The volumes of science, mathematics, general literature, &c., which
women have given to the world, without sharing to the full the
educational advantages of man, seem to promise that they shall outstrip
him here, the moment they have a fair start. But I go farther, and state
boldly, that women have, from the beginning, done the hardest and most
unwholesome work of the world in all countries, whether civilized or
uncivilized; and I am prepared to prove it. I do not mean that rocking
the cradle and making bread is as hard work as any, but that women have
always been doing man's work, and that all the outcry society makes
against work for women is not to protect _women_, but a certain class
called _ladies_. Now, I believe that work is good for ladies; so let us
look at the truth. "Let it once be understood," says one of our English
friends, "that the young business-woman is shielded by the social
intercourse of those who are called ladies, and it would obviate many of
those grave objections which deter parents from consenting that their
children shall brave the world in shops and warehouses."
Most certainly it would; and to this point we must frequently return.
Meanwhile, says Sydney Smith, "so long as girls and boys run about in
the dirt, and trundle hoop together, they are both precisely alike;" and
I shall proceed to show that large numbers have not only played but
worked in the dirt together, and trundled hoop, not merely through our
own lives, but ever since work and play began.
I shall speak first of Asiatic women; and I can afford to begin by
quoting a Cochin-China proverb, to the effect that "a woman has nine
lives, and bears a great deal of killing." I do not know anything else
about the Cochin-China women; but this looks as if their lot were no
exception to the general rule. The Chinese peasant-woman goes to the
field with her male infant on her back, and ploughs, sows, and reaps,
exposed to all the changes of the weather. When her husband is proved
criminal, she must die as his accomplice; having, at least, strength
enough to suffer. In Calcutta, women are the masons who keep the roof
tight; and you may see them daily carrying their hods of cement,
spreading it on the tops of houses, and flattening it with a wooden
rammer like that with which our Irishmen pave the streets.
You have heard of the Bombay ghauts. Ghaut is a native word, which means
"passage through;" and it is applied by the resident not only to the
railway cut between the hills, but to the hills themselves. These are of
volcanic origin,--a sort of trap. Formed beneath the water, the mass
cooled as it was thrown up, and the sides do not slope much. "When I
gained an elevation of two thousand feet," says my correspondent, "and
looked back, I saw hills of all shapes and sizes thrown up, and ravines
thousands of feet below, all looking like the dried bed of an ocean. The
table-land on which I stood is two thousand five hundred feet above the
level of the sea; and, as this is the elevation at Poonah, the railroad
from Campoolu winds as it can along the sides of the mountains. There
are twenty-five tunnels through the solid rock on this road, each half a
mile long or more. There are piers of solid stone, with arches spanning
forty feet, which rise a hundred above the valley. Part of the grade was
formed by lowering men with ropes, to drill the holes for blasting, a
thousand feet above the ravine. There are twenty thousand workmen
employed; and one-third, or about seven thousand, of these are"--what do
you think? In a country where no European man can labor, where the
native rests until compelled by his conqueror to work, in the year 1859
behold seven thousand _women_ laboring in the ghauts! Climbing,
climbing, through the cloudless day, _women_ carry baskets of stone and
earth upon their heads, to creep to the edge of the ravines, and fill
with these tedious contributions thousands of perpendicular feet; and
the men who pay them, doubtless, talk to their daughters about _woman's_
lack of physical strength!
In Australia, the woman carries the burdens which man's indolence
refuses; and the deserts of Africa bear the same testimony in freedom
that we glean from the witness of slavery. In the West-India Islands,
the patient negress toils by the side of her mate, doing to the full as
hard a day's work, though encumbered by the weight of a child upon her
back; but she does not share, in the same way, his hours of rest. The
customs of Africa still prevail, and she offers her husband's food and
tobacco on her knees.
Nor does the poetry of ancient Greece show us the so-long vaunted
delicacy of the sex. Homer's princesses beat linen on the rocks, and
Andromache shares all the functions of the groom:--
"For this, high fed in plenteous stalls ye stand,
Served with pure wheat, and by a princess' hand;
For this, my spouse, of great Actæon's line,
So oft hath steeped the strengthening grain in wine!"
