THE BOER WOMAN AND THE MODERN WOMAN'S QUESTION
Even in matters of sex and the inter-relations of the sexes, which form
the very core of human life, the Boer's primitive condition is not
without its vast advantages.[57]
[57] It is perhaps hardly necessary to repeat that by
the term "Boer" it is not intended to signify all the
Dutch-descended inhabitants of South Africa, but only such
as have retained the old seventeenth century habits and
ideas of their forefathers, and who speak only the "Taal."
Probably almost half the inhabitants of South Africa of
Dutch or French descent now speak English, and are often
entirely indistinguishable from the other inhabitants of
the country; the interest therefore which attaches itself
to the Boer who has preserved until to-day the manners
and ideas of two centuries ago does not attach to them.
We shall deal with such persons later among the other
nineteenth century folk of South Africa.
One who goes among these people expecting to find their sex
relationships and their feeling with regard to sexual phenomena
highly complex and poetical, will be disappointed. The æsthetic and
intellectual transfiguration of sexual instinct is the result of a long
course of intellectual evolution; and in the race or the individual
it, perhaps, more certainly than anything else, indicates the height
of development which the man or the society has reached, and the width
of the chasm which divides it from the primitive conditions of life.
It would be as rational to go into the woods and search on the wild
rose-stems for a Maréchal Niel or a Queen of Roses, with their wealth
of petals and perfume, as to go into a primitive up-country farmhouse
expecting to find the woman's heart humming "Portuguese Sonnets" to
her husband; or the man who, having lost his first wife, looks forward
through the rest of life to the death which shall at last allow him to
sleep beside her, and who shall have found every act of life sanctified
by the remembrance of a close intellectual fellowship. These things are
an efflorescence which can only appear on the branches very high on the
tree of life; perhaps possible only to the philosopher or poet, or to
those who are potentially such; and to look in any simple pastoral or
agricultural people for the intense and individualized affection which
is possible alone to the man or woman in whom the mental functions
entirely predominate over the physical, is a delusion.
The young Boer, when at sixteen or eighteen he passes from childhood to
manhood, looks about him for a female companion. "I am courting three,"
he may say, "and I am not yet sure which I shall take. So-and-so has
the most stock, but she is very plain; so-and-so is pretty and white,
but my mother does not like her; so I suppose I shall take so-and-so."
Nor is there sometimes more intensity of individualized feeling
expressed on the part of the woman. "Will you come to my wedding? I
am going to be married in two months' time," a maiden may say. And
when it is inquired to whom, she replies that there are several youths
courting her, and she intends to decide within the next three or four
weeks which she shall have, and has the material for the wedding dress
already in her box.
Nor even after marriage is there sometimes more individualized
intensity of feeling. Persons who have lived together with apparent
satisfaction and contentment for ten or twenty years will not have
lost their partners for three weeks before they are courting or being
courted; and it is an understood thing immediately on the death of
one spouse, the survivor shall as a rule look for another. Marriages
after thirteen weeks of widowhood or widowership are not uncommon. "If
it please the Lord to take him first," a very happily married wife
once said, looking across the room at her conjugal companion, "I shall
choose the man the likest him that I can get. I don't believe any woman
ever had a better husband."
You may inquire at a farmhouse, at which you called a month before,
after the house-mother who then sat in her elbow-chair. The husband
with deep sorrow may tell you she is dead, and describe her death, then
adds, brightening up, "But the week after next I am going to be married
again to so-and-so, the daughter of so-and-so"; and he looks to you for
congratulation.
"I am sick of all this talk of choosing and choosing," says the
old-fashioned mother, whose children may have imbibed somewhat of the
modern attitude on the subject. "If a man is healthy and does not
drink, and has a good little handful of stock and good temper, and is
a good Christian, what great difference can it make to a woman which
man she takes? There is not so much difference between one man and
another." Nor from her own standpoint is she wholly mistaken.
What the young man desires in a wife is a female companion who will
bear his children, suckle them, attend to the servants, and make his
moleskin clothing for him, and who will always be sitting in the chair
opposite when he comes into the house, and be ready to pour out his
coffee for him until his daughter is old enough; and who will save him
from that feeling of weary solitude he would be oppressed by if he sat
in the farmhouse quite alone; further, who will, if possible, bring
as much to the common housekeeping in the way of sheep, cattle, and
household goods as he himself brings; and, finally, be able to advise
him over all matters of domestic economy and external business. Of
the girls in the district many would probably be able to fulfil these
obligations equally well. Out of the hundred girls in the countryside,
eighty would make him almost equally happy, and the remaining twenty
would only be unsuitable through some serious defect in health, or
temper, or intelligence. Nor are the woman's needs in the direction
of sex companionship very different. She requires a man to look after
the common stock; to give her children; and if he do not drink (and he
very seldom does), and so spend the household money when he goes to
sell the wool; if he never buys or sells without asking her advice,
and is not ill-tempered but affectionately inclined, all that which she
most craves in a sexual partner is granted her. That essentially modern
condition of mind, in which an individual remains sexually solitary
and unmated because no other is found who satisfies the complex
intellectual and emotional needs of a nature in which these needs are
as imperative as the physical, and in which union with an individual
not singled out by an almost immeasurable sympathy from the rest of
their sex would be morally abhorrent, and union with such beloved
individuality is regarded as the crowning good of existence--this is a
condition of mind unintelligible to the primitive Boer.
That dream, which waking haunts the hearts of certain
nineteenth-century men and women (as indeed it has haunted hearts
in all centuries which have reached a certain stage of intellectual
growth, from old Montaigne pacing in his long study in France, to Plato
in the gardens of Athens)--the dream of a sex union, in which the
physical shall be but emblematic of an indissoluble union of head and
heart, which shall be as fruitful in the mental life of both man and
woman as the physical union is fruitful in perpetuating the race, and
across which shall lie as its darkest shadow only the fear of death's
separation!--this dream the real old Boer has of necessity never yet
dreamed.
If we suppose a child to take a handful of smooth, square blocks,
and seek to amuse itself by placing them securely one on another, he
would probably find small difficulty; each block he seized would fit
with equal smoothness on the surface of any other, and his game would
require no skill.
If, however, one should take a knife and trace a few shallow
geometrical lines and figures on the surface of the blocks, and the
object was to make them interfit perfectly on one another, the game
would now be more complex. Each block would not now accord with the
surface of any other with equal smoothness; and though all might be
super-imposed, some would fit well and some ill, as their surfaces
coincided or not; and the mating of them, though still simple, would
require some skill.
