“The Stimulating Power”: Olive Schreiner and the ‘Shrieking Sisterhood’

Clare Gill

In the sizable number of autobiographical materials penned by individuals immersed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century women’s movement, we can easily see a great deal of emphasis placed upon the importance of structured, serious reading. The leading luminaries of the various factions within the women’s movement at this time were acutely aware of the power of literature to both educate and inspire, and also of the ability for individual texts to foster a sense of identification and interconnectedness between readers. Railing against the hegemonic cultural iconography of the figure of the solitary reader, the women’s movement promoted an image of reading as a communal activity, as a pursuit that rallied women together in feminist solidarity, hence the emphasis placed on reading and on the dissemination of literature across the wider movement.

This paper will focus exclusively upon the contemporary women’s movement’s avid promotion of the literary works of the South African writer, Olive Schreiner. It will demonstrate how Schreiner’s texts - widely considered to ideologically buttress the major political tenets of the suffrage campaign - constituted a canny form of propaganda for the contemporary women’s movement. It will also examine how Schreiner’s reputation as a feminist literary icon was, to an extent, engendered by the women’s movement itself: within the pages of newspapers, pamphlets and the general ephemera published by the diversity of contemporary women’s associations, from the pulpit at myriad suffrage-related gatherings, and in the review sections, advertisements and correspondence columns of rigorously feminist publications like Vote, Shafts, Common Cause and Suffragette.