One is on the breast and clings there with arms, and one on the back and
clings with thongs. The burden of the back bows the body, turns the face
from the sky, narrows the lungs and flattens the foot; takes away the
flight and the dance from the gait of man, and ties him towards the
earth--not only in the way of nature, by means of his arched feet, but by
a heavy lien upon his shoulders and his brows. It is the fardel that
makes this vital figure to be subject visibly, and at several points, to
that law of gravitation which, in a state of liberty, it uses to
withstand, to countervail, to leap from, to walk with, making the
universal tether elastic. Bend in two this supple spine that can lift
itself, like a snake erect, with something better than mere balance--with
life and the active will; bend the back, and at once gravitation takes
hold of the loins and grasps the knees, and pulls upon the shoulders, and
the neck feels the weight of an abject head.
Wherever women are told off to hard open-air labour, we shall find among
them a lower class of their own kind--poorer where all are poor, and
straining at their task where all are labouring--who walk the dust with
burdens on their backs. Loads of field-labour are these, or of the
labour in a fishing-port, and large in proportion to their weight; too
large to be bound close and carried on the head, too wide to be borne on
the shoulder, too unwieldy for the clasp of arms. Among American
Indians, we are told, the women carry the tent so, and the gear of a
_demenagement_, and the warrior himself, upon his goods, not seldom. In
the agriculture of the European Continent the women carry the large loads
thus, the refuse is laid upon them, and all that is bound up for burning;
they are the gleaners, not of wheat but of tares. Or they carry fodder
for the imprisoned cattle, disappearing as they walk, bowed, quenched,
hooded, and hidden with hay.
Women who bear this load do not prosper. They have a downward look,
albeit not as conspirators; and in them the earth carries a burden like
their own, or but little more buoyant. Stones off the face of the stony
fields, huge sheaves of stalks and husks after granaries are filled, fuel
and forage--bent from the stature of women, those who bear those bundles
go near the earth that gave them, and breathe her dust.
In Austria, where women carry the hod and climb the ladder; in the
Rhineland, where a cart goes along the valley roads drawn by a woman
harnessed with a cow--even here I think the hardship hardly so great as
where the burden is laid upon the bent back of her whose arms are too
small or too weak to grasp it; for after long use in such carrying, the
figure is no longer fit for habitual erection. And the use is
established with those women who are so loaded. It is not that all the
labouring women of such a village or such a sea-port are burdened in
their turn with the burden of the back; it is rather that a class is
formed, a class of the burdened and the bent; and to that class belong
all ages; child-bearing women are in that sisterhood. No stronger women
can be seen than the upright women of Boulogne; to whom then, but the
bent, are due the many cripples, the many dwarfs, the ill-boned
stragglers of that vigorous population, the many children growing awry,
the many old people shuffling towards misshapen graves?
There is manifestly another burden, familiar and accustomed to the figure
of woman. This does not bend her back, nor withdraw her eyes from the
distance, nor rank her with the haggard waste of fields. It is borne in
front, and she breasts the world with it; shoulder-high, and it is her
ballast. So loaded she stands like the Dresden Raphael, and there is no
bearer of sword and buckler more erect.
It is, by the way, a curious sign of indignity of race--or, if not
indignity, provincialism--in the more extremely Oriental people, that a
Japanese woman carries her child on her back and not upon her arm. It is
a charming infant, and the mother looks no more than a gentle child; with
the little creature bound to her back she carries a soft lantern in a
mild blue night. She is not of a classic race, and she shuffles on her
subordinate way, an irresponsible creature, who must not proffer opinions
except by way of quotation, and is scarcely of the inches that measure
the landscape or of the aspect that fronts the sky.
But whence is this now prevalent desire to slip the nobler and bear the
ignobler burden? It is not long since an American woman wrote a book,
_Women and Economics_, urging equal labour upon women, by the analogy
of animals that know no distinction between a strong sex and a weak, nor
between a free sex and one confined to the pen, or the lair, or the
cover, by the care of little ones. The reply seems too obvious that the
children of men are more helpless, and are helpless for a longer time,
even in proportion to their longer life, than the off-spring of other
living creatures. The children of men have to be carried. This author
complains that women are economically dependent upon men; and she finds
that the world has "misty ideas upon the subject." If those misty ideas
are to the effect that a woman who keeps house for the service of
herself, her husband, and the other inmates, gives her work in return for
maintenance, and is not a dependent but a colleague, I must wish that
ideas "mistily" held were often so just, and ideas vaguely believed were
often so well founded. Those who charge the husband with "employing" his
wife choose to neglect the fact that she is mistress and hostess, as well
as "servant" or "housekeeper," ministering to herself and to the guests
in whose company she has pleasure, and to whose respect she has a right.
Our economic author proceeds: "We are the only animal species in which
the sex relation is also an economic factor. . . We have not been
accustomed to face this fact beyond our loose generalization that it was
'natural,' and that other animals did so too." Has anyone really been so
rash as to aver "that other animals did so too"? The obvious truth is
that other animals do otherwise, but that, whatever they do, they make no
rule or example for man. Again: "Whatever the economic value of the
domestic industry of women is, they do not get it. The women who do the
most work get the least money." And yet but now they were charged with
"getting it" too dependently, or rather, with having it "got" for them by
man! Is this writer indeed misled by that mere word "money," which she
here lets slip?
"He nearly persuades me to go on all fours," sighs Voltaire rising--rising
erect reluctantly, one may almost say--from the reading of Rousseau.