If yet again one should carve out the surface of certain blocks
into arabesque designs and delicate organic figures, the child's
problem would be made almost insoluble. Each surface would require
to be matched with a surface corresponding to its own in complex
indentations, and it would be hard to find any two which might be
brought into contact without breaking off some of their finer points
and marring their beauty; and that child might sit long with each
ornate block in its hand, and only when by rare good fortune a surface
harmonizing with its corrugations was found, could the matching go
on satisfactorily. The game so simple when it began with the smooth
blocks, would have become an intricate puzzle with the carved.
Very crudely, but with some sharpness, would this child's play
exemplify the great problem of sexual selection in the different stages
of social and individual growth.
The primitive savage, running naked in his primeval wood, or the
savage who survives in the heart of a civilized society in the form
of the pure sensualist and libertine, resembles our flat block. In
him, sexual instinct is still so simple and undifferentiated that
every female whom, as the naked savage he captures in war, or, as
the clothed savage, purchases with his gold, is equally suited to
satisfy his needs; for him the search for sex fellowship is neither
much more difficult, or more important, than that of the jelly-fish or
the hippopotamus, or any creature still in the quadrupedal stage. For
persons in this stage of emotional and intellectual development there
is no more any complex problem of sexual selection than for the child
with its smooth blocks there is a problem of block selection.
On the other hand, if we turn to the individuals of our own or past
ages who have reached the highest individualized development, emotional
as well as intellectual, we shall find them in the matter of sex
selection not inaptly to be compared with our most ornate and carved
blocks. As the child may hold its flowered block long in its hand
unable to mate it without injuring it, so individuals with highly
differentiated intellectual and emotional sex needs, not only find
the attainment of satisfactory sexual relationships one of the most
difficult and important matters of life, but they frequently fail
entirely, and are compelled to accept the mutilated life of celibacy,
or the more mutilated life of inharmonious union.[58]
[58] That on the higher planes of development, where the
individuality becomes complex and varied, the unions of
Socrateses with their Xanthippes, or fruitless celibacies,
are not universal, can only be accounted for by the fact
that, unlike the artificial blocks which the carver may
shape as he will, the men and women of any society or age
are part of one organic body and, except where unhealthy
social conditions prevent their being exposed to the
action of the same forces, will tend to develop in the
same direction, and again to meet on the higher planes of
growth as they did in the lower. Therefore the most highly
developed and individualized men and women of any society,
if they have been exposed to the action of the same
cultivating forces, may often be compared to those delicate
and intricate puzzles carved from one ball of ivory by the
Chinese, which only need to be brought into juxtaposition
to show how admirably they harmonize and how essentially
they form but one whole.
Though as the carved block once interwedged with a corresponding
surface yields a combination more stable than could ever be effected
between smooth surfaces; so, sex emotion having blossomed into its
intellectual and æsthetic stage, the unions of men and women, though
more difficult of attainment, may be when attained of more permanent
strength; till, in the case of a Pericles and an Aspasia, we may
find it possible for the most highly developed human natures to find
in sexual companionship carried out on the highest planes the same
absolute completeness of satisfaction, which an Indian hunter, on his
lower plane enjoys, when he captures a new squaw.
Midway between these two extremes in the matter of sexual evolution
may be placed the condition of our primitive South African Boer. If,
in the matter of sexual relationships, he has not attained to the very
highest æsthetic and intellectual standpoint yet reached by human
nature,--if even the transports of the monogamous bird, who pursues
his courtship with a breast swelled out with song, are little known
to him, he is yet very far removed from the level of the barbarian,
or the civilized libertine of our cities. He resembles our block when
in its second stage of complexity, where it passes from its matchable
condition and has not yet reached that stage of organic complexity,
which makes successful mating almost insuperably difficult. Our Boer,
when he seeks a wife, seeks, it is true, not so much the individual as
the woman--but it must be a woman of his own race, class, and stage of
growth; and if his psychic sexual wants are still so simple and uniform
that many a woman of his own class may satisfy them, they still exist.
The woman whom he places in the elbow-chair of his house, must share
his simple religion, his ancestral view of life and its right ordering,
must be able to instruct his children in those simple matters in which
he was himself instructed, and to order his household with dignity;
and, simple as these needs are, they are imperative. It is _not_ as a
merely physical companion, and still less a sexual slave, whom he seeks
to rule for his own pleasure, that he desires her: undoubtedly his sex
relations are on the whole dominated by less crudely primitive instinct
than those of the larger numbers of the sex unions, both legal and
illegal, which are formed in our nineteenth-century societies, however
much they may in certain matters fall below the highest ideal.
His system of sex relations has generally two vast advantages: it is
healthy, and it is just.
It is healthy, in that it is in harmony with his whole mental and
material condition.
We who are habituated to living in societies in a state of rapid
growth and development, in which as a result certain individuals
under the stimulus of new conditions attain to the highest stage of
psychic development, while others remain in the most primitive; and who
possess, bound up in one body social, persons in a hundred different
stages of culture; we, who are accustomed to feel that the harmonizing
of our institutions and manners with the needs of our enormously varied
social units constitutes an always pressing and almost overpowering
difficulty, and who are accustomed to feel this above all in matters
of sex--we find it difficult to conceive of the existence of a society
which has no social problems, and, above all, no sex problems--yet this
is very nearly the state of the primitive Boer.
One may live beside him for years, and watch his social life, without
the thought ever occurring, "Ah! were but the sexual condition of these
folk altered, were their traditions and modes of action with regard to
sex but more in harmony with the need and thoughts of at least the best
part of the community, how healthful would be their condition!" That
unlovely confusion which prevails in our civilized life, where sham
institutions, too high for one-half of our folk, overlay institutions
too savage to see daylight, and the sex relations, which should be
the joy of a people, form often the diseased and painful side of the
national life--and the perception of which haunts one hourly, as one
walks the streets of our great cities, or watches the life of our
drawing-rooms or alleys--does not exist in the simple uniform condition
of the South African Boer.
