Olive Schreiner
We conclude our South African triumvirate with Olive Schreiner, perhaps the poster child of early anti-discrimination and anti-war activism in South Africa during the early twentieth-century. Oliver Schreiner is perhaps best known for her groundbreaking book, The Story of an African Farm, published in 1883 when she was just twenty-eight. The book, published under the pseudonym ‘Ralph Iron’, was acclaimed then, as it is today, as the first open exposure of themes of agnosticism, existential independence, individualism, the professional aspirations of women and the fundamental nature of life on the colonial frontier. She went on to write numerous books and treatise, all of a strong social and political nature. She was extremely active in the civil rights movement in South Africa during the closing decade of the 19th century, as matters of race and equality were beginning to enter into the mainstream of national dialogue.
Olive Schreiner was militantly feminist, powerfully intelligent and forthright to the last degree. She was wholly unintimidated by the powerful male hierarchy of the Cape Colony, where she clashed bitterly and frequently with the Prime Minister of the Cape, Cecil John Rhodes.
In 1911, while in exile in England, she wrote and published ‘Women and Labour’, which influenced the movement of emancipation both in England and America through the 1910s-1930s. ‘Women’, she wrote, tended to be ‘parasitic’ and social conditions ‘robbed them of all forms of active, conscious social labour…reducing them, like the field tick, to the passive exercise of their sex functions alone’.
She anticipated the moment when women would enjoy an equal share in government and economy, believing that when that moment arrived, war would cease to be the universal method of setting differences. Women, she wrote, ‘understand what unites the races better than men because of their common experience of mothering’.
She believed, and passionately advocated for equality of pay, in a society where much of the productive work was done by women. ‘The fact that for equal work equally well performed by a man and by a woman, it is ordained that the woman on the ground of her sex alone shall receive a less recompense’, she said, ‘is the nearest approach to a willful and unqualified “wrong” in the whole relation of woman to society today’
Such forceful activism, however, won her few friends, and as an abrasive and opinionated personality, she was apt to alienate friend and foe alike, and for much of her life was a lonely and isolated figure. She died in December 1920, aged sixty-five, and in buried in the Eastern Cape of South Africa.