Woman and Labor

by Olive Schreiner

Author of the classic novel, The Story of an African Farm , South African writer Olive Schreiner (1855–1920) early became a free thinker, rationalist, and passionate liberal in economics and politics. A fervent advocate of feminist causes, she rebelled against Victorian-era social and political practices, particularly the inequalities of labor practices between men and women in the early years of the 20th century. Woman and Labor is her vivid, eloquently expressed effort to promote her principle and beliefs.
Schreiner examines the changes in people's lives engendered by social and technological advances, observing the consequences of replacing manual labor with machines and the subsequent modifications in material conditions of daily life. Urging society to find new and expanded roles for women, she views the feminist goal as an escape from customary female dependence on men as a source of support and well-being.
This ground-breaking document is widely regarded today as one of the "Bibles" of the feminist movement. Its intensely moving argument for equality and justice in the workplace is vital reading for social historians as well as anyone drawn to the feminist cause and the struggle for gender equality.

Genres: Feminism, Nonfiction, History, Politics, Womens

144 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1911

About the author

Olive Schreiner (24 March 1855 - December 11, 1920), was a South African author, pacifist and political activist. She is best known for her novel The Story of an African Farm, which has been acclaimed for the manner it tackled the issues of its day, ranging from agnosticism to the treatment of women.

From Wikipedia:
Olive Emilie Albertina Schreiner (1855-1920) was named after her three older brothers, Oliver (1848-1854), Albert (1843-1843) and Emile (1852-1852), who died before she was born. She was the ninth of twelve children born to a missionary couple, Gottlob Schreiner and Rebecca Lyndall at the Wesleyan Missionary Society station at Wittebergen in the Eastern Cape, near Herschel in South Africa. Her childhood was a harsh one: her father was loving and gentle, though unpractical; but her mother Rebecca was intent on teaching her children the same restraint and self-discipline that had been a part of her upbringing. Olive received virtually all her initial education from her mother who was well-read and gifted.[clarification needed] Her eldest brother Fred (1840-1901) was educated in England and became headmaster of a school in Eastbourne.

When Olive was six, Gottlob transferred to Healdtown in the Eastern Cape to run the Wesleyan training institute there. As with so many of his other projects, he simply was not up to the task and was expelled in disgrace for trading against missionary regulations. He was forced to make his own living for the first time in his life, and tried a business venture. Again, he failed and was insolvent within a year. The family lived in abject poverty as a result.

However, Olive was not to remain with her parents for long. When her older brother Theophilus (1844-1920) was appointed headmaster in Cradock in 1867, she went to live with him along with two of her siblings. She also attended his school and received a formal education for the first time. Despite that, she was no happier in Cradock than she had been in Wittebergen or Healdtown. Her siblings were very religious, but Olive had already rejected the Christianity of her parents as baseless and it was the cause of many arguments with her family.

Therefore, when Theo and her brother left Cradock for the diamond fields of Griqualand West, Olive chose to become a governess . On the way to her first post at Barkly East, she met Willie Bertram, who shared her views of religion and who lent her a copy of Herbert Spencer’s First Principles. This text was to have a profound impact on her. While rejecting religious creeds and doctrine, Spencer also argued for a belief in an Absolute that lay beyond the scope of human knowledge and conception. This belief was founded in the unity of nature and a teleological universe, both of which Olive was to appropriate for herself in her attempts to create a morality free of organized religion.
After this meeting, Olive travelled from place to place, accepting posts as a governess with various families and leaving them because of the sexual predation of her male employers in many cases. During this time she met Julius Gau, to whom she became engaged under doubtful circumstances. For whatever reason, their engagement did not last long and she returned to live with her parents and then with her brothers. She read widely and began writing seriously. She started Undine at this time.
However, her brothers’ financial situation soon deteriorated, as diamonds became increasingly difficult to find. Olive had no choice but to resume her transient lifestyle, moving between various households and towns, until she returned briefly to her parents in 1874. It was there that she had the first of the asthma attacks that would plague her for the rest of her life. Since her parents were no more financially secure than before and because of her ill-health, Olive was forced to resume working in order to support them.

Reviews

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

Jesus H. Christ. Ever see a book on gr with more editions than ratings?

13 ratings · 1 review

Editions (showing 1-27 of 27)

gr=Proustitute would place this along with a room of her own in some kind of relationship. Get to it, right?

Meanwhile, I don't know too much about Schreiner, but I'm thinking of Emma Goldman and Alexandra Kollontai?

[dangerous at every speed]

ngl this is a total vibe. stumbled across it for a uni essay, but was flabbergasted and ended up reading most of it. olive was a total baddie.

[Rosie · Rating 2 out of 5]

1.5 ⭐

The quotations in bold are ones I disagree with or find problematic.

