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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Woman and Labour by Olive Schreiner: nation by enervation, whose women remained active, virile, and laborious.
The conception which again and again appears to have haunted successive
societies, that it was a possibility for the human male to advance in
physical power and intellectual vigour, while his companion female became
stationary and inactive, taking no share in the labours of society beyond
the passive fulfilment of sexual functions, has always been negated. It
has ended as would end the experiment of a man seeking to raise a breed of
winning race-horses out of unexercised, short-winded, knock-kneed mares.
No, more disastrously! For while the female animal transmits herself to
her descendant only or mainly by means of germinal inheritance, and through
the influence she may exert over it during gestation, the human female, by
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