The Force of Feminism: Race, Precarity, and the Ethics of Nonviolence in The Story of An African Farm
This article argues that Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883) reflects the author’s early doubts about imperialism, by foregrounding an important political view of Schreiner: her lifelong commitment to nonviolence. Lyndall goes through an ethical transformation of renouncing her Social Darwinist view and individualism, to later acknowledging the inherent interdependency of lives that Butlerian nonviolence posits as a precondition of nonviolence. This anticipates Schreiner’s new form of relation-based feminism she envisioned for the global era, as the violent ideologies of colonialism, patriarchy, and the evolutionary theory prevalent in South Africa constantly conflicted with her pacifist views.
Olive Schreiner is best remembered today as one of the most important South African novelists of the late nineteenth century, but she was also a renowned political writer deeply involved in Cape politics. She especially grappled with issues of women’s labor and Victorian society’s oppressive gender roles, making her one of the first-generation New Woman writers. In particular, The Story of an African Farm (hereafter The Story) published in 1883, has been acknowledged as a key early feminist novel, addressing issues of women’s education, marriage, and the constraints of gender conventions, particularly through the figure of Lyndall.1 However, since the rise of postcolonial theory and criticism in the late twentieth century and, more recently, the crucial efforts of [End Page 110] “undisciplining” Victorian studies, The Story has been analyzed beyond its feminist implications to address problematic representations of race. Considering Schreiner’s commitment to addressing various social problems through her polemical essays, her fiction has also been regarded as an important resource to determine the author’s political stance. Notably, focusing on the narrow but palpable representations of black servants, Ryan Fong observes that Khoisan characters manifest their vibrant oral culture in the novel. Other postcolonial readings of The Story have centered around the racist discourse embedded within Schreiner’s feminism.2 Her progressive ideas on gender equality, once celebrated by early feminist critics, have been reread to disclose their inherent racism. For instance, in a recent article on The Story, M. A. Miller associates Schreiner’s portrayal of the transwoman—Gregory Rose—as a mark of Schreiner’s white feminism that erases the race-specific realities of native black women and translocated Indian South Africans. Although the article acknowledges Schreiner’s political views that opposed colonial policies, Miller argues the limitation of Schreiner’s feminism that fails to adhere to them.3
Notably, in criticizing the representations of black South Africans in the novel, critics have relied on Schreiner’s early political essays as a source of evidence to ascertain the novel’s position on the issue of race.4 However, I caution against making such a direct connection between her fictional and nonfictional writings, given that Schreiner’s political stance features an internal ambiguity. First, Schreiner wrote in a state where she was fully conscious of the British audience. Gaining public interest from the very start of her publication, she meticulously addressed her ideas—especially on the controversial issue of race in the Colony—in a way that would appeal to British readers. For example, her book Thoughts on South Africa “offer[s] a curiously ambivalent exposition” as it ultimately wishes for South Africa to become a “society free of racial oppression” while in some parts she “endorse[s] the ideological justifications of white conquest.”5 Her political commentaries thus aimed for justice and equality but at the same time elided directly opposing British rule of the Colony for a British audience, making it difficult to grasp her genuine position on the British empire. Moreover, her ideas on race changed greatly over her lifetime, making it difficult [End Page 111] to offer a clear-cut judgment of her thoughts.6 Early on, Schreiner held a romanticized vision of the English race accomplishing a missionary enterprise for South Africa, but after the outbreak of the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902) and the brutal expansionist policies of Cecil Rhodes, she formed a determined opposition to British imperialism and segregationist policies.7 Thus, with so many discontinuities in her political beliefs, her political writing is inadequate to corroborate her ideas on race in The Story. Nevertheless, I believe it is meaningful to acknowledge the inherent ambiguity of Schreiner’s perspective when reading The Story. Rather than assuming that her early racist views are reflected in the book, this article illuminates how the novel features its own ambivalence that bespeaks the author’s persistent doubts about imperialism even from her early career.
In what follows, I underscore an important political view of Schreiner that has been put aside by the critics in looking at The Story: her lifelong commitment to nonviolence. It is essential to realize that from early on, the author had “an undue faith in the possibility of nonviolent, egalitarian social progress” that later concretized into pacifism.8 This opposition to violence formed a foundation for her antiracist as well as feminist thought. Without acknowledging this overarching worldview she held even in the early stages of her writing career, we are likely to fall into the trap of reading The Story as another example that manifests Schreiner’s early racist views on native tribes of South Africa. Given its racist allusions and publication date of the early 1880s, The Story seems to reflect the author’s early political writings on black Africans. However, this article objects to condemning The Story as entirely racist. Even before she publicly asserted her pacifist views in the 1900s, Schreiner had wished for a nonviolent world from early on, which constantly went into conflict with the atrocities of the British empire she witnessed. Thus, this article pays more attention to how the novel offers early representations of Schreiner’s nonviolent views, which later precipitate her ultimate rejection of violent ideologies such as patriarchy, colonialism, and most notably, Social Darwinism.
The author’s relationship with Social Darwinism has been widely discussed due to its importance in determining the author’s thoughts on race. Margaret Lenta declares that Lyndall, and “probably her [End Page 112] author” as well, regard the San and the Khoekhoe “as occupying a lower rung on the evolutionary ladder,” and thus accept their inevitable demise.9 In contrast, scholars like Carolyn Burdett, Joyce Berkman, and S. Pearl Brilmyer dispute such criticism by stating that Schreiner combats the values of Social Darwinism by forming her alternative vision of progress.10 However, their discussions mostly center around other texts written by Schreiner, such as the unfinished novel From Man to Man, or the nonfictional work Woman and Labour which features a strong anti-Darwinist approach. The Story, and especially the character Lyndall is excluded from their argument, which is not surprising when considering Lyndall’s language is heavily imbued with Social Darwinist rhetoric. Nevertheless, this article acknowledges the importance of Lyndall in understanding Schreiner’s complex relationship with Social Darwinism. Rather than simply assuming that the direct usage of Social Darwinist language determines Schreiner’s racist thinking, I highlight possible scenes of conversion that the author includes towards the end of the novel. However, this article’s main aim is not to emphasize how The Story proves Schreiner’s abandonment of racist views; rather, it is to account for how the novel propounds ambiguities of her vision of race as well as gender, stemming from the author’s early commitment to nonviolence.