In our hurly-burly societies, in which the brothel with its female
outcasts and the male prostitutes whose gold supports it are found
side by side with men and women to whom sex relationships are already
sacramental; in which a large mass of the community are still in that
stage in which marriage itself is contracted mainly as the result
of an arithmetical calculation, while, to another large and always
growing section, it is a union based upon, and mainly consisting of, a
psychic union, whose spontaneity constitutes its strength:--we in such
societies are compelled hourly to discuss, if not audibly at least in
our own minds, the right and wrong, the usefulness and non-usefulness
of the sexual laws and customs of our societies; and we seek in vain
to reduce them to a uniformity suitable to the wants of all. To us,
as individuals and as societies, life presents itself as a series of
problems, which have to be worked out and solved, if solved at all, by
the individual for himself during the course of his life, and by our
societies as wholes in the course of generations; and this is above
all true with regard to matters of sex. For the Boer, on the other
hand, in his quiescent and unchanging social condition, there is no
such difficulty. With him, where generation has succeeded generation
without being exposed to the action of any new forces, and where almost
identical mental and material conditions have been brought to bear
on every member of the society, there is of necessity almost absolute
social homogeneity--and with homogeneity an absence of all those varied
conditions which perplex us.
What was good for the Boer's father is generally good for himself,
what is good for one man in his society is generally good for another;
tradition, the enforcing of which for many of us is simply an endeavour
to fit a child's shoe on a man's foot, or to force the fare of a
cannibal down the throat of a civilized man--tradition is his safe
and sure guide, and what all the folk about him do is also generally
the right and wise thing for himself. Above all, on matters of sex he
has no doubts, no difficulties, no perplexities: his curious little
courtships, his matter of fact but rational and honourable marriages,
his monetary institutions as they bear on sex, are all admirably
suited to his mental and emotional condition; and without altering
his intellectual outlook and his physical surroundings it would be
impossible to improve on them.
If it be objected that our nineteenth-century disorganization on sexual
matters, with its consequent enormous accumulation of suffering and
friction, is but an indication of our active growth and the rapid
development taking place at a hundred points in our social system--we
fully allow it.
But it remains true that that harmony between the sexual institutions
of a society and the highest wants and ideals of all its members, which
constitutes the condition of perfect health, is known in the little
Boer society (as it is in that of many other simple and stationary
people)--and it is not known in nineteenth-century communities, though
it may, and probably will, be to those of a later age. Sex and sex
relationships are no more the causes of gigantic suffering and social
evil among the Boers than food is the cause of colossal suffering to a
man who gets the kind he needs.
Whenever the stationary condition of such a society as that of the
primitive Boer is broken up, and he begins to grow, dislocation on
sex matters must occur, with its consequent suffering, before he can
attain to a new plane; but it must be allowed that the absence of this
suffering and dislocation is one of the great advantages of his present
condition.
Further, as we have said, the Boer's system of relations in matters of
sex is just.
We know of few social conditions in which the duties and enjoyments of
life are so equally divided between the sexes, none in which they are
more so.
This assuredly is no small matter.
A sense of sexual justice exhibits itself among these simple folks in
that, in the matter of inheritance, sex is allowed to play no part.
Not only at the death of parents is property equally divided between
children of both sexes, but that subtler and much more common and
grave injustice which in nineteenth-century societies exhibits itself
in the large sums expended on the higher education of sons, while the
daughters go often more slightly instructed, in the Boer's primitive
condition does not exist. This initial act of sexual justice renders
the Boer woman in marriage free and equivalent to the male. As a rule
she not only brings to the common household an equal share of material
goods, but, and this is infinitely of more importance, she brings to
the common life an equal culture. The fiction of a common possession of
all material goods which exists in many nineteenth-century societies,
notably the English, is not a fiction but a reality among the Boers;
and justly so, seeing that the female as often as the male contributes
to the original household stock.
But far more important than the fact that she holds an equal right over
the material things of life is the fact that she takes an equally large
and valuable share in the common work of life.
While the man counts in his sheep and rounds up his cattle and attends
to the shearing, or goes a-hunting, or at intervals builds a house,
or dam, or kraal; the woman, in addition to the bearing of the common
children, and feeding them at her breast, and rearing them with her own
hands, tends to the feeding of her household. It is she who with her
own hands shapes its clothing, she who trains and teaches her sons
and daughters all that in many cases they ever know of the religion
and the tradition of their people:--in the old days this was always
so, and still to-day is often true. It was she who in those days,
when conflicts with savage men and wild beasts were a part of daily
life, faced death side by side with the man, who stood always shoulder
to shoulder with him; and it is she who still to-day--and rightly,
considering her past and present--has a determining influence in peace
or war.[59]
[59] Speaking of the Boer insurrection of 1815, Sir Andries
Stockenstrom in his _Autobiography_ says of two families
of Boers, who were surrounded by British soldiers: "They
placed themselves in a position of defence under their
wagons. One of the soldiers by whom they were surrounded
having ventured within range, entreating them to surrender,
was shot dead on the spot. The fire was, of course,
returned. Bezuidenhout's wife, reloading the guns as they
were discharged, kept encouraging her husband and brother
Fabre not to surrender; until at last Bezuidenhout fell
dead, riddled with bullets, and she and Fabre were seized
dangerously wounded, as well as her son, a boy of twelve,
slightly."
The Transvaal War of 1881 was largely a woman's war; it was from the
armchair beside the coffee-table that the voice went out for conflict
and no surrender. Even in the Colony at that time, and at the distance
of many hundreds of miles, Boer women urged sons and husbands to go to
the aid of their northern kindred, while a martial ardour often far
exceeding that of the males seemed to fill them.[60]
[60] This was written in 1890, nine years before the War of
the Republics began.
If the Boer woman of to-day does not, like her Teutonic ancestresses
of eighteen centuries ago, lead her nation to war, going bare-footed
and white-robed before it, it is still largely her voice which urges
it forward or holds it back. It may, perhaps, be said that one-half
only of the fighting force of all nations appears upon its fields of
battle; that the other is heavily engaged at home in producing and
rearing, at a risk to life almost as great and at the cost of suffering
immeasurably greater, the warriors of the nation--but the Boer woman's
share in the defence of the state is more direct, more conscious and
unmistakable.
Further, if it cannot be said of the Boer woman that of the labour
which sustains and builds up her society she absorbs the same enormous
and all-important share which is found to devolve on women in many
primitive societies--it must be yet allowed that her share of labour is
relatively far more useful and important to her society than that of
immense masses of females under nineteenth-century conditions.
