The Feminism of Olive Schreiner and the Feminism of Aletta Jacobs: The Reception of Schreiner’s Woman and Labour in the Netherlands

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores points of contact between Olive Schreiner and Aletta Jacobs, two prominent first-wave feminists, presenting a case study of cultural mobility from South Africa to the Netherlands. Utilizing the histoire croisée approach, this contribution discusses the reception of Olive Schreiner’s Woman and Labour in the Netherlands. It argues that the profile of Aletta Jacobs, who translated the text into Dutch, was decisive in forming Dutch public’s reactions to the book. Schreiner, however, an influential South African writer and social theorist, was a radical voice among both South African and European feminists and her social vision was not entirely compatible with Jacobs’s views. This article proposes that reviews of Schreiner’s book in Dutch socialist and feminist press reflect the tensions between these two movements which played out in Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and do not take into account Schreiner’s actual non-European perspective and her global approach to social processes where gender, class, and race function as intersecting concepts.