Thoughts on South Africa

by Olive Schreiner

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]

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.