Olive Schreiner Quotes
It is the swimmer who first leaps into the frozen stream who is cut sharpest by the ice; those who follow him find it broken, and the last find it gone. It is the men or women who first tread down the path which the bulk of humanity will ultimately follow, who must find themselves at last in solitudes where the silence is deadly.
Schreiner, Olive. Woman and Labour. T. Fisher Unwin, 1911.
She credit her husband with this advice. While the advice was given in a business context, it also applies to science and most other fields.
In 1869 the all male legislature of Wyoming at the urging of legislator Col. William Bright passed legislation allowing women not only to vote but to hold public office. A local Justice of the Peace was so outraged that he resigned in protest. Then Esther Morris ran for the vacated position and won becoming the first woman to hold public office. See {585019} & {585018}
Olive Schreiner was a South African author, anti-war campaigner and intellectual. She is best remembered today for her novel The Story of an African Farm (1883), which has been highly acclaimed. It deals boldly with such contemporary issues as agnosticism, existential independence, individualism, the professional aspirations of women, and the elemental nature of life on the colonial frontier.
