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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: mortality and protract human life; and they have today already made it
possible for a race not only to maintain its numbers, but even to increase
them, with a comparatively small expenditure of woman's vitality in the
passive labour of child-bearing.
But yet more seriously has the demand for woman's labour as child-bearer
been diminished by change in another direction.
Every mechanical invention which lessens the necessity for rough,
untrained, muscular, human labour, diminishes also the social demand upon
woman as the producer in large masses of such labourers. Already
throughout the modern civilised world we have reached a point at which the
social demand is not merely for human creatures in the bulk for use as
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