Woman and Labor.
Schreiner, Olive. Woman and Labor. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1911.
8vo.; dark blue narrow ridged cloth stamped in gold at the front and spine; owner’s name in pencil at front free endpaper; bookseller’s ticket at rear pastedown; small split to paper at front hinge; slight bubble to cloth at front; a bright, fresh, firm copy; near fine.
First edition of this text “long considered one of the major feminist tracts written in English” and the first written in South Africa, and dedicated to the British suffragette Lady Constance Lytton. Schreiner’s primary concern in Women and Labor is that as women begin to lose their “ancient domain of productive and social labour,” they fail to gain any new charges because they are systematically denied access to the education and employment opportunities to which they are entitled. Even though her text is filled with illustrations from turn of the century Africa, “many of her core problems—the need for economic independence, pay for household labor, the link between pacifism and feminism, and arguments about the relative weighting of biographical and sociocultural factors in determining women’s history—are extremely modern and still relevant.” Schreiner’s introduction is followed by three chapters devoted to “Parasitism,” one on “Woman and War,” one on “Sex Differences,” and one addressing “Certain Objections.” D.L. Hobman called this work “one of the noblest books which have ever appeared in defense of feminism” (African Writers Volume Two, by Cherry Clayton, NY: Scribner’s, 1997, pp. 745-763).
Despite her short list of publications, Schreiner (1855-1920) is hailed as the founder of South African literature, and an early force in feminism. In her lifetime she published a semi-autobiographical novel, The Story of an African Farm (1883), for which she continues to be best-known, under the pseudonym Ralph Iron, and which was “hailed by contemporary critics as a sensitive expression of a thinking woman’s perspective on religion, marriage, and other social topics. Schreiner’s concern with social issues, the secondary status of women, and the racism of her native South Africa would continue to serve as the focus of her work, both in fiction and nonfiction.” Its success was immediate and wide spread, engaging a substantial readership in both Europe and the United States. Two collections of stories, dreams, and allegories were published in 1890 and 1893. Two lesser novels, and a collection of stories edited by her husband, were posthumously published. Gerard Monsman credits her with influencing William Plomer, Isak Dinesen, Virginia Woolf, Alan Paton, Doris Lessing, and Nadine Gordimer. He writes,
[H]er most significant legacy was a concern with personal relationships, manners, and values that lifted British colonial fiction from the mediocrity of hunters’ tales, native uprisings, and hairbreadth escapes to a tough-minded depiction of the political character of colonialism, the clash between indigenous ways of life, and the march of capitalistic development. Hardly less significant were her brief allegories—surreal and fuguelike word paintings that only just fell short of poetry… (DLB Volume 156: British Short-Fiction Writers, 1880-1914: The Romantic Tradition, The Gale Group, 1996, pp. 301-311).
Clayton’s assessment is superlative; she declares that Schreiner’s name “has become synonymous with an embattled, visionary feminism;” that her allegory “Three Dreams in a Desert” and Woman and Labour “gave passionate expression to feminist issues and inspired many sympathetic readers”; and that “her eloquent political pamphlets published at key moments of South African history, such as during the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902) and the establishment of the Union of South Africa (1910), marked her as a concerned English South African who tried to marry the best of English liberal traditions to indigenous social and political structures.”
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