Olive Schreiner, born in South Africa of a Boer father and English mother in 1855, was one of the most significant feminist theorists of the twentieth century. She lived a life of incredible hardship: her father was a missionary of implacable religious zeal and her mother aggressively attempting to maintain a European sensibility as the family nomadically wandered from mission to mission throughout the Transvaal. Schreiner eventually became a governess, migrated to England briefly, joined one of the leading socialist organizations in England, the Fellowship of the New Life, and eventually became friends with Eleanor Marx, the daughter of Karl Marx. She returned to South Africa, where she entered into a disastrous marriage; later she became involved in the crucible of South Africa politics in which she initially became a passionate acolyte of Cecil Rhodes, the great British imperialist (who endowed the fellowship known as the Rhode Scholarship). However, the more predatory aspects of Rhodes' imperialist philosophy--his most famous statement was, "I prefer land to niggers"--disenchanted Schreiner, and when the Boer war broke out, the English burned her house with all her manuscripts (including the first, long version of Women and Labour), and sent her to a concentration camp for several years. After the Boer War, she formed the Women's Enfranchisement League in Cape Town in 1908 and wrote the book that made her internationally famous, Women and Labour, in 1911. This book would become the bible of the women's emancipation movement in England and American in the 1910's, 20's, and 30's. Schreiner, however, never really lived to see the immense influence she would have, for in 1913 she died destitute in a boarding house in South Africa.
There are several important aspects of the selection you're reading that you should pay attention to. What aspects of Schreiner's account of women's labor seem to derive from Enlightenment concepts of oppression, rights, freedom, progress, and economics? What does Schreiner have in common with Mary Wollstonecraft? Adam Smith? Karl Marx? Where does she derive the idea of "sex parasitism"? Have the problems she's identified been resolved in this century?