“One word more I should like to add, as I may not again speak or write on this subject. I should like to say to the men and women of the generations which will come after us—‘You will look back at us with astonishment! You will wonder at passionate struggles that accomplished so little; at the, to you, obvious paths to attain our ends which we did not take; at the intolerable evils before which it will seem to you we sat down passive; at the great truths staring us in the face, which we failed to see; at the truths we grasped at, but could never get our fingers quite round. You will marvel at the labor that ended in so little;—but, what you will never know is how it was thinking of you and for you, that we struggled as we did and accomplished the little which we have done; that it was in the thought of your larger realization and fuller life that we found consolation for the futilities of our own.’” (23)

What a prophetic passage! It makes me emotional to read it.

“Under no conditions, at no time, in no place, in the history of the world have the males of any period, of any nation, or of any class, shown the slightest inclination to allow their own females to become inactive or parasitic, so long as the actual muscular labor of feeding and clothing them would in that case have developed upon themselves!” (78)

Ha! True.

“The relation of female parasitism generally to the peculiar phenomenon of prostitution is fundamental. Prostitution can never be adequately dealt with, either from the moral or the scientific standpoint, unless its relation to the general phenomenon of female parasitism be fully realized. It is the failure to do this which leaves so painful a sense of abortion on the mind, after listening to most modern utterances on the question, whether made from the emotional platform of the moral reformer, or the intellectual platform of the would-be scientist. We are left with a feeling that the matter has been handled but not dealt with: that the knife has not reached the core.” (81-2, in footnotes)

Absolutely not. Schreiner is correct in that the core of the matter had not been reached by most of the intellectuals in her time, but the core wasn’t “female parasitism” but the male sense of entitlement to female bodies and objectification of women, which are what truly drive prostitution. Patriarchy, really.

“The abnormal institution of avowed inter-male sexual relations upon the highest plane [in ancient Greece] was one and the most serious result of this severance. The inevitable and invincible desire of all highly developed human natures, to blend with their sexual relationships their highest intellectual interests and sympathies, could find no satisfaction or response in the relationship between the immured, comparatively ignorant, and helpless females of the upper classes, in Greece, and the brilliant, cultured, and many-sided males who formed its dominant class in the fifth and fourth centuries. Man turned towards man; and parenthood, the divine gift of imparting human life, was severed from the loftiest and profoundest phases of human emotion”. (84)

I would agree that the amount of male homsexuality and the way it was institutionalized in ancient Greece had to do with the fact that women were given no education and had no place in public life, but I would disagree somewhat with her phrasing - “abnormal institution” - which implies moral condemnation. I also object slightly to her flowery language - “the divine gift”. Schreiner frequently writes throughout this book with an overly religious tone, which I dislike.

“It is this fact which causes even prostitution (in many respects the most repulsive form of female parasitism which afflicts humanity) to be, probably, not more adverse to the advance and even to the conservation of a healthy and powerful society than the parasites of its childbearing woman.” (109)

I object to the morally condemnatory way Schreiner refers to prostitution; the institution is awful, of course, but she seems to be placing the blame on the women here. I also think her obsession with the idea of female parasitism is misplaced and should really not be the cornerstone of her theory.

“It is the perception of this fact, that, not for herself, nor even for fellow women alone, but for the benefit of humanity at large, she must seek to readjust herself to life, which lends to the woman’s most superficial and seemingly trivial attempt at readjustment a certain dignity and importance.” (125-6)

Good grief. So, were women to seek to make feminist social change solely for women alone, it would be “superficial and trivial”? I find this tactic of trying to convince men that the liberation of women will be to their advantage pathetic and boot-licking—especially given Schreiner seems to really believe what she is saying here, acting as if she represents all women.

“It is this profound hidden conviction which removes from the sphere of the ridiculous the attitude of even the feeblest woman who waves her poor little ‘woman’s rights’ flag on the edge of a platform, and which causes us to forgive even the passionate denunciations, not always wisely thought out, in which she would represent the evils of woman’s condition as wrongs intentionally inflicted upon her, where they are merely the inevitable results of ages of social movement.” (126)

I do not find such a woman ridiculous, and I do not think any woman’s passionate denunciations need to be “forgiven”. I do not think the wrongs of woman’s condition are the “inevitable results of ages of social movement”, either. Obviously, social movement has had a profound effect and is tied up inextricably with it, but I think there is definite substance to the contention that these wrongs have been intentionally inflicted upon women by the oppressor class of men.

“Beyond the small evils, which she seeks by her immediate, personal action to remedy, lie, she feels, large ills of which they form but an off-shoot; beyond the small good which she seeks to effect, lies, she believes, a great and universal beatitude to be attained; beyond the little struggle of to-day, lies the larger struggle of the centuries, in which neither she alone nor her sex alone are concerned, but all man-kind.” (135)

Here, again, Schreiner is trying to abstract the women’s suffrage and women’s rights struggle to include all of humanity. As if women's emancipation is too unimportant to stand alone! And I would wager many of the suffragettes would contest Schreiner calling their work a “little struggle”, the evils they fought “small evils”.

