Olive Schreiner (1855-1920) was the best-known feminist theorist
and writer of her time. Her writings spanned a number of
conventionally separate genres (including the novel, short story,
allegory, political essay, polemic and theoretical treatise), which
she crafted to produce a highly distinctive feminist and analytical
'voice'. A feminist who was contemporaneously an
internationally-renowned social commentator, Schreiner's developing
political analysis was - and still is - highly original. She
developed a materially-based socialist and feminist analysis of
'labour' which led her to theorise social and economic change,
divisions of labour in society and between women and men,
capitalism and imperialism, around innovative ideas about how --
and by whom -- economic and social value was produced. She combined
with this a keen attention to inter-personal relations, between
women as literally or politically sisters, between 'respectable'
and sexually outcast women, between feminist women and the 'New
Men', and within the family. Distinctively, Schreiner's writings on
economic and political life in South Africa criticised the policies
and practice of Rhodes in the Cape Colony and British imperialism
in southern Africa more widely. She opposed the South African War
of 1899-1902, promoted federation rather than union as the form the
South African state should take and insisted on equal political
rights for all. Schreiner steadfastly opposed the development of
apartheid segregationist policies and provided a radical analysis
of the relationship between 'race' and capital.
Imperialism, Labour and the New Woman is based on primary
archive research, making particular use of Schreiner's unpublished
letters and other major manuscript sources to provide a major
reconceptualisation of the scope and importance of her writings and
innovative and experimental ideas about genre and form. It offers a
major rethinking of Schreiner's political writings on South Africa,
and it emphasises the distinctiveness of Schreiner's contribution
as the major feminist theorist of her age and that which followed.
The book will appeal particularly to readers interested in the
development of social theory, in influential feminist ideas and
writing of the fin de sicle period, in the contemporary critique of
capitalism and imperialism, and in 'the age of imperialism' in
Southern Africa, as well as to Women's Studies scholars across the
academic disciplines.
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