ABSTRACT
More than a century ago , Olive Schreiner, in her classic, Woman and Labor, cried:
We demand that in that strange new world that is arising alike upon the man and the woman, where nothing is a s it was, and all things are assuming new shapes and relations , that i n this new world we also shal l hav e our share of honored and socially useful toil. 1
Her plea epitomizes the goals of privileged women who had been excluded from the economic process with the advent of the industrial revolution. It does not, in any sense, represent the aspirations of the great majority of women for whom honor s were beyond th e horizon, an d who had never known any wa y of lif e bu t "sociall y usefu l toil. "
