CHAPTER V

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.