If, unlike the female in those societies in which almost the sole
occupation of the male being war and the chase, to the female is
left, in addition to the bearing and rearing of the whole people, all
agricultural and manufacturing labour, from the cultivation of the
fields, and the grinding grain, to the building of houses, and the
weaving of garments, and in which even the primitive artistic labour
of the society largely devolves on them in the ornamenting of utensils
or clothing--if the Boer woman cannot lay claim to the exclusive
possession of all these important fields of action, she still retains
possession of one full half of the labour of her race. Under no
circumstances has she become the drone of her society, or sunk to the
condition of being merely a parasitic excrescence on the national life,
fed, clothed, and sustained by the labours of others in return for the
mere performance of her animal sex function--her very children, when
once she has gone through the mechanical labour of bearing them, being
reared by others, while she contributes nothing either mentally or
physically to the fund of labour which sustains the state--a condition
into which large masses of females in the civilizations of the past and
present have tended to sink, which is universal among the inhabitants
of Eastern harems to-day, which was tending to become universal among
the wealthier classes in Europe until forty or fifty years ago a
counter movement took its birth.
If the Boer woman does not manifest that superiority in intelligence
over the male section of her society, which is continually remarked
with surprise by those who study the women of many primitive societies
(and which is doubtless the result of the more strenuous, complex, and
important labours with which they occupy themselves, as compared with
the males of their societies), the Boer woman's condition is even more
happy yet, being one of intellectual equality with her male companions;
a condition which seems to constitute the highest ideal in the human
sexual world. Between the Boer woman and her male comrade we never find
yawning that mental chasm which in Eastern harems, and frequently in
European drawing-rooms, divides the males, highly trained, and in many
cases laboriously active, and therefore mentally strong, from their
females, so frequently mentally vacuous and feeble, in whom the passive
enjoyment of ease has taken the place of all strenuous systematic
exertion; and who have become in many cases so enervated, that in
passing from their society to that of the males of their own circle we
seem to be passing intellectually into contact with another and higher
tribe of creature. We believe there is hardly a Boer farm-house in
South Africa, where the perturbing influence of the nineteenth-century
civilization has not yet crept, where it would be possible to discuss
any matters with the male members of the household which its females
would not have discussed with an equal thoughtfulness, knowledge, and
intelligence. Nay it has sometimes even appeared to us that the Boer
woman, probably owing to her somewhat more arduous and complex labours
with regard to her children, does exhibit, as compared to the male, a
slightly greater thoughtfulness, and a larger tendency to inquire into
the causes of things and to interest herself in impersonal matters:
tendencies which the males of the upper classes in the nineteenth
century commonly exhibit to an immensely larger degree than their
females.
Among the finest specimens of the Boer we have met have certainly
been women, devoid of the culture of schools, but keen, resolute,
reflective, and determined; showing no trace of that frivolity, love of
pleasure, and uncertainty of thought, which so often marks the female
of the wealthy classes in our nineteenth-century societies, and renders
her so markedly the inferior of the male.[61]
[61] It is hardly necessary to state that we are not
referring to the labouring classes in modern societies,
in which, when the male and female are both exposed to
the same conditions of labour, the same intellectual
homogeneity is to be observed. The position of these women
differs, however, from that of the Boer woman in the less
social consideration they enjoy, this depending on causes
too complex to be here entered on.
No man, we believe, can study the condition of the South African Boer,
before he has been acted upon by the nineteenth-century conditions,
without being convinced that not only is one full half of the social
labour in the hands of the women, but that it is not the least complex
or socially honourable; and that she is far more the fellow labourer
and comrade of man, than are the mass of women in nineteenth-century
societies.
It has often be said of the Boer woman that she, almost alone, still
sits immovable in her elbow chair, while all her sisters, Teutonic,
and even Keltic and Slavonic, have risen to their feet; and that while
the women of all European societies, from New Zealand to America,
from Australia to Russia, have risen, or are tending to rise up, to
re-adjust their relations to human life, she alone sits stolid in
her elbow-chair. It is said of her that in that vast movement, which
without leaders or instigators, is taking its rise from end to end of
the civilized world, awakening in the heart of the young English girl
on solitary karoo plains, stirring in the breast of the duchess in her
boudoir, and guiding the hand of the working-girl as she knocks for
admission at the door of the factory--that movement which, like some
vast tidal wave, silently gathering strength as it swells in the ocean
depths, will break at last on the shores of life, carrying all before
it; and, whether for good or for evil, will accomplish a more radical
modification in human life than any the world has witnessed, since in
pre-historic ages the discovery of fire or of letters modified all
future human existence on the globe--it is said of her that in this
movement the Boer woman has no part. This is true, and well it may be
so.
For let us pause an instant to consider what, in its ultimate essence,
this Woman's Movement represents.
It is not a sudden endeavour on the part of earth's women to attain
to greater physical enjoyment or more luxurious ease. There have been
self-indulgent and sensuous women since the days when our fore-mothers
ground corn with handstones, individual women seeking ever to increase
their sexual and sensual enjoyments, and evade their burdens; but it
is noticeable that it is exactly these women who are _not_ found in
the van of change to-day. If the woman's movement of this country may
be said to have its origin in any one class more than another, it is
exactly among those women of the wealthier classes whom modern life has
supplied with overwhelming liberality with all the material enjoyment
and comfort which existence can yield; and who have no physical or
sexual indulgence or material good to gain by change, but who have much
to lose. It is these women, and not the overtasked labourer's wife with
ten children to rear, feed, and labour for, it is these women above all
who have started to their feet and are demanding the re-organization of
their relations to life; and side by side with the factory girl and the
ill-paid solitary spinster whom the struggle of life is driving to the
wall, are found the millionaire's daughter and the countess, and the
comfortably situated woman of the middle classes, for whom earth has
left no material good unyielded. The Woman's Movement is essentially
_not_ a movement on the part of civilized women in search of greater
enjoyment and physical ease.
Further, it is not a movement that has its origin in a sudden and
astonishing revelation to earth's womanhoods of the fact that physical
and mental suffering in an unequal proportion has been the guerdon of
their sex. Unless a woman be unendowed with that modicum of reflective
power which characterizes even the lowest savage, she must always
have been aware of this fact. Since the first Eve, slowly rearing
herself from the quadrupedal to erect bipedal attitude, found the
pains of child-bearing and bringing forth immensely increased by her
erect attitude, her arms filled with her helpless offspring, and her
fighting powers diminished by her absorption in shielding and feeding
the race, till that time when she became the agricultural slave of her
more unhampered companion, women have always suffered, and they have
known that they suffered. If you sit down beside the savage woman as
she kneels on the ground grinding her corn between her handstones,
you may have painted for you a picture of woman's suffering, such
as few civilized women could paint, because few have so intense an
experience into which to dip their brushes. Yet there has been in all
the countless ages of the past, when women suffered immensely more than
they suffer to-day, no Woman's Movement.