We have crossed the boundary line of Europe, without any change in the
indications; and we may drop from Homer to the middle ages, or modern
times, as well.
The traveller who gazes admiringly upon the vineclad hills of the Jura,
rising, terrace upon terrace, till the eye can scarce distinguish the
limit between the work of man and the rock of ages which still crowns
the summit, will learn with surprise that the mind which conceived of
such stupendous labor, and the hand which held out honor and freedom as
its reward, were a woman's.
Under a burning sun, or exposed to a bitter, glacial _bisè_, the first
cultivators, partly women, climbed slowly and painfully, by rocky ledges
or crevices, along those dangerous slopes and beetling cliffs, where
trees were to be hewn down and briers plucked up, raising by manual
efforts alone the stone necessary for the steps and walls, and the deep
tunnels for the safe passage of the torrents which vegetation now
conceals. And among them, wherever her donkey's foot could find a way,
went the woman who devised the work and bestowed the guerdon, with the
distaff on her saddle, which gives her to this day the name of Bertha
the spinner.
Yes, it was Bertha, of the Transjurane, who, about the middle of the
tenth century, undertook this work; opened the old Roman roads; and, in
defending her people against the Saracen hordes, first devised, it may
be, the modern telegraph. A prolonged line from her Alps to the Jura is
still set with the solid stone towers from which Bertha's sentinels
warned each other.[19]
On the 13th of April, 1809, the French and Bavarian prisoners held by
the Tyrolese at Steinach were marched to Schwatz, and thence to
Salzburg, under an escort of women: and the prisoners, at least, felt
sufficient confidence in the physical strength of the guard; for they
made no attempt to escape.
"Not a year ago," writes Anna Johnson of Germany, "I saw a young girl
standing up to her knees in a manure-heap, which she shovelled into a
cart, and then drove to the field. She was hired to do this work at
fourteen dollars a year. On the mountains, the women were carrying soil
and manure to the vines in baskets, as Queen Bertha taught them nine
centuries ago." A still less pleasant picture may be drawn from Köhl's
"Reminiscences of Montenegro." "Down among the stones, on the banks of
the Fuimera," he says, "some Cattaro women and girls were washing and
scraping the entrails of the goats that the men had brought to market.
There was one tall, slender, handsome girl, dressed in a crimson
petticoat, and jacket embroidered with gold, and her hair elegantly
fastened with golden pins. A pair of richly wrought slippers lay on the
stone beside her; and she laughed and talked merrily as she washed and
scraped away. At last, she packed the whole into a tub, and lifted it on
her gayly dressed head to carry home. The next day was Sunday; and I met
her, radiant with beauty and gold embroidery, on her way to church. I
often met these girls carrying on foot the baggage of the
riding-parties."
In 1850, a clergyman of this city tells me that he saw women, wearing
leathern breast-plates, harnessed to the canal-boats of the Low
Countries, and doing the work of oxen.
In France, we find the same evidences of out-door work and physical
ability. Galignani tells us, that, in consequence of the success of a
certain Madame Isabelle in breaking horses for the Russian Army, the
French minister of war lately authorized her to proceed officially
before a commission of officers, with General Régnault de St. Jean
d'Angely at their head, to break some horses for the cavalry. After
twenty days, the animals were so completely broken, that the minister
immediately entered into an arrangement with her to introduce her system
into all the schools of cavalry in the empire, beginning with that of
Saumur.
Marshal Baraguay d'Hilliers, at Nantes, recently made a distribution of
St. Helena medals to the old soldiers of the empire. Among the number
was a woman named Jeanne Louise Antonini, who had served ten years in
the navy, and fifteen in the infantry, where she obtained the rank of
non-commisioned officer in the seventieth regiment of the line. She
received nine wounds while bravely fighting. "It is not the _coat_ that
makes the man," said our marshal when he gave the medal.