In re-examining Schreiner’s changing views on feminism represented in the novel, this essay borrows the theorization of nonviolence postulated by Judith Butler. Claiming to be a lifelong pacifist, Schreiner wished to extirpate all types of violence in the world. Her obligation to ameliorate the “physical and spiritual suffering” of all living creatures would have been irreconcilable with Social Darwinism, which operates through conflicts.11 Building upon these claims, my work details the ways in which Schreiner strategically invokes Lyndall’s violent and egoistic feminism to highlight its limits. I focus on how Lyndall’s ethical transformation in the final days preceding her death presents the concept of interdependence, a precondition within Butler’s recent work on nonviolence. This demonstrates the dismantling of Lyndall’s highly individualistic attitude, marking Schreiner’s rejection of the Social Darwinist celebration of violence as well as anticipating a new form of relation-based feminism required in the global era. [End Page 113] Mindful of Talia Schaffer’s recent work, Communities of Care, which reveals the importance of foregrounding ethics of care in analyzing Victorian literature, this essay also seeks to employ a similar ethical framework of nonviolence that reorients our attention to relationality rather than individuality.
This essay is divided into three sections. The first section touches upon the inherent violence in Social Darwinism that becomes the fundamental reason why Schreiner, as a renowned pacifist, distances herself from the theory despite her early interest in Herbert Spencer’s writings. In the second section, centering around the concept of violence, I analyze how Lyndall’s feminism features two characteristics: Social Darwinism and individualism. Lyndall’s feminism is framed to adhere to the principles of Social Darwinism, manifesting a racial hierarchy and the necessary sacrifice of the so-called “inferior” race in the process of evolution. This necessary entailment of violence in her feminism evokes a certain egoistic trait, as she rules out the importance of other beings, and is primarily engrossed in her own devastating situation as a woman. Such an individualistic attitude is what allows violence to operate as the fundamental social factor in the first place, according to Judith Butler. By disproportionally assigning value among people, Lyndall’s feminism seems to fail to acknowledge the social relations that interdict the act of violence. The final section explains how The Story presents Lyndall’s change to hint at her disavowal of violent ideologies, and further, how Schreiner anticipates key ideas of Butlerian nonviolence. Lyndall’s individualism derives from the belief in autonomous selfhood which Butler warns about in The Force of Nonviolence. However, in combatting this individualistic thinking and realizing the inherent interdependency of human lives, Lyndall renounces the use of violence as a primary factor in society. Furthermore, this evinces Schreiner’s expanded vision of feminism that is more relation- and compassion-based than egoistically rooted in forms of racial, colonial, and evolutionary violence. This reading of a nineteenth-century feminist also gives insights into a twenty-first-century feminist, Butler, whose philosophical focus shifted from theories predominantly focused on the idea of gender to a theory of nonviolence that addresses broader social and global concerns. [End Page 114]
Violence in Social Darwinism
Schreiner’s interest in evolutionary thought started from a young age when she first encountered Spencer’s social theory. Recorded in the biography written by her husband Samuel Cronwright-Schreiner, he writes how Willie Bertram’s gift of Spencer’s First Principles was an eye-opening experience for her.12 The book helped Schreiner, in a period of religious doubt, to formulate ideas about how a constant progressive evolution could serve as a model of social transformation. She likened the effect of the book to something like “Christianity [bursting] on the dark Roman world.”13 In short, Schreiner was initially drawn to Spencer’s evolutionary theory, resorting to its principles of Natural Selection to understand social progress.
However, Schreiner started to express her doubts about Social Darwinism as she found them incompatible with her deep belief in pacifism. The dominant creed of Social Darwinism essentially endorsed the use of violence as it necessitates the victimization of the unfit for the sake of progress. Spencer held a firm belief that universal progress was achieved through a constant mutation of society that happens through non-adapted organisms being destroyed to give way to the fit-test, which develops into the famous phrase, “survival of the fittest.”14 In the late nineteenth century, when such glorification of competition prevailed in society, Schreiner vociferously demanded a total elimination of violence, especially the imperial violence happening in the Cape Colony. While all the people around her supported British militarism and colonial wars—including Havelock Ellis, Edward Carpenter, Emily Hobhouse, Will Schreiner, and even the renowned pacifist Mahatma Gandhi—she stridently resisted conforming to the prevailing public sentiment.15 She castigated the imperial policy of Cecil Rhodes, the prime minister of the Cape, that raised war against the Matabele and the Mashona. She especially showed strong repugnance towards his vote for the Flogging Bill in parliament which “imposed lashes on Africans for minor offences like absence for work and disobedience of a master’s orders.”16 One of the most notable essays that illuminate Schreiner’s pacifism, “The Dawn of Civilisation,” reveals her pacifist thought in relation to evolutionary theory. Recalling her childhood [End Page 115] in the Cape Colony, she describes how she witnessed various acts of cruelty that made her wonder: “Why did the strong always crush the weak? Why did we hate and kill and torture?”17 Growing up in the Cape Colony and seeing firsthand the brutal colonial wars conducted by Boer and English soldiers, Schreiner questions the very principle of Social Darwinism that takes for granted the “strong” crushing the “weak.” Based on this antipathy towards any type of aggression or violence in society, she objected to not only “the final expression of war” itself, but also more strongly “to ideals and aims and those institutions and methods of action which make the existence of war possible and inevitable among men.”18 Among the various “ideals and aims” entrenched in society, Schreiner started to express her ideas at odds with Social Darwinism.
In a letter to Havelock Ellis in April 1884, Schreiner expresses her willingness to move beyond Spencer’s theories, questioning the basic principles of Social Darwinism. She professes that she does not read Spencer anymore, thinking that he “has nothing else to give [her] now.”19 There was a discordance of his theory with her later philosophical thought that “condemns . . . laissez-faire social Darwinism as an inadequate model of societal transformation.”20 In “The Dawn,” she explicitly illustrates her wish for a nonviolent world “in which creatures no more hated and crushed, in which the strong helped the weak”—a vision diametrically at odds with Social Darwinism which legitimizes the survival of the fittest.21 Thus, although Schreiner’s explicit use of Social Darwinist language in several works seems to prove how the author does not fully abandon the racial hierarchy implicit within its discourse,22 Schreiner, in reality, questioned the Social Darwinist principle of seeing the “dynamics of evolution primarily violent and competitive.”23 For Schreiner, pacifism and Social Darwinism were simply incompatible.
