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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Woman and Labour," Olive Schreiner offers a compelling analysis of the role of women in society, meticulously examining the intricate relationship between gender and labor. Written in a time when feminist discourse was just beginning to gain traction, Schreiner employs a blend of philosophical inquiry and sociological observation to critique the existing social structures that marginalize women. The book is characterized by its accessibility and emotive prose, inviting readers to reflect on the gendered nature of work and the implications of women's economic independence in the late 19th century. Schreiner's work straddles literary and political frameworks, making it a critical text within the feminist canon. Olive Schreiner, a South African writer and social activist, drew from her own experiences and the socio-political climate of her time to craft her arguments. Her upbringing in a Dutch Reformed missionary family and her exposure to both colonial and feminist ideologies profoundly influenced her perspective on women's rights and labor. Schreiner's advocacy for gender equality and social reform is visible throughout her oeuvre, making "Woman and Labour" part of a larger project that aimed to elevate the status and rights of women across various spheres. This pioneering work is essential for anyone interested in the intersection of gender studies and labor history. Schreiner's insightful observations remain relevant as they challenge contemporary readers to reconsider the ongoing disparities in the labor market. Readers will find "Woman and Labour" not only an enlightening historical document but also a passionate call for the recognition of women's contributions to both society and the economy. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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Woman and Labour
Table of Contents
Introduction
Woman and Labour advances the uncompromising idea that human societies flourish only when women are free to undertake meaningful, self-directed work alongside men, transforming both private life and public institutions through shared responsibility and creative labor.
Olive Schreiner’s Woman and Labour is a work of feminist non-fiction, a sustained essay that intervenes in early twentieth-century debates about gender, industry, and citizenship. Published in 1911, it arrives at a moment shaped by rapid economic change and the intensifying struggle for women’s political and social rights. Schreiner, a South African writer known for her engagement with social questions, sets out to examine not a single nation or household but the broader structures that define what counts as work and who is permitted to do it, making the book both historical artifact and ongoing provocation.
The book offers a searching analysis rather than a narrative, inviting readers into an argument that is at once ethical, economic, and philosophical. Schreiner asks how cultures have organized production and reproduction, and what happens when women’s capacities are confined to dependence or ornamental roles. The voice is lucid and forceful, moving between careful reasoning and impassioned appeals to justice. The mood is sober yet hopeful, pressing toward a future in which work is not a badge of domination but a medium of human development, mutual obligation, and social dignity.
Central to Schreiner’s project is the claim that excluding women from recognized, socially necessary labor impoverishes everyone. She explores the relationship between economic independence and self-respect, the value of caregiving and mothering as forms of social contribution, and the ways societies mismeasure productivity by ignoring or devaluing certain kinds of work. The book critiques ideals that romanticize dependence, arguing that such arrangements distort relationships and waste human talent. It suggests that a just community requires both the equitable distribution of opportunity and a rethinking of what labor means beyond wage work alone.
Schreiner develops her case through historical reflection and observation, tracing how customs and institutions have shaped gendered divisions of labor. She interrogates the consequences of confinement to narrowly defined domestic roles, not to deny the significance of care but to insist that capacities should not be assigned by sex. Her reasoning draws on the intellectual currents of her time, especially debates about social evolution and the organization of modern economies, yet she employs them to unsettle complacency rather than to fix identities. The result is an argument that seeks partnership over rivalry and transformation over accommodation.
Contemporary readers will find in Woman and Labour questions that still reverberate: How should societies value unpaid care? What policies and cultural norms enable people to combine family life and public work without sacrificing health or dignity? How does economic dependency shape power within relationships, and what would it mean to design institutions that foster mutual responsibility? Schreiner’s emphasis on shared, purposeful labor speaks to debates about equity in workplaces, the visibility of care infrastructures, and the ethics of productivity, inviting renewed attention to the moral stakes of how we define and distribute work.
To read Woman and Labour today is to encounter a clear, demanding case for aligning social arrangements with human potential. Schreiner’s prose is measured yet urgent, challenging readers to examine assumptions about value, aptitude, and duty. The book does not offer easy formulas; it offers a framework for thinking, one that treats labor as a site of freedom, reciprocity, and creative possibility. As an introduction to feminist social thought from the early twentieth century, it remains a bracing, accessible entry point—grounded in historical awareness and animated by a conviction that justice requires the full work of all.
Synopsis
Woman and Labour presents Olive Schreiner’s systematic examination of women’s relation to productive work and social organization. Written to clarify the aims of the emerging woman movement, it traces how women’s labor has shaped, and been shaped by, economic and cultural change. Schreiner distinguishes between forms of work that maintain the individual, the community, and future generations, and argues that women’s contributions span all three. She proposes that the status of women cannot be understood apart from their place in production, and that any enduring advance requires aligning social institutions with the realities of women’s capacities, responsibilities, and aspirations.
