Thoughts on South Africa — Part One: V. The Boer Woman and the Modern Woman's Question

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.