Feminism Tainted by Racism and Individualism
What, then, are the major traits of Lyndall’s feminism that Schreiner wanted to expose by its explicit resort to Social Darwinism? First, we [End Page 116] have to look at the evolutionary language Lyndall adheres to when propounding women’s rights. In a scene with Waldo, the female protagonist delivers an impassioned speech on the unequal positions of women and men. To refute the concerns the public had in the aftermath of giving women liberty, she explains the dynamics of gender through the language of evolutionary theory:
If two men climb one ladder, did you ever see the weakest anywhere but at the foot? The surest sign of fitness is success. The weakest never wins but where there is handicapping. . . . If we are not fit, you give us to no purpose the right to labour; the work will fall out of our hands into those that are wiser.24
Here Lyndall resorts to the discourse of evolutionism by referring to women as the “weakest,” and claims that without a proper education that can prepare them for men’s labor, women will likely lag behind. She also directly borrows the metaphor of the ladder, a pre-Darwinian trope frequently used to describe the process of evolution. The evolutionary ladder, or the “Great Chain of Being,” has been used starting from the eighteenth century to “explain the history of life and a progression towards the human form.”25 The ladder encapsulates Social Darwinist theory, assuming linearity of progress, hierarchy among species and races, and a presumption that all organisms strive to reach a predetermined goal. Moreover, she firmly declares her belief that success—adaptation or progress—is to be determined by “fitness.” She finds the defeat of the inferior inevitable to make room for the “wiser.” According to her, a society driven by this rule of competition deprives the “right” to survive from those that lack adaptability or capacity. As a result, the “weakest” never have the chance to win and thereby remain in the early stages of development, which she describes as being “at the foot.” In short, Lyndall appropriates Social Darwinist discourse, particularly the process of Natural Selection, to explain the unequal social opportunity between men and women.
The problem is that her evolutionary thoughts denote an inherently racist rhetoric of Social Darwinism. Speaking to Gregory Rose, Lyndall expects an ominous fate for the naked “Kaffir [Bantu]” at the foot of the “kopje [hillock]” as she questions: “Will his race melt away in the [End Page 117] heat of a collision with a higher? Are the men of the future to see his bones only in museums—a vestige of one link that spanned between the dog and the white man?”26 This half-mocking inquiry is often read to be complicit with Social Darwinism, positioning the black race as subject to struggle in evolutionary progress. As it was almost axiomatic that the fittest race—England’s Anglo-Saxon or Germanic roots—would thrive over other races, the latter’s so-called inferiority makes their race vulnerable to extinction, which is expressed as “[melting] away,” through the competition with other groups—“heat of collision with a higher.” Furthermore, the black man functions as the “one link” between the animal and the white man, alluding to the racist Victorian evolutionary thought where the lowest order of species is the animal, a little above the position of animals stand the nonwhites, and lastly, the Anglo-Saxon or Germanic roots occupying the top of the evolutionary ladder.
The problematic representation of the “Kaffir [Bantu]” man also marks the racism ingrained in Lyndall’s feminist thoughts. Framing the man as possessing something of a “master” about him “in spite of his blackness and wool,” Lyndall assumes that the man will “kick his wife with his beautiful legs when he gets home.”27 Through this scathing imagery of domestic violence, she denounces the universal position of women subjected to the patriarchal authority of the house regardless of race.28 However, in doing so, she relies upon the racist evolutionary views of the time. She alludes that the reason why the “Kaffir [Bantu]” man has the right to kick his wife is because he has “bought her for two oxen.” She implicitly suggests that the subjugation of women in the Bantu household is attributed to the primitive form of marriage, which is directly contrasted to the love that Lyndall describes later in the passage “love that holds all—friendship, passion, worship.”29 This juxtaposition draws a subtle implication that the Bantu man, remaining in an earlier evolutionary stage, will not reach this lofty love that Lyndall conceptualizes later in the story. Thus, in setting up a feminist claim of decrying the violence of the patriarch, Lyndall utilizes the racist idea of black South Africans positioned as undeveloped forms of humanity.30
Lyndall’s Social Darwinist views not only expose the racist framing of her feminism but also its individualistic traits. A discriminatory [End Page 118] categorization of race entails a certain violent mode of understanding the world—individualistic thinking—distributing different values of lives on the presumption that some lives are not significantly attached to one’s life. Judith Butler, in The Force of Nonviolence, explores this relationship between individualism and violence. Butler suggests that one’s life is already sustained by “social bonds” and no human can exist without them.31 However, individualism holds the fictitious notion of an individual miraculously coming into the world as an autonomous being from the start. This is what condones the use of violence, as “they” exist as disparate individuals whose welfare is a separate business from our own. Pursuing nonviolent ethics becomes then a way of acknowledging this inherent interdependency of human life and dismantling the demographic hierarchy among people, viewing every person as “born into a condition of radical dependency.”32 It is this understanding of vulnerability that formulates obligations towards others, rendering nonviolence a critique of individualism. In such terms, Lyndall’s endorsement of Social Darwinist views intimates a sign of her individualism. Through her failure to realize the social bonds she shares with others, her feminist aims can be seen as more alienated and egoistic.33
Lyndall’s mirror, referenced several times in the novel, serves as a signifier of Lyndall’s egoistic self-possession. Lyndall frequently sees herself “asleep, swathed, shut up in self,” and unable to break down the “narrow walls” that lock her up in herself.34 In this state of detachment, she has cultivated a habit of looking at her face in the mirror “ever since she could remember,” and this functions as a ritual act that gives assurance to her.35 She looks at the mirror and talks to herself, asserting her self-reliance: “We are all alone, you and I . . . no one helps us, no one understands us; but we will help ourselves.” In Lyndall’s belief system, the “you” that Butler posits as the other being upon whom “I” depend, is not a genuine “you” but another “I”—herself in the mirror. Lyndall is thus oblivious to how the “I” “cannot come into being without a ‘you.’”36 She believes the formation or maintenance of “I” does not need others. To explain this further in Butler’s terminology, her obsession with the mirrored image of herself accounts for how she is unable to completely dispossess herself to attend to the inherent vulnerability of life. Butler [End Page 119] explains that if one possesses oneself “too firmly or too rigidly, [one] cannot be in an ethical relation.”37 In such terms, Lyndall is in this state of egoism where she holds on to herself too rigidly. Lyndall voluntarily blocks interaction with others from her belief that she can survive through self-reliance, when the reality is that one’s life is implicated in others’ lives. Lyndall, speaking to herself in the mirror in a self-consolatory way, only conjures up her inability to perceive others as socially constitutive subjects.
