The Personal Is Political 273the Rights of Woman (Burdett 1994, 177). Schreiner worked on the project
for three years, but abandoned it in 1889. Although her introduction be-
gan with rehashing the standard British Victorian negative assessment of
Wollstonecraft’s writing and legacies, it quickly turned toward a positive
reclamation of the book’s visionary understanding of the “necessity” of the
“woman’s movement” (Schreiner [1889] 1994, 190).
Schreiner noted that the book’s demand for women’s liberation was
rooted in the author’s own experiences as a woman: “being a woman, per-
haps there was no necessity for her to see it; she knew it” ([1889] 1994,
190). She concluded the essay with her own observations of black women
in South Africa, whom she believed demonstrated the “primitive” and natu-
ral roots of the universal female sense of their sex’s oppression. Schreiner’s
colonial upbringing gave her a condescending view of these indigenous
women as “uncivilised,” but she nonetheless opposed British feminists
who excluded black women from the vote when the Union of South Africa
was formed in 1910.
Despite her prejudices, Schreiner presented her interaction with the lo-
cal black women as a kind of feminist ethnography. She strove to preserve
the cultural distinctions between herself and the indigenous women, in
distinguishing between her and her interviewee’s fi rst-person voices. She
recalled, “I have bent over a woman half fl ogged to death by her husband,
and seen her rise, cut and bleeding, lay her child against her wounded
breast, and go and kneel down silently before the grind-stone and begin to
grind” ([1889] 1994, 193).
Seeking to understand such “deep” resignation to patriarchal oppres-
sion, she interviewed a black woman and translated her explanation at
length. Schreiner recorded her interviewee’s insight into the black woman’s
double burden of sex-based and race-based oppression: “we are dogs, we
are dogs. There may perhaps be a good for the white women; I do not know;
there is no good for the black” ([1889] 1994, 193). This African woman’s
voice echoed the “I” and the “we” of Wollstonecraft and her fi ctional alter
ego Maria’s laments of females’ birth into domination. In contrast to the
Rights of Woman’s demand for political reforms to address such systematic
injustice against women, however, Schreiner interpreted the black woman’s
despair as a sign of the “necessity” of women’s resignation to sexual domi-
nation in primitive societies ([1889] 1994, 193). Despite its troubling so-
cial Darwinist conclusion, Schreiner’s introduction to the Rights of Woman
shares Wollstonecraft’s appreciation of the rhetorical and methodological
value of using the “I” and the “we” in recording women’s experiences of
degradation at the hands of men.