Sitting beside a Bantu woman once as she knelt on the ground grinding
her corn, we, anxious to arrive at her conception on religious matters,
inquired of her whether she believed there was a God. She shook her
head, and said that she did not; there might be a God, but if there
were one, He was not good. When further we inquired why this was so,
she replied that if God were good He would not have made women. There
might be a God for the white woman, but there was certainly none for
the black; and then she broke into a description of the condition
of women in semi-barbarous societies, the force of which cannot be
retained when translated from her picturesque and passionate language,
but its substance was much as this:--"See there," pointing to two small
girl children playing beside the huts, "they are happy now; they play
all day; they play with their brothers; they think they are boys; it
is good with them. Now, wait a little--when they are so high," raising
her hand as high as she could reach kneeling, "it is still well with
them. Then the breasts begin to grow; the people look, and say, she
is beginning to be a woman; then they say, where are the cattle for
her? Then a man comes, perhaps he is old; it does not matter--'Here,
take her; give us the cattle.' She goes home with him. She plants the
corn, she makes the hut; she makes his food for him. Soon the child
begins to grow in her body; that is good. All day she works,"--putting
her hand to her back--"her back aches; it doesn't matter. It is all
right; she is glad she is going to have a child; the man will like her;
he will not beat her. At night she cooks the food, she cleans round
the hut, she has children, she grinds the corn! See there, all those
baskets--her hands made them full of corn! Then the wrinkles begin to
come; see, her breasts get soft; she is old. Then the man comes home at
night. 'Make haste, make haste,' he says, 'you do not grind the corn
nicely.' She grinds it as she always ground it, but he beats her. 'Make
haste, make haste! You are old--you are lazy! What is your face so
ugly for?' She works; he beats her. See here"--pointing to her breast
as though there were a mark on it--"he beats it with a whip: the blood
comes out. Never mind. Take the child, put it at the breast, let it
suck: the blood comes on its face. She wipes it off"--with an action of
the hand as though she were wiping the blood off an imaginary child's
face.--"Then he brings the young wife. The young wife is strong; her
arms are still fat. She has still many children in her. The young wife
says, 'Do this; do that.' The old wife must not speak. Then the breasts
dry up--there is no milk in them. She works in the fields all day. She
brings the wood home. 'Make haste! Make haste!' The old wife is done
for! There--throw her away; she is good for nothing. Let her sit out
there on the dung-heap! She is only a thing! The man can have as many
wives as he likes. Yes, there is perhaps a God for the white woman;
there is none for the black."
Now, what is curious with regard to a state of feeling such as this
woman experienced, is that, intensely bitter as she is against the
impersonal fate which has made her what she is, keenly as she feels her
own servitude, and intensely conscious as she is of her own pain, there
is not in her the dawning of a feeling which might ultimately result
in rebellion, nor the shadow of a feeling of resentment against even
man, nor is there any hope, one might almost say desire, to alter her
own position. If you suggest to her that she may alter matters, she
looks at you with a leaden-eyed despair, with more than incredulity,
almost with condemnation. She looks at you as the tortoise might, on
whose back, according to Eastern tradition, the elephant stands who
supports the world. If he complained to you that the elephant's feet
were heavy on him, and you suggested that he might move out from under
them,--"What! and destroy the world, which ultimately depends on me!"
Keenly conscious of their suffering, and bitter against fate have been
the hearts of numberless women of all ages, but it has been silent
bitterness, such as we mortals feel who are conscious of the existence
of death from the cradle to the grave, and object strongly to it, but
say little, knowing it is useless, and its presence inevitable.
What is new is not that woman suffers or knows that she suffers. The
woman of to-day probably suffers less than the women of any period,
since that most primitive time when men and women both wandered free;
the absolutely new thing is her conscious determination to modify her
relation to life about her.
If, then, a Woman's Movement be not in its ultimate essence a sudden
and insane desire on the part of woman for increased material enjoyment
and physical ease, nor, on the other hand, the result of a sudden
revelation to herself of her own sufferings, what in its ultimate
essence is this movement?
Vast social phenomena, rising up in what appears to be obedience to an
almost universal instinct, must be based on some equally comprehensive
social condition, which acts everywhere as its cause; a cause which
will not be less irresistibly operative because those who are acted
upon by it have not always grasped it intellectually, nor are capable
of reasoning on its nature. As those vast herds of antelope which
at times sweep down across our South African plains from the north,
bearing all before them, are propelled, not by any logical induction,
the result of an intellectual process, but are driven onwards, whether
they will or no, by the pressure of a stern fact which forces itself
painfully on the consciousness of each isolated individual in the
herd--the fact, that behind lie parched deserts desolated by drought,
while before are green lands;--so nineteenth-century women are urged
on by the pressure of a condition which they have not created, and of
whose nature they have not even in many cases a clear intellectual
perception, yet which acts upon the whole mass, causing irresistible
social movement through its pressure on each isolated unit.
Looking at the modern Woman's Movement from the widest standpoint, and
analysing, not isolated phenomena connected with it here and there, but
its manifestation as a whole, the conviction is forced upon us that the
Woman's Movement of the nineteenth century in its ultimate essence is
_The Movement of a Vast Unemployed_.
Let us pause for a moment to consider how and why this is so.
In primitive societies woman performed the major part of the labours
necessary for the sustenance of her community, as she still does in
Africa and elsewhere, where primitive conditions exist. In addition
to child bearing she was the agricultural labourer of the community;
and while the male of necessity reserved his energies for war and the
chase, the agricultural and domestic labours devolved on woman. Not
only did she plant the grain and reap it, but she ground it and made it
into bread and beer; it was she who built the hut, shaped the domestic
utensils, and in travelling she was the beast of burden, and carried
the household goods; she was generally the doctress, and often the
wizard or priestess of her people.
