Woman and Labour | Page 3

forced open and broken up, and its
contents set on fire in the centre of the room, so that the roof was
blackened over the pile of burnt papers. He added that there was little
in the remnants of paper of which I could make any use, but that he had
gathered and stored the fragments till such time as I might be allowed
to come and see them. I thus knew my book had been destroyed.
Some months later in the war when confined in a little up-country
hamlet, many hundreds of miles from the coast and from Johannesburg;
with the brunt of the war at that time breaking around us, de Wet

having crossed the Orange River and being said to have been within a
few miles of us, and the British columns moving hither and thither, I
was living in a little house on the outskirts of the village, in a single
room, with a stretcher and two packing-cases as furniture, and with my
little dog for company. Thirty-six armed African natives were set to
guard night and day at the doors and windows of the house; and I was
only allowed to go out during certain hours in the middle of the day to
fetch water from the fountain, or to buy what I needed, and I was
allowed to receive no books, newspapers or magazines. A high barbed
wire fence, guarded by armed natives, surrounded the village, through
which it would have been death to try to escape. All day the pom- poms
from the armoured trains, that paraded on the railway line nine miles
distant, could be heard at intervals; and at night the talk of the armed
natives as they pressed against the windows, and the tramp of the watch
with the endless "Who goes there?" as they walked round the wire
fence through the long, dark hours, when one was allowed neither to
light a candle nor strike a match. When a conflict was fought near by,
the dying and wounded were brought in; three men belonging to our
little village were led out to execution; death sentences were read in our
little market-place; our prison was filled with our fellow-countrymen;
and we did not know from hour to hour what the next would bring to
any of us. Under these conditions I felt it necessary I should resolutely
force my thought at times from the horror of the world around me, to
dwell on some abstract question, and it was under these circumstances
that this little book was written; being a remembrance mainly drawn
from one chapter of the larger book. The armed native guards standing
against the uncurtained windows, it was impossible to open the shutters,
and the room was therefore always so dark that even the physical act of
writing was difficult.
A year and a half after, when the war was over and peace had been
proclaimed for above four months, I with difficulty obtained a permit to
visit the Transvaal. I found among the burnt fragments the leathern
back of my book intact, the front half of the leaves burnt away; the
back half of the leaves next to the cover still all there, but so browned
and scorched with the flames that they broke as you touched them; and
there was nothing left but to destroy it. I even then felt a hope that at

some future time I might yet rewrite the entire book. But life is short;
and I have found that not only shall I never rewrite the book, but I shall
not have the health even to fill out and harmonise this little
remembrance from it.
It is therefore with considerable pain that I give out this fragment. I am
only comforted by the thought that perhaps, all sincere and earnest
search after truth, even where it fails to reach it, yet, often comes so
near to it, that other minds more happily situated may be led, by
pointing out its very limitations and errors, to obtain a larger view.
I have dared to give this long and very uninteresting explanation, not at
all because I have wished by giving the conditions under which this
little book was written, to make excuse for any repetitions or lack of
literary perfection, for these things matter very little; but, because (and
this matters very much) it might lead to misconception on the
subject-matter itself if its genesis were not exactly understood.
Not only is this book not a general view of the whole vast body of
phenomena connected with woman's position; but it is not even a
bird's-eye view of the whole question of woman's relation to labour.
In the original book the matter of the parasitism of woman filled only
one chapter out of twelve,