Lyndall’s individualism leads her to a firm disbelief in her words being understood by others. In expressing her feminist views, she discloses anxiety about “the narrowness of the limits within which a human soul may speak and be understood by its nearest of mental kin” and imagines that one’s soul “reaches that solitary land of the individual experience, in which no fellow-footfall is ever heard.”38 In contrast to Lyndall’s belief, Butler asserts that one is always and already in a responsive position in society. The other’s address exists “prior to the formation of our will,” indicating how one’s existence is first and foremost constituted by the other’s address regardless of whether one wants it or not.39 Thus, no person can ever exist in the “solitary land” Lyndall refers to, which is devoid of these moral demands spoken by others. Unable to accede to this precarious state of being, Lyndall’s declama-tory feminist utterances feature a form of self-enclosure. Given these racist and individualistic traits of Lyndall’s feminism, an erroneous reading can take place under the assumption that it is representative of Schreiner’s own political outlook.
Nonviolence and Schreiner’s New Vision of Feminism
While most studies end by concluding with the racist or individualistic feminism presented by Lyndall, I would like to continue this discussion by shedding light on particular passages that can subvert this interpretation. Estranged from other social ties, Lyndall faces constant solitude that almost overpowers her in her pursuit of women’s rights. Her soliloquy, delivered in front of Otto’s grave, shows her desire to move beyond this entrapment of self, “why am I alone, so hard, so cold? I am so [End Page 120] weary of myself! It is eating my soul to its core,—self, self, self! I cannot bear this life! I cannot breathe, I cannot live! Will nothing free me from myself?”40 Her previous self-absorption, expressed through the wailing of the words “self, self, self!” now comes to function as a suffocating fetter. What she regarded as self-reliance instead turns out to be an entrapment, ultimately signifying Lyndall’s recognition of her failed self-autonomy.
Realizing the limits of her individualistic thoughts, Lyndall introduces a new vision to her feminism. Nearing her death, she recounts to Gregory Rose, a mysterious vision she sees:
I see the vision of a poor weak soul striving after good. It was not cut short; and, in the end, it learnt, through tears and much pain, that holiness is an infinite compassion for others; that greatness is to take the common things of life and walk truly among them; that . . . happiness is a great love and much serving.41
The vision of this “poor weak soul” indicates her own status; identical to the poor soul, she has “[strived] after good”—her feminist aims—for an entire life, but in the moment of imminent death insinuated in the phrase “in the end,” she realizes something that she has not considered as important in life, which is “compassion for others.” Lyndall, who has been previously engrossed in herself and remained remote from other’s society, has not realized that “[walking] truly among” the common things in life, or “serving” for others is what constitutes the greatness of life. At last, she replaces her self-sufficient vision of striving alone for “happiness” or “holiness,” with the principle of nonviolence, responding to the “reciprocal social obligation” of preserving each other’s lives.42 In other words, she encounters the inherent state of human precariousness, finally coming to apprehend the importance of social relations.
Further examining this watershed moment in Lyndall’s feminist thinking, the particular use of syntax in the passage also connotes her modified vision of self from an individualistic viewpoint to a more relational one. In this passage of self-reflection, rather than directly identifying herself with the “poor weak soul,” Lyndall narrates this scene as if she “sees” this soul from a distance, thereby referring to herself in the third person. As a result, this creates a gap between the “I” and the [End Page 121] “soul,” accentuating how Lyndall’s belief in an autonomous and unified subject is dismantled. Despite the passage being a retrospection of her life, the primary subject “I” appears once at the start and fades out, being substituted by the “soul” that is constantly referred to as “it.” The use of the pronoun “it” is also noteworthy, as the gender-neutral term anticipates Lyndall’s relation-oriented feminism that strives to think beyond the battle between femininity and masculinity. In this perspective, unlike the previously mentioned argument of Miller that the transgender character Gregory Rose is a sign of white feminism, they—Rose, identified neither as he nor she—betoken Schreiner’s relation-based feminist vision. This vision moves beyond the narrow individualistic thinking that feminism is exclusively about a narrow biological understanding of traditional womanhood. Such use of the neutral term “it” then connotes how Gregory’s case can shed a more positive light on Schreiner’s inclusive feminism in The Story.43 In sum, instead of focusing on the disparities that divide “you” and “I” or “he” or “she,” a preliminary act for determining the grievability of lives as Butler suggests in The Force, the novel hints at a change to the ethical practice of non-violence that foregrounds the equal value of human life.
Lyndall’s eventual overcoming of individualism also reflects Schreiner’s alternative view of “socialist individualism” which evinces an important change in her feminist outlook.44 Schreiner acknowledged the limitations of an individualistic and egoistic feminism that is based on the prevalent discourse of Social Darwinism and, instead, called for a relation-based feminism that asserts not independence, but autonomy predicated on relationships. She did not side completely with socialists, writing to Havelock Ellis that what she longs for is “perfect freedom and independence” which cannot be achieved from socialism’s subjugation of the individual to the whole.45 At the same time, she did not believe individual organisms could exist alone and veered from individualism, instead claiming herself as “an individualist socialist” whose socialism was not incompatible with the freedom of individuals.46 Schreiner’s analysis of society thus depended on a dual operation of personal and societal change toward equality and justice. That is, the social structure needs to be conducive to individual needs and desires to eradicate unequal socioeconomic relationships derived from class, gender, [End Page 122] and race antagonism, while at the same time, individuals are also required to attain compassion and egalitarian feelings. This attests to Schreiner’s alternative vision of social progress that she sees as “possible only through fostering ‘interknitted sympathy’ among all classes.”47 Her version of socialist individualism was thus concentrated on removing hostility and fostering compassion among different groups that further extended to “internationalism, antiracism, feminism, and pacifism.”48 In this sense, The Story captures Schreiner’s turn to an ethical reconfiguration of individualism that was sensitive to various interpersonal relations.
