Emily Hobhouse

Emily Hobhouse (9 April 1860 – 8 June 1926) was a British welfare campaigner and pacifist who became known for her work on behalf of Boer women and children during the Second Boer War. She investigated conditions in British concentration camps in South Africa and published reports that drew attention to the suffering of civilians held there. She later campaigned for reconciliation and maintained close ties with South Africa. Quotes I call this camp system a wholesale cruelty. It can never be wiped out of the memories of the people. It presses hardest on the children. They droop in the terrible heat, and with the insufficient, unsuitable food; whatever you do, whatever the authorities do, and they are, I believe, doing their best with very limited means, it is all only a miserable patch upon a great ill. Thousands, physically unfit, are placed in conditions of life which they have not strength to endure. In front of them is blank ruin. If only the English people would try to exercise a little imagination – picture the whole miserable scene. Entire villages rooted up and dumped in a strange, bare place. National Army Museum I had never seen your country nor did I know anyone of you. It was therefore no personal link of friendship that brought me here. Nor was it a political motive of any description. I came quite naturally – in obedience to the feeling of unity or oneness of womanhood and of those noble traditions, characteristic of the life of the English people, in which I was nurtured and which I inherited from times immemorial. It is when the community is shaken to its foundations, that abysmal depths of privation call to each other and that a deeper unity of humanity evinces itself. Jane Addams Digital Edition It was late in the summer of 1900 that I first learnt of the hundreds of Boer women that became impoverished and were left ragged by our military operations. That the poor women who were being driven from pillar to post, needed protection and organized assistance. And from that moment I was determined to go to South Africa in order to render assistance to them. South African History Online The women are wonderful. They cry very little and never complain. The very magnitude of their sufferings, their indignities, loss and anxiety seems to lift them beyond tears… only when it cuts afresh at them through their children do their feelings flash out. National Army Museum And surely, the honour of a country is not determined by the blundering acts of some passing administration or weak generalship, but lies in the sum-total of her best traditions which the people at large will rise up to maintain. Even as the noblest men are ever ready to admit and remedy an error, so England as soon as she was convinced of the wrong being done in her name to the weak and defenceless confessed it in very deed, and by thorough reformation of those camps, rendered them fit for human habitation. Speaking While Female Speech Bank External links Category:1860 births Category:1926 deaths Category:Women activists from England Category:Pacifists Category:Human rights activists