“They are as old as Loki among the gods, as Lucifer among the Sons of the Morning, as the serpent in the Garden of Eden, as pain and dislocation in web of human life.” (152)

This quotation isn’t very important, except for in how it is an example of just one of the many, many, many religious analogies Schreiner employs. At first, I had no issue with it, but it became extremely obnoxious after a certain point how much she relied upon analogies to forward her argument, particularly biblical ones. It came across as moralizing and irrelevant to the modern day. And I’m certain it’s not merely because of the time period this book was written, because I’ve read a decent number of books published within this time period on women and the suffrage that did not do this!!!

“Even in the little third-rate [female] novelist whose works cumber the ground, we see often a pathetic figure when we recognize that beneath that failure in a complex and difficult art, may lie buried a sound legislator, an able architect, an original scientific investigator, or a good judge.” (163)

Hear, hear!

“Our [women’s] relation to war is far more intimate, personal, and indissoluble than this. Men have made boomerangs, bows, swords, or guns with which to destroy one another; we have made the men who destroyed and were destroyed! We have in all ages produced, at an enormous cost, the primal munition of war, without which no other would exist. There is no battlefield on earth, nor ever has been, howsoever covered with slain, which it has not cost the women of the race more in actual bloodshed and anguish to supply, than it has cost the men who lie there. We pay the first cost on all human life.” (174)

An interesting point, similar ones of which I have seen made today by modern radical feminists.

“On that day when the woman takes her place beside the man in the governance and arrangement of external affairs of her race will also be that day that heralds the death of war as a means of arranging human differences.” (176)

I have my doubts. I can’t gesture towards the present as evidence, as women are not equally governing the world, even in industrialized first-world societies like the United States, but I am inclined to think it is more likely women are in common with men, in terms of an abundance of human selfishness, than they are likely to put an end to all war.

“The physical creation of human life, which, in as far as the male is concerned, consists in a few moments of physical pleasure, to the female must always signify months of pressure and physical endurance, crowned with danger to life. To the male, the giving of life is a laugh; to the female, blood, anguish, and sometimes death. Here we touch one of the few yet important differences between man and woman such.” (180-81)

An interesting observation. And I was a bit surprised that Schreiner was willing to be (comparatively) explicit enough to say “physical pleasure”, based on how euphemistic I am used to female authors from this time period being when discussing this topic.

“Both in the class and the individual, whether male or female, an intense love of dress and meretricious external adornment is almost invariably the concomitant and outcome of parasitism. Were the parasite female class in our own society to pass away, French fashions with their easeless and grotesque variations (shaped not for use or beauty, but the attracting of attention) would die out. And the extent to which any woman to-day, not herself belonging to the parasite class and still laboring, attempts to follow afar off the fashions of the parasite, may be taken generally as an almost certain indication of the ease with which she would accept parasitism were its conditions offered to her.” (191, in footnotes)

I am doubtful. I agree that women’s fashion is inextricably tied into patriarchy, but the implication Schreiner makes that working women aping the fashion of “parasites” means they would easily accept parasitism I disagree with. I do not see the connection, really. Or, rather, I see what she’s trying to say, but I think it doesn't hold much merit.

“It is not the labor, or the amount of labor, so much as the amount of reward that interferes with his [man] ideal of the eternal womanly; he ias as a rule contented that the women of the race should labor for him, whether as tea-pickers or washerwoman, or toilers for the children he brings into the world, provided the reward they receive is not large, nor in such fields as he might himself desire to enter.” (213)

Yes, exactly. And this remains true today.

“It is almost inevitable that this suffering and conflict must make itself felt in its acutest form in the person of the most advanced individual of our societies. It is the swimmer who first leaps into the frozen stream who is cut sharpest by the ice; those who follow him find it broken, and the last find it gone. It is the men or women who first tread down the path which the bulk of humanity will ultimately follow, who must find themselves at last in solitudes where the silence is deadly.” (285)

A beautiful analogy (one of the few she employs that I don’t find obnoxious and unnecessary).

“And it is a fact which will surprise no one who has studied the conditions of modern life, that among the works of literature in all European languages which most powerfully advocate the entrance of women into the new fields of labor, which most uncompromisingly demand for her the widest training and freedom of action, and which most passionately seek for the breaking down of all artificial lines which sever the woman from the man, many of the ablest and most uncompromising are the works of men.” (288-9)

Elevating men again. I must admit, I am doubtful of the verity of this statement and find it somewhat insulting on behalf of the many female intellectuals who have written in defense of their sex.

[Siddiq Khan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Olive Schreiner was a South African novelist, feminist, socialist and pacifist active around the turn of the century. She made very sharp observations about the political situation of the country, especially regarding race, which proved correct. Her views on female solidarity, the roots of patriarchy, and nonviolence are fascinating and moving. She was certainly one of the most outstanding intellectual figures in colonial South Africa of her era, and this is not counting her celebrated creative work.

[Teodora · Rating 3 out of 5]

The books was definitely revolutionary for the time when it has been written. I like the idea of women producing the most deadly weapon in the war: men. However, I think it puts too much emphasis on women as care givers.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Now this was better than story of an African farm but her takes are VERY old fashion

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Makes a lot of sense. Bet she'd be disappointed we haven't come further in the last 100 years.

[Holly]

AMAZING. FANTASTIC. EVERYONE MUST READ THIS.