The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Woman and Labour by Olive Schreiner: complete and helpless sex-parasitism.
Sex-parasitism, therefore, presents itself at the end of the nineteenth
century and beginning of the twentieth in a guise which it has never before
worn. We, the European women of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
stand therefore in a position the gravity and importance of which was not
equalled by that of any of our forerunners in the ancient civilisation. As
we master and rise above, or fall and are conquered by, the difficulties of
our position, so also will be the future, not merely of our own class, or
even of our own race alone, but also of those vast masses who are following
on in the wake of our civilisation. The decision we are called on to make
is a decision for the race; behind us comes on the tread of incalculable
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