Floyd Dell

There was once a lady (I forget her name) who said that love was for women one of the most important things in the world. She made the remark and let it go at that. She did not write a book about it. If she had considered it necessary she would doubtless have written such a book.

Consider the possibility—a book entitled Woman and Love, a book proving with logic and eloquence that woman ought to love, and that, unless she loved, the highest self-development was impossible to her and to the race!

It is not entirely absurd. Such a book might have been necessary. If half of all womankind, through some change in our social and ethical arrangements, refrained from love as something at once disagreeable and ungenteel, and if the other half loved under conditions disastrous to health and spirit, then there might have been need for a book preaching to women the gospel of love. It would have been time to urge that, hateful as the conditions might be, love was for women, nevertheless, a good thing, a fine thing, a wonderful and necessary thing. It would have been time to break down the prejudice which made one-half of womankind lead incomplete and futile lives, and to raise love itself to its proper dignity.

Well, we are in a condition like that today, only it is not love, it is work that has lost its dignity in the lives of women. It is not love, it is work from which one-half of womankind refrains as from something at once disagreeable and ungenteel, while the other half of womankind performs it under conditions disastrous to health and spirit.

There is need today for a book preaching to women the gospel of work. It is time to break down the prejudice which makes one-half of womankind lead incomplete and futile, because idle, lives. We need a book to show women what work should mean to them.

And, curiously enough, the book exists. It is Olive Schreiner’s Woman and Labor. It is a wise book and a beautiful book. There are statistics in it, but there is eloquence flaming on every page. It is a book of the joy and the significance of work for women.

When Olive Schreiner says “work,” she means it. She does not refer to the makeshifts which masquerade under the term of “social usefulness.” She means work done with the hands and the brain, work done for money, work that sets the individual free from dependence on any other individual. It is a theme worth all her eloquence. For work and love, and not either of them alone, are the most important things in the world—the supremest expressions of individual life.