This realization of the necessity of an interknitted society is a powerful act of nonviolence that Butler postulates. It is recognizing the precariousness of lives, which is equivalent to acknowledging that one’s existence depends upon others, and one can only survive when various social and economic forms of support are to be met.49 Schreiner, who has been attentive to such precariousness among unequal socioeconomic relationships, adopts a new form of feminism through Lyndall to account for the multiple economies of power that affect the well-being of life. It must go against the individualistic assumption that women’s rights are more important than other issues and realize that other social discourses are also actively in play, determining the value of lives. Reorienting feminism this way, Schreiner can effectively tackle the underlying violent ideology that operates under all forms of injustice in South Africa. As Butler defines nonviolence as a force, a “social and political power to establish existence for those who have been conceptually nullified,” Schreiner’s feminism functions as a force as well, through its critique of colonial and racial violence to recast the victims as worthy of preservation.50
Talia Schaffer’s recent work on the ethics of care in Victorian literature can help us to better understand relation-based feminism as a type of force in The Story. According to Schaffer, the ethics of care is also predicated on the fundamentally interdependent condition of being like the ethics of nonviolence. Her framing of this inherent interdependency is strikingly similar to Butler’s: “Enmeshed as we are in networks of obligation, gratitude, and assistance, we need to recognize our own profound social ties. None of us are autonomous; our very selfhood [End Page 123] is intermeshed with others.”51 Then Lyndall’s wish to form affinities based on compassion for others translates into her wish to form a “care community.” Schaffer stresses in her book how this formation of communal relationships becomes a mechanism for survival among people of marginalized communities. Such care communities operate through “performative” action rather than mere feelings, just as nonviolence is a set of actions, not a failure of action.52 In such terms, Lyndall’s acknowledgment of solidarity grounded on nonhierarchical relations may be seen as a powerful act of securing her feminist ethics. Thus, although Lyndall’s anticlimactic death seems to suggest a failure of her feminist vision, the “beauty and tranquility” on her dead face bespeaks how she has found “something to worship” as the narrator suggests: a care community.53 It is notable that near her death Lyndall first becomes involved in a care community where she is cared for by Gregory, who performs the act of nursing with tenderness, and Doss, her dog, who never leaves her side to provide emotional care. This care community that goes beyond the distinctions of gender or species culminates in their short trip to the blue mountains. Regarding how Schaffer defines care relations to be built around another’s “need,” their journey to fulfill the incapacitated heroine’s ardent wish to go to the mountains—despite the clearly foreseen failure to reach it before her death—discloses the care community’s main purpose to serve the needs of the other.54 In sum, her conviction in commonality, which undermines her own individualism, furnishes hope for Lyndall’s feminism to have overcome its futile obsession with self-reliance for a more favorable condition to safeguard her feminist values.
Understanding Schreiner through such relation-based ethics highlights her political attention to various groups that she deemed equally worthy of social recognition, equality, and freedom. Deeply involved in the suffrage movement in South Africa, Schreiner insisted that women having the vote is not an issue of gender alone, but also one of class and race. She held the belief that gender is only a part of the question, which led to her resignation from the Women’s Enfranchisement League when the dominant white middle class rejected to form a non-racial franchise.55 In various polemical writings, as well, she strived to group co-existing issues together to look at the bigger picture of South [End Page 124] Africa in which multiple subjects coexist forming various hierarchies. For instance, she underscored how multiple inequalities present in the Colony were entangled with one another, linking the issues of racism and sexism to the problem of labor.56 In Woman and Labour, when Schreiner talks about female parasitism as a cause of the decay of a nation, she also points out that a “larger social phenomenon” lies behind this: the “subjugation of large bodies of other human creatures” such as “slaves, subject races, or classes.”57 In the novella Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland, in exposing the atrocities of Cecil Rhodes’ imperial enterprise, Schreiner also raises awareness about the issue of labor through the Chartered Company’s exploitation of the black labor force, as well as how the expansionist project is a highly gendered issue by portraying the entailing sexual assault and rape.58 In this perspective, the changed attitude of Lyndall functions as Schreiner’s self-critique, addressing the dangers of narrow-minded feminism that reinforces the hierarchy of power relations and consolidates the distinction between others and oneself.
In fact, the globalized era makes it imperative to pay attention to the interrelatedness of various social issues. According to Butler, in a global world, where temporal and spatial gaps are constantly overcome through the development of media and transportation, there arises a “multilocality and cross-temporality of ethical connections.”59 Butler focuses on this globality as a mediation to suggest how the range of one’s responsibilities to others expands on a larger scale, blurring the exact distinctions about whose lives are relevant to one’s own or whose are not. This concept of broadened ethical relations predicated on the effects of globalization reveals the major motivation for Judith Butler’s own turn of philosophy as well. Her philosophical trajectory which exclusively focused on the issue of gender now expands to deal with the ethics of nonviolence that engages in various social issues including race, nationality, media, ecology, and so on.60
Similarly, the late nineteenth century writer witnessing the start of a new century, wished for a broader and more global feministic thinking that foregrounds interdependency and cooperation. Instead of narrowly prioritizing women’s issues as she did before, Schreiner also brought the “native question” to the fore, claiming that “[e]ven the [End Page 125] question of woman’s emancipation comes second to it.”61 The rapid globalization of society demanded the implementation of much broader and multifaceted perspectives on social issues, leading her to also focus on the issue of race as “the great question” even while pursuing the work of women’s emancipation.62 In explaining the resolution of racial problems in Closer Union, Schreiner states:
The problem of the twentieth century will not be a repetition of those of the nineteenth or those which went before it. The walls dividing continents are breaking down; everywhere European, Asiatic and African will interlard. The world on which the twenty-first century will open its eyes will be one widely different from that which the twentieth sees at its awaking. And the problem which this century will have to solve is the accomplishment of this interaction of distinct human varieties on the largest and most beneficent lines, making for the development of humanity as a whole, and carried out in a manner consonant with modern ideals and modern social wants.63
She seems to be already aware that the issue of race should be dealt with differently in this new configuration of increased globalization where the arbitrary “walls dividing continents are breaking down” and “distinct human varieties” interact with one another. Then the ways in which The Story illuminates the interdependency of human lives, or the inextricability of various social injustices that operate through the violent ideologies of the nineteenth century, all anticipate Schreiner’s later effort to move away from a parochial perspective and to embrace a global and nonviolent way of looking at the world.64
In acknowledgment of Schreiner’s intersectional viewpoint, this essay also interweaves various perspectives to understand The Story. Social Darwinism, racism, pacifism, and nonviolence are all intricately related to each other through the issue of violence, and putting them into conversation allows us to detect what has been overlooked by earlier criticism that simply denigrates the racism of Lyndall’s feminist prose. This analysis aims to instead acknowledge the signs of the author’s rising doubts about various violent ideologies. It allows a renewed understanding of Lyndall as a character who demonstrates the capacity for growth, similar to Schreiner’s disillusionment with individualistic [End Page 126] and violent ideologies throughout her life. Moreover, this understanding of the political stance held by the nineteenth-century author is not detached from the present world, giving insights into the transition of Butler’s philosophy that started primarily from theories of gender to theories of nonviolence that highlight the interrelatedness of several social issues. In sum, by acknowledging the ambivalence of The Story’s stance on race, we will be on better ground to judge Lyndall, taking into consideration the complex interplay among issues of race, Social Darwinism, and pacifism, as well as the equally complex figure, Olive Schreiner.
