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

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.