In woman, with almost all creatures which give suck to their young, and
unlike birds of prey and many orders of insects and sea creatures, the
human female tends to be less heavy in build than her male equivalent;
and with an equal vitality and a strength of endurance and persistent
activity greater than that of the male in some directions, she is not
yet as a rule his equal in muscular strength. In a society in which
physical force ruled exclusively, and the most muscularly powerful
males were of necessity dominant even over their weaker fellow males,
woman, less powerful to hold, to strike, and to kill, was also of
necessity almost everywhere under the physical control of the male, and
often more or less enslaved. But the part she played in the communal
life was all important: as a social labourer she often, if not always,
exceeded the male in value. As far as physical activity can expand
the mind and body, everything tended to increase her vitality and
intelligence; and undoubtedly in the primitive societies of the past,
as in those still existing at our own day, the woman was found in
thoughtfulness and general intelligence the equal or superior of man to
an extent surprising to those accustomed to the wide division between
the male and female in those classes of modern societies where the male
absorbs the larger portion of social labour and the mental training
required by it.
Undoubtedly woman suffered, and often suffered heavily, in those
primitive societies, but she must always have been clearly conscious,
as was the Bantu woman quoted, of the inevitableness of her position.
She may have cried out against fate in moments of bitterness, but
she must always have recognized her own social importance, and even
the anti-sociality of attempting to shirk her obligations, upon the
fulfilment of which depended the very life of the society.
Had there arisen a Woman's Movement in any tribe, and had it been
successful, that tribe would have become instantly extinct. The labours
of war and the chase were inconsistent with the incessant child-bearing
and rearing essential where life is precarious; she could not generally
have competed on equal terms with men in war and the chase, when these
depended on strength of arm and muscle in wielding spear and axe; she
would have forsaken the higher and equally essential labours of society
for those for which she was less fitted, and the result must have
been the destruction of her society. Not only was a Woman's Movement
impossible, but had it been possible it would have been anti-social.
Her labour formed the solid superstructure on which her society rested;
her submission to her condition was the condition of social health and
even national and tribal survival. She suffered and knew she suffered,
but she knew also that her condition was inevitable and her society was
upheld by her toil.
In the later social condition, where war and the chase ceasing to
demand the entire attention of the male, men began of necessity to
encroach on woman's fields of labour, to undertake her agricultural and
outdoor labours generally; woman, though her field of labour became
more or less restricted to domestic toil within the dwelling, still
retained possession of a full half of the labours of her societies.
Down even to recent times, the woman, whether lord's wife or peasant,
with her own hands wove the clothing of her household and of the entire
race. If woman no longer planted the grain, it was she who made the
bread and brewed the ale, she who knitted the hose and shaped the
clothing of her people. It may be questioned whether down to quite
modern times woman's domestic labours did not equal or even exceed
in general social value those of men in other fields, and were not
as complex, demanding as much activity of body and versatility and
strength of mind.
In a social condition in which practically all women but religious
enthusiasts married, where child-bearing and the rearing and training
of her children and the supporting of her household with food and
clothing, and through them the whole race, occupied the entire
strength and time of woman, she could not complain that she lacked
social functions; nor would it have been possible for her to undertake
other social duties without deserting those of more importance. If
man's work was from sun to sun, while her work was never done, if she
laboured under certain social disabilities which were not inevitable,
she still knew that her labour was as valuable and essential to her
race as that of man, and there is no evidence of any movement on
her part to readjust her relations to life and to enter the fields
of labour apportioned to the male. In the main she was satisfied
with her condition. If isolated women here and there entered new
fields of labour, became professors at universities, or took to
statecraft or trade, it was because of some great individual aptitude
in these directions, and not because woman felt ill at ease and in
disco-ordination with her share of the world's labour or her place in
social life.
With the rise of what we term modern civilization, all this has become
slowly reversed.
The invention of modern machinery, and the discovery of modes of
compelling natural forces to perform the labours in earlier times
performed by the muscles of human creatures, with the resulting
conditions, have profoundly modified all modern life, and above all
they have affected the position of woman.
With steady and persistent advance the field of woman's domestic
industries has been invaded and is passing from her. In remote country
districts she still weaves and brews and bakes, not as a luxury
and amusement, but from necessity, and still feeds and clothes her
household, and marries early, and gives her children what training they
get: but exactly as modern civilization advances, and where it is found
in its fullest development, these conditions recede.
Her loom has been transformed into the vast factory where thousands of
steam-driven machines, largely possessed and guided by men, accomplish
the labour she performed in her home, and clothe the world; the
steam-driven sewing-machine is fast supplanting the woman's needle, and
even the domestic sewing-machine; bread, the manufacture of which has
been through all ages one of woman's chief handicrafts, is increasingly
the work of machinery, owned and guided almost exclusively by males;
beer, the right brewing of which was our grandmother's pride, is
exclusively the manufacture of machinery and males, who, for absorbing
this branch of the female's work, are often rewarded with knighthoods
and peerages; the very preserves and sweetmeats which our fore-mothers
prepared are now produced cheaper, if not better, in vast factories;
the milkmaid is vanishing, and cheese is as often a male as a female
manufacture; clothes are washed, windows cleaned, carpets beaten, by
machinery, and the smallest minutiæ of domestic life are more and
more passing out of the hands of the woman householder; the male cook
penetrates into the kitchen as the male accoucheur penetrates into the
birth-chamber.
Yet far more noticeable is the shrinkage of woman's ancient field of
labour in other directions. The mother, who in primitive societies
was the guide and instructress of her daughter till adult years were
reached, and whose son grew up about her knees till youth began, now
finds, whether a city workwoman or a duchess, the education and
training of her children pass largely from her hands into those of
specialized instructors, almost from infancy. From the infant school
and kindergarten to the college and university, the education of the
young has now become a complex and highly specialized business, the
successive classes in schools being instructed by persons distinctly
trained for their work, and the average mother's calling as trainer and
educator of her own offspring is rapidly dwindling.
Further, all branches of labour are becoming more specialized,
requiring distinct, long-continued, and often very complex training for
their performance.
Any woman or man might in simpler times be turned into the fields to
hoe or bind corn, and with little instruction might do it as well as
their fellows; but a comparatively high training is required even
for the modern labourer who is to take control of our complex modern
agricultural machinery, of our steam-driven ploughs and binders; and
as we advance from these, the simpler forms of manual labours, to the
intellectual callings, the demand for prolonged and special training
has become imperative. From this specialized training for particular
callings woman is largely excluded, and therefore her hold on many old
forms of labour is relaxed. Even amid her other domestic labours the
woman of the past might find time to acquire knowledge of the simples
and poultices which formed the staple of the healing art, and might,
with a proficiency excelled by none, minister to the complaints of her
family or community; and the old woman was the recognized accoucheur
and adviser of her societies. Now, without long and complex training,
no woman can practice her old art, and a field of study, surprisingly
large if we study the history of the past, falls from her.