Gyuri Moon is a PhD student in the department of English at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research interests include feminism, environmental humanities, postcolonial studies, and nineteenth-century anthropological discourses.
NOTES
1. The initial celebration of The Story of an African Farm as a feminist novel was consolidated in the 1980s by Second Wave feminist scholars, who did not consider the issue of race or discourse of imperialism but primarily focused on the figure of Lyndall. Lyndall was nominated as “the first wholly serious feminist heroine” in the English novel by Elaine Showalter’s ground-breaking study of British women writers of the nineteenth and twentieth century. See Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists From Brontë to Lessing (Princeton University Press, 1977), 199.
2. Past scholars have dealt with the complex interplay of race and gender in Schreiner’s thoughts. Margaret Lenta, “Racism, Sexism, and Olive Schreiner’s Fiction,” Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory, no. 70 (October 1987): 15–30; Anne McClintock, “Olive Schreiner: The Limits of Colonial Feminism,” in Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (Routledge, 1995), 258–95; Nadine Gordimer, “The Prison House of Colonialism: Review of Ruth First and Ann Scott’s Olive Schreiner,” in Olive Schreiner, ed. Cherry Clayton (McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1983), 95–100; Laura Chrisman, “Colonialism and Feminism in Olive Schreiner’s 1890s Fiction,” English in Africa 20, no. 1 (May 1993): 25–38; Louise Green, “Olive Schreiner and the Labour of Writing,” Southern African Journal of English Studies 29, sup. 1 (2012): 159–73.
3. M. A. Miller, “The Costs of Passing in the Transvaal,” Victorian Studies 64, no. 4 (Summer 2022): 611–23 (614).
4. For example, Lenta uses Schreiner’s racist commentary in Thoughts on South Africa that addresses South African blacks as “primitive in their social development and probably also in their intellects,” to suggest that these thoughts are also reflected on the representations of blacks in The Story. See Lenta, “Racism, Sexism, and Olive Schreiner’s Fiction,” 17. Also, Paula Krebs examines polemical texts of Schreiner written in 1890s and uses them to argue that The Story justifies the elimination of the “Bushman” through evolutionary theory, which derives from her “loyalty … to the future white South Africa” composed of Boers and Britons. Schreiner only metaphorically includes them to her vision of South Africa by denigrating them to the sphere of the spiritual or art. See Paula M. Krebs, “Olive Schreiner’s Racialization of South Africa,” Victorian Studies 40, no. 3 (Spring 1997): 427–44 (438).
5. Ruth First and Ann Scott, Olive Schreiner (Schocken Books, 1980), 197.
6. Liz Stanley states that Schreiner’s idea on race moved from “liberal patronage, through subsuming ‘race’ within questions of labor, to seeing racism as deep-seated prejudice and fundamentally wrong.” See Liz Stanley, Imperialism, Labour and the New Woman (Routledge, 2013), 158. This book conducts a comprehensive and detailed examination of Schreiner’s ideas on race and emphasizes that the political views have greatly changed over her life. Stanley also recently wrote a chapter on the “turning points” that mark Schreiner’s change of thought in race. She picks three important epiphanies in her life, and also claims how these serve as “components within a wider rethinking of issues concerning race,” meaning that not only these three, but also her overall thinking on materialism, labor, white backlash against black resistance contribute to her changing ideas on race. See “Turning Points: Olive Schreiner Changing Her Mind about Race Matters” in Olive Schreiner: Writing Networks and Global Contexts, ed. Jade Munslow Ong, and Andrew van der Vlies (Edinburgh University Press, 2024), 99–114. To look more on Schreiner’s early thoughts on imperialism (1890–1892) that is based on the idea of England playing a leading role in uniting the diverse race in South Africa, see Thoughts on South Africa (T. Fisher Unwin, 1923). In the book, although Schreiner shows repugnance towards military use of invading native land and depriving freedom of the black Africans, she does not fully oppose the English colonization of South Africa. She regards the Englishmen as having a “duty” (348) to manage and lead the colony and the country should be “permeated with the English doctrine of the equal right” (360). A little later, Schreiner writes An English South African View of the Situation to instigate public opinion of stopping war between Britain and the Boer Republics. Although here as well she does not explicitly oppose British colonization, she still points out the situation of black Africans who have been exploited and killed by imperial expansions. See Olive Schreiner, An English South African View of the Situation (Hodder and Stoughton, 1899), 26–27. A decade later, in Closer Union, Schreiner talks more explicitly about “the native question.” Referring to them as the “labouring class,” she asserts that black South Africans should be treated as equal and take share “in higher duties of life and citizenship.” However, in arguing for the freedom and justice of the “natives,” the logic behind this is for this labouring class to work for the benefits of the whole country through their cheap labor. See Olive Schreiner, Closer Union: A Letter on the South African Union and the Principles of Government (Fifield, 1909), 50, https://purl.dlib.indiana.edu/iudl/vwwp/VAB7036. To read more on Schreiner’s views on these polemical texts of the 1890s, see also, Krebs, “Olive Schreiner’s Racialization of South Africa.”
7. Stanley, Imperialism, Labour, 158.
8. Joyce Avrech Berkman, The Healing Imagination of Olive Schreiner: Beyond South African Colonialism (University of Massachusetts Press, 1989), 7.
