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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: the expenditure of whose crude muscular force in physical labour of
agriculture and manufacture those intermediate civilisations would, in the
absence of machinery, have been impossible. Twenty men had to be born, fed
at the breast, and reared by women to perform the crude brute labour which
is performed today by one small, well-adjusted steam crane; and the demand
for large masses of human creatures as mere reservoirs of motor force for
accomplishing the simplest processes was imperative. So strong, indeed,
was the consciousness of the importance to society of continuous child-
bearing on the part of woman, that as late as the middle of the sixteenth
century Martin Luther wrote: "If a woman becomes weary or at last dead
from bearing, that matters not; let her only die from bearing, she is there
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