Finally, in the one great field of labour which is and must always
remain woman's exclusive domain, there is shrinkage. The changed
conditions of life accompanying modern civilization have reduced the
demand upon woman as a child-bearer. In primitive societies, where war
and the exigencies of primitive life were continually denuding the
race, woman was as a rule compelled to bear persistently, if the number
of warriors was to be maintained; and in a later social condition,
where all the crude labours of life were performed by human labour and
a vast and unlimited supply of unskilled labourers was always required,
there was almost the same demand upon her. Moreover, the training and
rearing of the young was a comparatively simple matter.
The growing substitution of machinery for human labour in almost all
forms of handicraft has diminished the demand for untrained labour;
both the family and the State have reached a point where they recognize
that the mere production of a human creature, unless there be also
the means of fitting it for the complex conditions and duties of
modern life, does not increase the wealth or strength of either state
or family, but is a source of weakness and suffering, and there is a
steady tendency for persons to marry later and produce fewer offspring
as civilization advances in a class or race. So radically has woman's
condition changed with regard to this form of labour, that while, in
most societies of the past, every woman not physically incapable was a
child-bearer, and bore more or less persistently from youth to age, in
our own societies at the present day there has arisen a vast body of
women compelled, not by any religious enthusiasm, but by the exigencies
of modern civilized life, to remain throughout life absolutely celibate
and childless, performing no sex function whatever. This phenomenon is
accompanied by another equally important, the increase as civilization
advances, and especially in our vast cities where it is found in its
complete form, of that body of women, who, while not celibate, are also
not as a rule child-bearers and mothers, but leading a purely parasitic
and non-productive life, drawing their aliment from a society to which
they contribute nothing in return.
Child-bearing must always remain the all-important labour of many
women during some portion of their lives; at the present day it has
become a labour which millions of women are never, by the exigencies
of modern life, called upon or permitted to perform; and upon few or
no women is the demand for child-bearing from youth to age sufficient
to fill or even partially fill her life. Deplorable as it is that any
woman should have to go through life without the joy of motherhood, the
glory and compensation of woman through her long ages of excessive toil
and suffering, the fact has to be faced that, for millions of women,
child-bearing has ceased to be one of the labours that life offers them.
Thus the modern woman stands with the prospect of shrinking fields
of labour on every hand. She is brought face to face with two
possibilities. Either, on the one hand, she may remain quiescent and,
as her old fields of labour fall from her, seek no new: in which case,
as modern civilization advances and her old forms of manual labour are
absorbed by machinery made and guided by highly-trained males, and
she fails to attain to the new complex mental training which would
fit her for fields of mental labour, she is bound to become more or
less parasitic, as vast bodies of women in our wealthier and even our
middle classes have already become, depending on her sex functions for
support, and returning nothing equivalent to society for that which it
expends on her, leaving the major portion of all human labours to man,
thus becoming slowly but surely enervate, as all parasitic peoples and
classes tend to be, while the residual celibate portion of her sex, who
perform no sex function and yet are not fitted by training to enter the
new fields of labour, will be driven to seek in fierce competition with
each other a pitiful livelihood in such remnants of woman's ancient
fields of labour as without training they can retain a hold of.
Such a condition already exists in our societies in certain classes,
where millions of women live supported by males without performing
any productive labour but occasional child-bearing, and often not
that, supplied with the material comforts of life, and sucking in the
results of the mental and physical labours of the race without any
equal return, as the parasite bug or fungus sucks the blood or sap of
its animal or vegetable host; while a large body of other women, often
celibate and childless, are driven to perform the few labours still
open to the untrained or little trained females, who are compelled so
enormously to overcrowd those few occupations that her life can hardly
be maintained by working in them. This condition, if woman remains
quiescent, must tend in time, as civilization spreads and she does not
seek new forms of labour as the old pass from her, to become universal.
This is the one possibility.
On the other hand, woman may determine not to remain quiescent. As her
old fields of labour slip from her under the inevitable changes of
modern life, she may determine to find labour in the new and to obtain
that training which, whether in the world of handicraft or the mental
field of toil, increasingly all-important in our modern world, shall
fit her to take as large a share in the labours of her race in the
future as in the past. She may determine not to sink into a state of
parasitism dependent on her sex functions for support, but to become
what she has been through all the ages of the past, the co-worker
with man and the sustainer of her society. It is this determination
which finds its outcome in the Woman's Movement of our age, a movement
entirely new and revolutionary when regarded from one aspect, yet
profoundly conservative when regarded from another. New, in that it is
an attempt on the part of woman to adapt herself to conditions which
have never existed before on the globe; conservative, in that it is
an attempt to regain what she has lost. For the hand of the woman who
knocks so persistently at the door of the factory for admission to its
labour in all its branches is but the hand of the old spinning woman
following her loom in its transformation and determined to keep her
hold on it; the women who have fought persistently and have at last
in a measure won their right to the training that shall fit them to
be the physicians of their race are but the "wise woman," "skilled
in herbs and all simples," of the past seeking to adapt herself to
new conditions. The Woman's Movement is essentially a movement based
on woman's determination to stand where she has always stood beside
man as his co-labourer. And the moral fervour which is the general
accompaniment of this movement rises from woman's conviction that in
attempting to readjust herself to the new conditions of life and retain
her hold on the social labours of her race, she is benefiting not
herself only, but humanity.
It is a movement impossible in the past and inevitable in the present
to women within whom the virility and activity of the Northern Aryan
races is couched.[62]
[62] We glance at this matter briefly here as we have dealt
with it in detail in _Women and Labour_.
Such being the nature of the Woman's Movement of our day, it becomes
readily manifest why the African Boer woman has taken no part in it,
though belonging by descent to the most virile portions of the Northern
Aryan peoples.
For her, the conditions of woman's life and work have not changed; she
still has her full share of the labours and duties of life, and the man
might as well complain of the insufficiency of his field of toil as she
of hers.