One of the great celebrities of the Invalides was buried, very lately,
with great pomp. This "old invalid" was an individual of the softer
sex,--the widow Brulow,--who entered the army, in 1792, as a soldier in
the forty-second regiment of infantry, authorized to enlist, in spite of
her sex, by General Casabianca. At Fort Gesco, she was promoted to the
rank of sergeant, after being severely wounded in the encounter which
took place. Perceiving that the troops were getting short of powder, she
set out alone at midnight for Calvi, roused the women of that place to
the number of sixty, and started them off for Gesco, laden with powder
and ammunition, which enabled the little fort to hold out eight and
forty hours longer, until relief came. A little after, at the siege of
Calvi, the widow Brulow, while in charge of a gun, was so desperately
wounded that she was forced to renounce her military career; and none
other was open to her but the retirement of the Invalides, where she was
admitted with the rank of sub-lieutenant. The present emperor, to whom
the widow Brulow was introduced on his visit to the Invalides, presented
her with the cross of the Legion of Honor and the medal of St. Helena;
her comrades, by acclamation, having designated her as most worthy of
the honor. By a decree, dated from the imperial headquarters, since our
first edition was printed, we learn that the race of heroines is not
extinct; for two other women, by that decree, obtained the military
medal for their courage at the battle of Magenta.
There recently died, at Portsea, in England, a woman, ninety years of
age, named Nelly Giles. She was one of the few surviving witnesses of
the battle of the Nile; having been on board His Majesty's ship
"Bellerophon," in the command of Captain Darby, and in all subsequent
engagements under Nelson. During the action of the Nile, she was
surrounded by heaps of slain and wounded; and she nursed the latter
tenderly, undismayed by the horrors of the scene. Three days after the
battle, she gave birth to a son.
The government, in consideration of her great attention to the sick and
wounded, and of the assistance she gave the surgeons, awarded her a
gratuity of seventeen pounds a year for her life.
A young patriot, named Francisco Riso, was killed on April 4, 1862, at
Palermo, during a popular demonstration which took place before
Garibaldi's arrival. On April 20, his father, Giovanni Riso, sixty years
old, was shot by the Bourbon soldiers, without so much as the form of a
trial. On the very day that Garibaldi entered Palermo, a young and
beautiful nun, Ignacia Riso, the sister and daughter of the two Risos
named above, left the convent, and, amidst a shower of balls and
grape-shot,--a cross in one hand, and a poignard in the other,--placed
herself at the head of Garibaldi's column, crying, "Down with the
Bourbons! Death to the tyrant! Vengeance!" She kept her place as long as
the fighting lasted; and her courageous attitude electrified the
volunteers. Ever since that day, the name of Ignacia Riso has been held
sacred. When she passes in the street, the soldiers bow low, and bless
her with the most profound respect. Garibaldi himself pays her great
attention, and loves her as if she were his own daughter.
From instances like these, refreshing because they tell of self-imposed
labor and eccentric character, we turn with less pleasure to the
statistics of the factories. Here men have left to women not only the
worst paid but the most unwholesome work of the respective mills.
Women, in France, are employed in the manufacture of cotton, silk, and
wool. The cotton manufacture compels two processes which are very
injurious,--the beating of the cotton, which brings on a distressing
phthisis; and the preparation, or dressing, which needs a degree of heat
not to be endured after mature age. Both these departments are filled by
women paid at half-prices.
The woollen manufacture compels only one unwholesome process,--that of
carding; but all the carders are women at half-wages.
In the silk factories, again, there are two unwholesome processes
entirely carried on by women. The first is the drawing of the cocoons,
where the hands must be kept constantly in boiling water, and the odor
of the putrefying insects constantly fills the lungs; the second is
carding the floss, the fine lint of which affects the bronchial tubes.
Six out of every eight women so employed die in a few months. Healthy
young girls from the mountains soon develop tubercular consumption; and,
to complete the dreadful tale, they are kept upon the lowest wages;
being paid only twenty cents where a man would earn sixty.[20]
The Anglo-Saxons, says the historian, "had not been long settled in
England before the more savage of their traits were softened down. The
wife continued to be regularly purchased by her husband, and the
contract was considered a mere money bargain, long subsequent to the
reign of Ethelbert." And why? Not because love was mercenary; but
because woman was regarded, in the first place, as a beast of burden, a
laborer. In the "Romany Rye," we are told that the sale of a wife with a
halter round her neck is still a legal transaction in England. "It must
be done in the cattle-market, as if she were a mare; all women being
considered as mares by the old English law, and, indeed, called mares in
certain counties where genuine old English law is still preserved."
