"The woman who dared"

Major Mabel st Clair Stobart

Angela K. Smith

pp. 158-174

in: Alison S. Fell, Ingrid Sharp (eds), The women's movement in wartime, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007

Abstract

The moment was 1907. The self-confessed feminist was Mabel St Clair Stobart, a woman who, as she states, had good reason to understand that women had the ability to achieve much more than convention gave them credit for. She had lately returned from a four-year-long adventure in the Transvaal, during which she and her husband St Clair (a masculinist by her own admission) had set up a frontier farm, Mabel herself taking charge of a "Kaffir" store that sold a range of products to the local people as well as to white settlers and missionaries. This move to Africa had been precipitated by a financial disaster that had put an end to the comfortable married life filled with golf, tennis, fishing and other leisure pursuits that the Stobarts had enjoyed for almost 20 years.