‘The Woman Who Dared’: Major Mabel St Clair Stobart

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.

At this moment the ‘Votes For Women’ agitation was sadly upsetting equilibriums. I had been outside the range of suffrage politics and had never even heard it discussed,… but I could not help being a feminist, for I knew from personal experience that women could do things of which tradition had supposed they were incapable. I viewed the situation from an angle of my own. My feeling was that if women desired to have a share in the government of the country, and this seemed a legitimate ambition, they ought to be capable of taking a share in the defence of their country. (Stobart 1935: 83)