuscript: This book's origin story, told in Schreiner's introduction: it is what survives of a much longer twelve-chapter work on sex relations, most of which burned when her Johannesburg house was looted during the Boer War, forcing her to reconstruct this shorter book from memory and fragments years later under military confinement.; Related: "Three Dreams in a Desert"
The Master and the Ass: An allegory in Chapter VII comparing a man who tells his exhausted female companion to rest only once the hardest part of a shared climb is over — after she has already done her share of the labor — to the way society invokes women's childbearing role to justify excluding them from other labour only once the domestic burden has already fallen unequally on them.; Related: Sex-Parasitism
The Old Mother Duck Allegory: A parable in Chapter II comparing older women bewildered by their daughters' rejection of traditional domestic duties to a mother duck leading her ducklings to a pond that has since dried up — the ducklings instinctively seek new water elsewhere, just as young women seek new fields of labour once the old ones vanish.; Related: "Give Us Labour!"
The Voices of the Great Dame, the Burgher's Wife, and the Maiden: A sequence of imagined first-person speeches in Chapter II, in which a noblewoman, a burgher's wife, and a young spinner each explain why they are content with their traditional domestic labour — a rhetorical device Schreiner uses to show that women's historical acceptance of domestic work was reasoned and purposeful, not passive, before industrialization made that same work obsolete.; Related: The Old Mother Duck Allegory
The Woman's Movement: Schreiner's term for the broad, restless nineteenth- and twentieth-century push by women across Europe for new fields of labour and social participation, which she argues is driven not by whim or selfishness but by the concrete historical shrinking of women's traditional productive work under industrialization.; Related: "Give Us Labour!"

W

Woman and War: Chapter IV's argument: because women bear the direct physical cost of reproducing the race, Schreiner claims they have a distinct authority to speak against war's waste of that labour and life — an early and explicit link between feminism and pacifism.; Related: Sex-Parasitism
Woman as First Physician: Schreiner's claim, made in Chapter I and expanded in Chapter II, that women in early human societies were the race's first healers, priests, and prophets as well as its first farmers and potters — the deep historical basis for her argument that women's labour was once comprehensive and essential, not marginal.; Related: "Give Us Labour!"