vy for
us. While savage man lay in the sunshine on his skins, resting, that he
might be fitted for war or the chase, or while he shaped his weapons of
death, he ate and drank that which our hands had provided for him; and
while we knelt over our grindstone, or hoed in the fields, with one
child in our womb, perhaps, and one on our back, toiling till the
young body was old before its time--did we ever cry out that the labour
allotted to us was too hard for us? Did we not know that the woman who
threw down her burden was as a man who cast away his shield in battle--a
coward and a traitor to his race? Man fought--that was his work; we fed
and nurtured the race--that was ours. We knew that upon our labours,
even as upon man's, depended the life and well-being of the people whom
we bore. We endured our toil, as man bore his wounds, silently; and we
were content.

Then again a change came.

Ages passed, and time was when it was no longer necessary that all men
should go to the hunt or the field of war; and when only one in five,
or one in ten, or but one in twenty, was needed continually for these
labours. Then our fellow-man, having no longer full occupation in his
old fields of labour, began to take his share in ours. He too began to
cultivate the field, to build the house, to grind the corn (or make
his male slaves do it); and the hoe, and the potter's tools, and the
thatching-needle, and at last even the grindstones which we first had
picked up and smoothed to grind the food for our children, began to pass
from our hands into his. The old, sweet life of the open fields was ours
no more; we moved within the gates, where the time passes more slowly
and the world is sadder than in the air outside; but we had our own work
still, and were content.

If, indeed, we might no longer grow the food for our people, we were
still its dressers; if we did not always plant and prepare the flax and
hemp, we still wove the garments for our race; if we did no longer raise
the house walls, the tapestries that covered them were the work of our
hands; we brewed the ale, and the simples which were used as medicines
we distilled and prescribed; and, close about our feet, from birth
to manhood, grew up the children whom we had borne; their voices
were always in our ears. At the doors of our houses we sat with our
spinning-wheels, and we looked out across the fields that were once ours
to labour in--and were contented. Lord's wife, peasant's, o