9. Margaret Lenta, “Racism, Sexism, and Olive Schreiner’s Fiction,” Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory, no. 70 (October 1987): 15–30 (19). Similar to Lenta, many scholars have pointed out that Schreiner’s feminism resort to the racist evolutionary theory. Carol L. Barash suggests that Schreiner bases her thoughts on Darwinian models of racial determinism and female sexual selection that glorify motherhood and ultimately fail to dismantle “the patterns of white male dominance” in society. See “Virile Womanhood: Olive Schreiner’s Narratives of a Master Race,” Women’s Studies International Forum 9, no. 4 (1986): 333–40 (339); Sally Ledger also suggests that her writing of Woman and Labour shows Schreiner’s racial supremacism on the basis of racist ideologies of Social Darwinism: “Her revolutionary idea of humans . . . is painfully present in this much-lauded feminist tract.” See The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the fin de siècle (Manchester University Press, 1997), 43, 74; Laura Chrisman also notes how Schreiner in Woman and Labour reveals her argument for modern white Western women’s liberation” through “imperial race language.” See Chrisman, “Colonialism and Feminism,” 28.
10. Burdett talks about how in the story From Man to Man, Schreiner introduces the “revised Darwinism” that defies ideas of human hierarchy and the “natural law” of evolutionary struggle. Instead, it offers a feminist theory of evolution through seeing maternity as the condition for a higher state. See Carolyn Burdett, Olive Schreiner (Northcote House Publishers, 2013), 57. Joyce Berkman also alludes to Schreiner’s own version of revisionist Darwinist theory that dismantles the assumed hierarchy among species and the notion that the world operated through conflict. For her, the “measure of progress was the degree to which patterns of domination had diminished.” See Berkman, Healing Imagination, 74. Brilmyer talks about Schreiner’s unfinished novel From Man to Man that contains an extensive critique of Social Darwinism, by arguing that the forces of cooperation and care are more fundamental to life than the forces of competition. See S. Pearl Brilmyer, “The Intimate Pulse of Reality; or, Schreiner’s Ethological Realism,” in The Science of Character: Human Objecthood and the Ends of Victorian Realism (University of Chicago Press, 2022), 180–219 (191).
11. Berkman, Healing Imagination, 71.
12. Samuel Cronwright-Schreiner, The Life of Olive Schreiner (T. Fisher Unwin, 1924), 80–84.
13. Olive Schreiner to Havelock Ellis, March 28, 1884, in Schreiner Letters Project Transcription (Austin, TX: Harry Ransom Research Center: Manuscript Collections), http://www.oliveschreiner.org/vre?view=collections&colid=18&letterid=3.
14. In his book, Social Statics, which contains the basis of his later evolutionary thinking, he asserts that non-adapted organisms ought to be destroyed, arguing “all unfitness must disappear.” See Herbert Spencer, Social Statics, Abridged and Revised; Together with The Man Versus the State (Williams and Norgate, 1892), 27 (emphasis added). It defines “inferior creatures” as “creatures that must be disposed to make room,” implying that elimination of inferior elements is inevitable for the progress of civilization (230). Similarly, explaining the basic survival tactics of aboriginal people, he writes how in order to survive, the “primitive man” needs to “have the desire to kill” the race endangering his life or those unfit in the world (230). In short, the measuring of the fit and the unfit depends upon whether one has the tendency to destroy, an inseparable element for progress. Within a British imperial context, social evolutionism provided a convenient justification for the oppression of certain races.
15. Stanley, Imperialism, Labour, 91.
16. Although Schreiner initially respected Cecil Rhodes stating him as a “man of genius,” she started to oppose his views on politics, especially when he voted for the Flogging Bill. See First and Scott, Olive Schreiner, 199–200.
17. Olive Schreiner, “The Dawn of Civilisation,” in Dreams: Three Works by Olive Schreiner, ed. Elizabeth Jay (University of Birmingham Press, 2003), 139–144 (142). This text was printed initially in the Nation and Athenaeum in 1921 and reprinted in Stories, Dreams and Allegories in 1924.
18. Schreiner, “The Dawn of Civilisation,” 140.
19. Olive Schreiner to Havelock Ellis, April 1884, in Schreiner Letters Project Transcription, https://www.oliveschreiner.org/vre?view=collections&colid=18&letterid=4.
20. Ruth Knechtel, “Olive Schreiner’s Pagan Animism: An Underlying Unity,” English Literature in Transition (1880–1920) 53, no. 3 (2010): 259–82 (268).
21. Schreiner, “The Dawn of Civilisation,” 143.
22. Scholars like Lenta declares that Schreiner’s writing seems to be heavily based upon the prevalent evolutionary idea that nonwhite races represent “an early stage” of human development. She particularly focuses on the scene where Lyndall tells a story to Gregory Rose speculating on whether the Bantu people will become extinct and argues that Schreiner conformed to the racial hierarchy postulated by Social Darwinist theories. See Lenta, “Racism, Sexism,” 19.
23. Berkman, Healing Imagination, 78.
24. Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm (Oxford University Press, 2009), 159.
25. Peter J. Bowler, Progress Unchained: Ideas of Evolution, Human History and the Future (Cambridge University Press, 2021), 28. This idea of progress continued throughout the nineteenth-century as the metaphor of “ascending a ladder . . . lay at the heart of most efforts to understand the development of society and culture.” See Bowler, Progress Unchained, 89.
26. Schreiner, The Story, 195.
27. Schreiner, The Story, 194.
28. Schreiner, The Story, 194.
29. Schreiner, The Story, 196.
30. It is important to notice that the African characters in the novel lack their own voices to assert themselves and are rather portrayed through the words of the white settlers, like Lyndall, who look at them from a distance or interpret their culture in their own ways. In discussing the ways South Africans are perceived, Ryan D. Fong proposes a new way of looking at the African characters by going beyond these mere representations and using an indigenous framework to illuminate the presence of a living South African culture. See Ryan D. Fong, “The Stories Outside the African Farm: Indigeneity, Orality, and Unsettling the Victorian,” Victorian Studies 62, no. 3 (Spring 2020): 421–32.
31. Judith Butler, The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind (Verso, 2020), 15.
32. Butler, The Force, 41.
33. Lyndall’s alienation inscribed in her feminism has also been noted by other feminist scholars. Lyndall constantly alienates herself from society and shows a strong inclination to fall back on her own self, rather than reach out to others for help. Haskill considers Lyndall as a frustrated feminist woman who fails to know that the key to success is a communal connection. Haskill explicitly comments on Lyndall’s self-alienation by describing Lyndall to be “shut up in the self, . . . unable to work for freedom and unable to find an ethic of compassion that enables her to get outside herself and see the other.” See Christine Haskill, “Valuable Failure as a Unifying Principle in The Story of an African Farm,” English Literature in Transition 57, no. 1 (2014): 81–98 (92). Ruth First and Anne Scott also examine Lyndall’s feminism in relation to her isolation: “Lyndall is very much alone, very much a product of her thought rather than her interactions.” They state that in her life, she holds “the imperative to self-reliance” as she constantly relies only on herself, rather than reaching out for help from others. See First and Scott, Olive Schreiner, 103.