The book opens by looking backward to early human communities, where women’s sustained, regular labor in food gathering, crafting, and child-rearing formed the stable base of social life. Men’s hunting and defense were episodic and complementary. In this view, society originally grew from a partnership of differentiated, necessary tasks. Women’s work was visible and indispensable; it created continuity, stored knowledge, and underpinned early industry. By reconstructing this cooperative foundation, Schreiner establishes a benchmark for evaluating later changes. She emphasizes that the relation of the sexes was not inherently antagonistic, but organized around shared survival, with both contributing essential forms of labor.
With the rise of more complex economies, private property, and specialized trades, the balance altered. Guilds, legal codes, and inheritance systems increasingly concentrated economic power in male hands, while women’s productive activities were narrowed or pushed into the household. The book describes how occupations women once shared became formally closed to them, obscuring their contribution and creating dependence. This shift did not reflect diminished capacity, Schreiner argues, but structural exclusion. As public life consolidated around institutions that recognized male labor, the work women continued to perform—particularly domestic industry—was devalued or rendered invisible, laying groundwork for later debates about women’s economic rights.
Industrialization intensified these trends by relocating production from households to factories and markets. As machinery centralized and standardized work, many tasks formerly performed by women at home were displaced. For some, paid employment opened; for others, particularly in wealthier strata, withdrawal from productive labor created a new pattern. Schreiner analyzes how a segment of women came to live on the earnings of male relatives, while poorer women entered harsh, poorly paid industries. The resulting division produced contrasting experiences: idle dependence and overwork. Both conditions, she suggests, distorted social relations and obscured the principle that healthy communities require all adults to contribute their share of labor.
To describe the condition of affluent, economically dependent women, Schreiner introduces the concept of sex-parasitism. She argues that when a human being is maintained without corresponding service, the outcome is social and personal harm. In the case of women, this dependence encourages overemphasis on sexual display and marriage as livelihood, and contributes to institutions such as prostitution. Schreiner stresses that these effects arise from economic arrangement, not intrinsic nature. The remedy, therefore, is not moral censure but structural change that enables women to sustain themselves through socially valuable work, reducing pressures that exaggerate sex distinctions and aligning incentives with communal well-being.
A central argument concerns motherhood as a form of labor essential to the continuation of society. Schreiner maintains that bearing and rearing children, when freely chosen, is a highly skilled social service requiring protection, education, and material support. Recognizing maternity as labor does not limit women to it; rather, it places reproductive work within the broader economy of human effort. She advocates conditions that safeguard mothers’ health, time, and autonomy, insisting that the community benefits when the work of creating future citizens is respected and professionally informed. Such recognition complements women’s participation in other fields, instead of being treated as a reason for exclusion.
From these premises, the book advances the case for women’s economic independence and full civic equality. Education, technical training, and open access to all occupations are presented as prerequisites for a just division of labor. Political rights, including the vote, follow as instruments to shape institutions that affect work and family life. Schreiner emphasizes that equality does not imply uniformity: individuals should pursue capacities and interests without artificial barriers based on sex. By expanding women’s opportunities, society gains productive energy and moral clarity, replacing dependence and coercion with mutual obligation and competence across domestic, industrial, and intellectual domains.
Schreiner envisions cooperative partnership between women and men as the foundation for modern social organization. Marriage, in this framework, evolves from an exchange underpinned by economic dependence into a companionship of fellow workers and citizens. Sexual relations, she argues, become healthier and less distorted when both parties possess personal autonomy and the means to contribute. The book links ethical progress to the rebalancing of labor: when each adult is free and responsible for service to the community, affection and respect can replace calculation and compulsion. This partnership model extends from the household to public life, encouraging collaborative problem-solving and shared responsibility.
In conclusion, Woman and Labour contends that the future health of society rests on restoring women to the full circle of productive activity, including but not limited to motherhood. The dismantling of legal, educational, and economic obstacles will diminish parasitism, stabilize personal relations, and increase collective efficiency. Schreiner’s synthesis of historical observation, social analysis, and practical advocacy yields a coherent program: value all necessary work, equip women to perform it, and guarantee the rights that make participation real. The overarching message is clear: human advancement depends on the free, competent labor of both sexes, acting together in equality and service.
Historical Context
Published in 1911 in London after years of drafting in the Cape Colony and Britain, Olive Schreiner’s Woman and Labour emerges from the late Victorian and Edwardian world of rapid industrial expansion and high imperialism. The book is not set in a fictional locale; rather, it surveys conditions across the British Empire, with special attention to Britain and South Africa between the 1880s and 1910. These decades witnessed urbanization, mass migration, and the consolidation of settler-colonial rule in southern Africa. Schreiner writes from experience in the Karoo and Cape Town as well as from metropolitan reform circles, interpreting women’s economic roles amid factories, mines, and imperial households.
