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.