34. Schreiner, The Story, 162, 182.
35. Schreiner, The Story, 210. The remaining quotes in the paragraph are on the same page.
36. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (Verso, 2006), 45.
37. Judith Butler, “Precarious Life, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Cohabitation,” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 26, no. 2 (2012): 134–51 (142).
38. Schreiner, The Story, 162–63.
39. Butler, Precarious Life, 130. For more detailed explanation on Butler’s idea on the issue of address, see the last chapter of Precarious Life titled “Precarious Life,” 128–51.
40. Schreiner, The Story, 209.
41. Schreiner, The Story, 249.
42. Butler, The Force, 71.
43. Calling attention to Miller’s initial reading of Gregory’s nursing as a moment of “cross-racial female coalitional connection” with Ayah, a Mozambican nurse, I suggest that Lyndall’s vision here supports a new understanding of Gregory as manifesting a possibility of universal formation of a community of care beyond one’s class, race, and sex. See Miller, “The Costs,” 618.
44. This term is used by Olive Schreiner herself in a letter to Merriman (see note 46). It is also explained in the book Individualism, Decadence and Globalization where “socialist individualist” is described to oppose competitive individualism and instead sees society as “the basic unit of analysis” that makes possible the development of individuals. See Regenia Gagnier, Individualism, Decadence and Globalization: On the Relationship of Part to Whole, 1859–1920 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 86.
45. Olive Schreiner to Havelock Ellis, March 29, 1885, in Olive Schreiner Letters Project, https://www.oliveschreiner.org/vre?view=collections&colid=137&letterid=68.
46. Olive Schreiner to John X. Merriman, September 13, 1906, in Special Collections (Cape Town: National Library of South Africa), https://www.oliveschreiner.org/vre?view=collections&colid=51&letterid=21.
47. Berkman, Healing Imagination, 170.
48. Berkman, Healing Imagination, 160. Berkman categorizes Schreiner as one of the “ethical socialists.”
49. Butler, The Force, 50. Butler explains that this is because one is subject to various infrastructural conditions that assign different levels of grievability, distinguishing certain lives unworthy of preservation.
50. Butler, The Force, 23.
51. See Talia Schaffer, Communities of Care: The Social Ethics of Victorian Fiction (Princeton University Press, 2021), 29.
52. Schaffer, Communities of Care, 29.
53. Schreiner, The Story, 253.
54. Schaffer, Communities of Care, 36.
55. McClintock, “Limits of Colonial Feminism,” 295.
56. Stanley also talks about the intersectional characteristic of Schreiner’s polemical writings. As Schreiner “refused to be confined to ‘women’s issues’ conceived narrowly,” most of her polemical writings covered various issues together, engaging in a broad discussion of various inequalities in South Africa. See Stanley, Imperialism, Labour, 67. First and Scott also point out that Schreiner, who experienced the seclusion of women by Victorian society as well as colonial society, still “moved from themes of women’s subjection and powerlessness to those of national oppression and the struggles of subject races and classes.” According to the biography, unlike her contemporaries, “she perceived the race conflicts during South Africa’s industrial revolution in terms of a worldwide struggle between capital and labour.” See First and Scott, Olive Schreiner, 17. From such biographical evidence, we can see how Schreiner’s multifaceted approach to social problems is reflected through the discarding of Lyndall’s individualistic feminism to aim for a fundamental dismantling of the South African framework that utilizes violence.
57. Olive Schreiner, Woman and Labour (Cambridge University Press, 2013), 98.
58. Olive Schreiner, Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland (London, 1897; Project Gutenberg, 1998).
59. Butler, “Ethics of Cohabitation,” 138.
60. In early works of Judith Butler including Gender Trouble, Butler focuses on the idea of gender to examine how the idea of identity and subject are constituted through accumulated acts of performance that are socially scripted. Entering a new century, however, Butler shifts their focus to the notion of precarity and ethical responsibility in discussing the social construction of subject. In contrast to identity constructed on performativity—an idea concerned with a sort of individual agency and acting subject—the idea of precarious self is dependent upon the existence of the Other and the reciprocal recognition between the Other and self. To read how Butler explains the transition in their idea of subject-formation and connection between performativity and precarity, see Judith Butler, “Performativity, Precarity, and Sexual Politics,” AIBR: Revista de Antropología Iberoamericana 4, no. 3 (September 2009): 1–13. Through focusing more on precarity, Butler’s philosophy is able to highlight the different vulnerability of bodies that exposes certain minority groups to heightened risk of violence. This broadens the discussion by not only talking about sexual minorities as they did in early works, but also taking into consideration other vulnerable lives such as the poor, migrants, blacks, Arabs, sex workers, and so on. In Precarious Life, Butler explicitly states that political movements on gender and sexuality should “be part of the affinity with anti-racist struggles, given the racial differential that under-girds the culturally viable notions of the human,” acknowledging how social norms that frame what is “human” are linked not only to gender but also race. See Butler, Precarious Life, 33. I find that Butler’s shift from gender performativity to precarity closely resembles Schreiner’s own change of political interest: from thinking about women’s position in a colonial land to discussing broader relations of power, including the racial inequality of black South Africans.
61. Olive Schreiner to Caroline Murray née Molteno, December 9, 1907, in Manuscripts & Archives Collections, https://www.oliveschreiner.org/vre?view=collections&colid=99&letterid=33.
62. Schreiner to Molteno, Dec. 9 1907.
63. Schreiner, Closer Union, 46.
64. It is also noteworthy that Butler’s trajectory of feminist theory also reflects this change as Butler expresses the need to broaden the category of “woman” to include transgender women. In Undoing Gender, following the emergence of New Gender Politics, Butler talks about how the word “women” now “no longer serves as the exclusive framework for understanding its contemporary usage” in the discussion of gender discrimination, as issues of “transgenderism and transsexuality” must be considered. See Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (Routledge, 2004), 6.