When that day comes, as come it will, when the waves of modern material
civilizations with their vast burden of mingled good and evil shall
break round the walls of the most solitary up-country farmhouse in
Africa--when the Boer woman finds her old field of labour slipping
from her; when the roof of her old brick-oven falls in for ever,
because a man-driven cart brings round her bread every morning; when
the needle with which for generations she had stitched the clothing
of her household slips from her fingers or is used only for amusement
and luxury; when her husband orders his trousers from the man-tailor,
and the old bombazine kapje she stitched so carefully for herself is
replaced by a Paris bonnet; when her children almost from infancy pass
into the hands of trained teachers and as soon as youth is reached
leave her roof altogether to gain higher instruction; when her husband
complains at the birth of each new child after the sixth that he does
not know how to pay for its education and rearing; when he with whom
she has shared every business and interest from the selling of a sheep
to the sowing of a field, and who sat in the heat of the afternoons
on the sofa opposite her discussing his plans for to-morrow's work,
goes out every morning to return only at night occupied with callings
and business of which she has no understanding and can take no share;
when, if she complains of loneliness and the emptiness of her life,
he tells her to go out and buy balls and knock them through arches in
her back yard or over a net, as children and youths do, or put a few
flowers in vases--when this day comes and she sits alone, her children
at school, her husband gone and absorbed in business of which she knows
nothing, and she hears the flies buzz in the stillness, as African
flies will still buzz when all else is changed; and when she looks down
at the face of the girl-child still at her breast and realizes that
out of every six girls she bears one will most likely never know the
joys of motherhood; when she knows that of women born of her race and
blood thousands stand at the street corners because no higher use in
life is to be found for them: as she sits there alone she will begin
to reflect, to wonder why these things must be, and to ask herself of
what value her life is, and what she makes of it; and with this thought
the new time will have come. She who has sat still so long will rise
from her chair, she will push aside her coffee-table and knock over her
stove, and will demand of life the right to experiment and see if these
things be inevitable and unchangeable.
She who has been the companion of man in peace and war will know how
to find her way with him into the new fields of life and intellectual
toil. And if it were possible without the intervention of a period of
parasitism and enervation for the old Boer woman of the laager and the
trek, who with her companion man first tamed South Africa and peopled
it, to transform herself in the person of her descendant into the
labouring woman in the new and complex fields of modern civilization,
South Africa might boast in the future as in the past of possessing one
of the most virile womanhoods that the world has seen.
If the Boer woman still sits motionless in her elbow-chair to-day,
when her sisters of the Old World and the New are rising to their feet
to readjust their relation to life--she yet does well to sit there till
her conditions of life change, for it is a throne.
_Note added in 1898:_ As we were engaged in copying this
article, it chanced business took us into the country. In
the veld, some ten miles from the town, we saw approaching
a large wagon with a team of ten donkeys. Before the
donkeys plodded a small Hottentot boy of eight years. As
the wagon approached we saw it was laden with wood and
dried cakes of manure ("mest," kraal-fuel) for the next
morning's market in the town; but what the figure was
upon the front box (voorkist) we couldn't quite make out.
Then it came nearer and we saw, in truth for the first
time in our life in such a position, a huge Boer woman of
perhaps forty. She wore a black dress made without regard
to fashion with a full short skirt and short jacket. On
her head she had a large white cotton kapje (sun bonnet),
such as Boer women make, projecting far forward with white
curtains hanging on to the shoulders. In her hand she had
a wagon-whip made from a bamboo eight or nine feet long,
with the plaited leather cord long enough to reach the
front donkeys of the span. She sat massively upright on the
front-box. We looked at her as we passed and she scowled
at us from under her deep kapje with resentment which I
knew meant, "Verdomde Engelse vrou, do you think I care for
your ridicule!" She took her whip from her shoulder and
gave a resounding clap in the air with it over the backs
of the donkeys; and she went on one way and we another.
But if she had known what was in our heart, we might have
stopped and shaken hands. We found out afterwards that she
had nine children and was the wife of a man, an invalid and
too feeble to work, that they were what is known in South
Africa as "bywoners," poor people living on the land of a
richer farmer, and that she supported her family entirely.
She would take her wagon of fuel to the next morning's
market, and the little clerks and shopkeepers and women
with flowers in their hats would laugh at her short black
skirt and kapje and her resolute scowl. Had we but been
able to sit beside her on her voorkist and been able to
make clear to her our meaning, we would have said: "The new
women from all the world over send you their greetings,
Tante![63] In you and such as you we see our leaders, and
we are following in your steps. For God's sake, Tante,
hold fast your seat on the front-chest and your fuel and
carry it to market in spite of all the fools. I see in you,
Tante, something that harmonizes strangely with this great
blue African sky above us and the little koppies to our
right, and the great plain to our left, and the red sandy
road in which your donkeys plough, and the thorn-trees here
and there casting their shade. Like this wide plain, you
wake in me an aspiration for freedom and independence which
no woman in the town below us could awaken. For God's sake,
Tante, never give up your wagon-whip for a mother-of-pearl
card case, and your kappie for a straw hat with paper
flowers, and, instead of digging up fuel in your kraal and
cutting wood, take a croquet mallet for your weapon of
toil! I see in you, Tante, the secret of many a brave fight
that your race has fought for freedom, and many still to
come. When you paste little black spots on your cheeks and
pencil your eyebrows with black, and wear an eighteen-inch
waist, and trip with high-heeled shoes with your head on
one side, there will be no more Amajubas. Keep thy hard
horned hands, Tante. The day will perhaps come when thy
sons and daughters will grasp the artist's brush and the
thinker's pen and the mechanician's tool in place of the
spade and the axe and the driving-whip; but, till that time
comes, labour on in thine own field. It is easier to pass
from any one work to any other work than from parasitism to
labour; and they will need work well, Tante, who will work
more usefully, more bravely, than you. The working-women
from all the world over, whether they toil with the head
or the hand, indoor or out, send their greetings to you,
Tante. You are not only the backbone of your race and of
South Africa, but you and such as you are the backbone of
the human race. In many an hour of weariness and doubt over
the future of woman, of South Africa, and humanity, your
sturdy figure on the wagon chest will come back to us.
Sit fast, Tante! I see in you a promise of a great free
labouring race of men and women for South Africa. The world
is not played out while you sit on your wagon box and clap
your whip. God bless you! The future is ours, Tante! Let
the fools laugh. He laughs loudest, who laughs last!"
[63] Tante = Auntie.