Smuts eventually supported her husband's efforts to bring reconciliation to the Dutch and English communities and the creation of the self-governing union.

Smuts preferred to remain outside the public sphere and rarely joined her husband in any official capacity until his second term as prime minister began in 1939.

In 1940, Smuts founded and chaired the Gifts and Comforts Fund, which raised money to provide servicemen with toiletries, sports equipment, and radios.

Microfilm copies of the Smuts Archive, which also includes Jan's records, are housed at the Universities of Cambridge and Cape Town.

[1][2][3] Susanna, known as Sanie, was descended from Johann Christoffel Schabort, a physician who left employment with the Dutch East India Company to immigrate to the Cape in 1714.

[2][13] When she was fifteen,[11] Jan Smuts, a farmer's son from Riebeek West, near Malmesbury, moved into the house of W. Ackermann,[14] a neighbour and friend of the Krige family.

[15] Instead, after passing the entrance exam in 1887 for Victoria College,[16] Krige graduated in 1891 and began teaching in a rural school,[15][17] where she earned £5 a month.

[28] They had another son, Jacobus Abraham (known as Koosie), on 16 April 1899,[25][27] and before the end of the year, Smuts published A Century of Wrong, an English translation of her husband's co-written work Een Eeuw van Onrecht.

[36] At the conclusion of the war, the Treaty of Vereeniging established the supremacy of the British, bringing all White South Africans under The Crown's authority.

She feared that the Dutch would be treated unfairly under British rule and according to the writer Helen Bradford, Smuts preferred annihilation over capitulation.

[41] In 1906, he went to England to try to convince British legislators to grant self-rule and revise the method of allowing only propertied individuals to vote.

[42] He was successful in arguing for new voting laws, and in December suffrage was granted to all White European men over the age of twenty-one.

[44] By 1908, all three British colonies – Cape, Orange River, and the Transvaal – had achieved self-governance,[45] and over the next two years negotiations continued for the formation of the Union of South Africa.

[50] She became active in the welfare work of the Suid-Afrikaanse Vrouefederasie [af] (South African Women's Federation),[16] an organisation founded in 1904 by Annie Botha and Georgiana Solomon to assist destitute widows and war orphans.

[51][52] In 1909, the couple moved to a farm in Irene township, outside Pretoria, covering 4,000 acres (1,600 ha), where Jan relocated a former military mess hall and renovated it into a home that came to be known as Doornkloof (and in English The Big House).

[54] It contained a huge library of around 6,000 books in "Afrikaans, Dutch, English, French, German, Hebrew, Latin, and Greek", on a wide variety of subjects, including botany, ethics, evolution, and philosophy.

[61][62] In addition to running the household, Smuts organised a massive collection of articles written about Jan.[Note 4] Her scrapbooking activities frequently took place at night after the family had retired.

[61] She also dealt with the hate mail regularly received at the farm from many Afrikaners who felt that Jan had betrayed his own people by reconciling with the British.

[66] Known for her frankness and humour,[67][68] her personal correspondence reveals that she was "lively, intelligent, and humane", according to Keith Hancock and Jean van der Poel, the historians who compiled the family archival records.

Shortly after her arrival, the Smuts invited her and her husband Crown Prince Paul, their children Constantine and Sophia, her brother-in-law George II of Greece, her sister-in-law Princess Katherine and other members of their party to a luncheon at Libertas, Jan's official residence in Pretoria.

[13] By the time Jan had begun his second term as prime minister, women in the Union of South Africa had won the right to vote.

[92] When the war broke out, a radical fascist segment of the White Afrikaner community gained adherents who sympathised with the Nazi Party's ideology of Germanic people's racial superiority.

[93] When the Ossewabrandwag, a right-wing, paramilitary, Afrikaner nationalist group took part in demonstrations and acts of sabotage,[94] Smuts stressed the need for the country to unite in the fight against fascism.

[98] Smuts personally sewed toiletries bags, wrote articles for The Women's Auxiliary, gave speeches, and went on troop inspection tours with Jan.[99] On one such trip in Egypt in 1942, she visited soldiers in their camps and in hospital and supervised the delivery of parcels to them.

[105] In 1943, the African National Congress presented Jan with a demand for full citizenship rights and the ability for Blacks to participate in the governance of the country.

These also included some of Jan's papers, but not the documents she had destroyed as a safety measure before the British siege of Pretoria in the Boer War.

To prevent the loss of the historic site, the Pretoria attorney Guy Brathwaite purchased the house and 25 morgen of land (around 50 acres (20 ha)), from Kitty, widow of Smuts's oldest son Japie, for £7,000.

[116] Gathering ex-servicemen at a conference, Brathwaite proposed the establishment of the General Smuts War Veterans' Foundation to preserve the property as a memorial.

[117] The house was restored and plans were made to plant indigenous trees and shrubs on the property to create a nature park, preserving the botanical specimens in the wild gardens the Smuts had designed.

[120] According to Chetty, a study of Smuts' life provides understanding of the changes underway in South Africa caused by the three wars which occurred in the first half of the twentieth century.