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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: wealth in the hands of the dominant class or race. It has invariably been
by feeding on this wealth, the result of forced or ill-paid labour, that
the female of the dominant race or class has in the past lost her activity
and has come to exist purely through the passive performance of her sexual
functions. Without slaves or subject classes to perform the crude physical
labours of life and produce superfluous wealth, the parasitism of the
female would, in the past, have been an impossibility.
There is, therefore, a profound truth in that universal saw which states
that the decay of the great nations and civilisations of the past has
resulted from the enervation caused by excessive wealth and luxury; and
there is a further, and if possible more profound, truth underlying the
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