Thoughts on South Africa

by Olive Schreiner

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.