Industrial capitalism’s second wave (c. 1870–1914) transformed women’s wage work in Britain. Sweated trades in East London—tailoring, box-making, chain-making—operated long hours in cramped rooms for meagre pay; a House of Lords Select Committee on the Sweating System reported in 1890, and the Anti-Sweating League formed in 1906. Responding, Parliament enacted the Trade Boards Act of 1909 to set minimum rates in vulnerable industries. Factory and Workshop Acts (notably 1901) extended inspection. Schreiner’s analysis of productive labour and her indictment of sex-parasitism echo these debates: she defends women’s right to economically meaningful work and condemns social structures that confine them to underpaid or idle dependence.
The organized struggle for women’s suffrage surged in Britain during Schreiner’s mature years. The National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), led by Millicent Garrett Fawcett, unified constitutional suffragists in 1897, while the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), founded by Emmeline Pankhurst in 1903, adopted militancy. Mass actions included Women’s Sunday in Hyde Park on 21 June 1908 and the clashes of Black Friday, 18 November 1910. A 1911 census boycott dramatized disenfranchisement. Schreiner aligned intellectually with suffrage arguments for citizenship grounded in contribution to the commonwealth; Woman and Labour supplies an evolutionary and economic rationale for political rights by insisting that civic status follows from productive social labour.
South African conflicts and the mineral revolution profoundly shaped Schreiner’s social vision. The discovery of diamonds near Kimberley in 1867 and gold on the Witwatersrand in 1886 created vast corporate mining complexes—De Beers consolidated under Cecil Rhodes in 1888—drawing migrant labor from across southern Africa and intensifying imperial competition. The botched Jameson Raid of December 1895, engineered by Rhodes’s allies, destabilized the region and prefaced the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902). British forces under Lords Roberts and Kitchener implemented a scorched-earth policy, destroying farms and interning civilians. Approximately 115,000 Boer women and children were confined to camps where more than 26,000 died; at least 115,000 Black Africans were held in separate camps, with recorded deaths exceeding 14,000. Emily Hobhouse’s 1901 exposé forced a government inquiry and galvanized transnational protest. The Treaty of Vereeniging (31 May 1902) ended the war, but reconstruction entrenched mining capital and racialized labor controls. Schreiner, long a critic of Rhodes (as in her 1897 Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland), witnessed these upheavals from the Cape and corresponded with Hobhouse. In Woman and Labour she universalizes lessons taken from wartime deprivation: military and capitalist systems that render women dependents or camp inmates while extracting men’s and colonized peoples’ labor are indicted as historically contingent, not natural. Her contrast between parasitic elites and genuinely productive workers draws directly on the spectacle of imperial enrichment built on dispossession, making South Africa’s mines and camps a concrete backdrop to her ethical and economic claims.
Political reconfiguration followed with the South Africa Act (1909), passed at Westminster, creating the Union of South Africa on 31 May 1910. The constitution entrenched white minority rule, preserved the Cape’s limited, property-based multiracial franchise only in one province, and enabled racial exclusion elsewhere. Early union legislation, including the Mines and Works Act (1911) and Native Labour Regulation Act (1911), formalized the color bar and tight controls on African labor in the goldfields. Schreiner’s pamphlet Closer Union (1909) opposed such a settlement. Woman and Labour extends this critique by linking full civic membership to capacity and performance in social labour, implicitly challenging racialized and gendered hierarchies of work and citizenship.
Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scientific debate about sex and heredity framed contemporary policy. Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man (1871) and Herbert Spencer’s writings were enlisted to naturalize female domesticity, while Francis Galton coined eugenics in 1883; the Eugenics Education Society formed in London in 1907, influencing discourse on national efficiency after the 1904 Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration. Parallel neo-Malthusian campaigns, including the 1877 Bradlaugh–Besant trial and the founding of the Malthusian League (1877), contested reproductive control. Schreiner engages this terrain by arguing, in evolutionary terms, that women’s creative energies must find expression in socially productive work beyond mere procreation, contesting biological determinism with historical economics.
Reform of women’s legal and educational status underpinned the book’s insistence on economic citizenship. The Married Women’s Property Acts (1870, 1882) and the Guardianship of Infants Act (1886) expanded women’s control over earnings and children. The 1876 Medical Act enabled licensing of women; pioneers such as Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and Sophia Jex-Blake opened medical careers. Girton (1869) and Newnham (1871) Colleges at Cambridge, and the University of London’s decision in 1878 to award degrees to women, widened higher education, while the Midwives Act (1902) professionalized maternal care. The Qualification of Women (County and Borough Councils) Act (1907) extended local office-holding. Schreiner draws upon these shifts to claim professions and public service as rightful fields of women’s productive labour.
As social and political critique, Woman and Labour exposes the intertwined injustices of imperial capitalism and patriarchal dependency. Schreiner attacks the class ideal of the leisured wife as sex parasitism, indicts sweated industries that live off women’s underpaid toil, and links the denial of suffrage to the broader expropriation of productive agency. Her South African vantage highlights how militarism and racialized labor regimes convert women into dependents or victims, while wealth accrues to extractive elites. By reframing citizenship as founded on socially necessary labour—waged or unwaged, maternal or professional—she challenges prevailing hierarchies of sex, race, and class, demanding structural reforms rather than private charity or moral exhortation.
