Thoughts on South Africa

by Olive Schreiner

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?