Such a sale as this was recently completed at Worcester, and the
agreement between the men was published in the "Worcester Chronicle."
"Thomas Middleton delivered up his wife Mary Middleton to Philip Rostins
for one shilling and a quart of ale; and parted wholly and solely for
life, never to trouble one another.
"Witness. (Signed) THOMAS × MIDDLETON, his mark.
Witness. MARY MIDDLETON, his wife.
Witness. PHILIP × ROSTINS, his mark.
Witness. S.H. STONE, Crown Inn, Friar St."
I have preserved the old expression _mare_ in my quotation, to indicate,
not the degradation to which women fell, but that it was as a beast of
burden that men regarded her. Several cases of sales, such as is here
referred to, have occurred within a few years; but this is the only
certificate of transfer that I ever saw. I desire to direct your
attention to the remarkable fact, that, of the three parties to it, the
wife, who was sold, was the _only_ one who could write her name. The men
signed it by a mark.[21] "A generation back," says Cobbett, "it was a
common thing to see women, half naked, working like beasts, chained to
carts, upon the common roads of England."
When Lord Ashley's Commission reported, in 1842, five thousand females
were at work, more than a thousand feet below the soil, in the
coal-mines of the north of England. These women were nearly naked, and
drew trucks, in harness, on all-fours, like beasts of burden. You cannot
have forgotten the remarkable description of such women in D'Israeli's
novel of "The Sibyl."
"They come forth. The plain is covered with the swarming multitude:
bands of stalwart men, broad-chested and muscular, wet with toil, and
black as the children of the tropics; troops of youth, alas! of _both
sexes_, though neither their raiment nor their language indicates the
difference. All are clad in male attire, and oaths that men might
shudder to hear issue from lips born to breathe words of sweetness. Yet
these are to be, some _are_, the mothers of England! Can we wonder at
the hideous coarseness of their language, when we remember the savage
rudeness of their lives? Naked to the waist, an iron chain fastened to a
belt of leather runs between their legs, clad in canvas; while, on hands
and feet, an English girl, for twelve, sometimes for sixteen, hours a
day, hauls and hurries tubs of coal along subterranean roads, dark,
precipitous, and plashy." These women, _called_ free, were the wretched
slaves of capital. In the life of Stephenson, the railway engineer, you
will find a further account of them, and may read the chilling answer
given by a woman whom he asked if she had ever heard of Jesus, "that no
such hand had ever worked in her shaft!" Let the proprietors of English
mines remember! No such hand did ever work in those shafts, yet they
called themselves Christian men! True as death were the words. If the
_law_ is now free of reproach, the _evil_ has by no means ceased to
exist: the Master still stands knocking.
"Children," wrote Lord Ashley, "are taken to work when only four years
old, girls as well as boys. Dragging the coal carriages requires the
whole strength of either sex. Young men and women, married women and
married men, work together through the same number of hours, almost,
sometimes quite, naked, constantly demoralizing each other. It stints
their growth and cripples their limbs." In the east of Scotland, they
still toil up steep ladders from the shafts.
If it were my purpose to show you moral degradation, you could hardly
bear what I must say; but I desire only, at this moment, to show you
these men and women _working_, as Sydney Smith would say, _in the dirt
together_. In 1842, the Earl of Durham knew of this; and he and the set
with whom he lived dared, doubtless, to whisper to the ladies in their
halls, that women were not made to labor!
In the calico-mills, girls grind and mix the colors. They are called
_teerers_. They begin at five years of age, and labor twelve hours a
day, sometimes sixteen; and are kept late into the night to prepare for
the following day.
In Sedgely and Warrington, the fate of the female pinmakers is no
better. They begin at five years of age, and work from twelve to sixteen
hours a day. If refractory, they are struck at Wiltenhall with strap,
stick, hammer, or file, in spite of the delicacy of the sex. In Sedgely,
more women are employed than men; but they do not fare any better: their
bodies are seamed by blows given with bars of burning iron.
O my sisters! why has God sheltered _us_ in quiet homes? What have we
done to deserve a happier fate? Why were we not left to writhe beneath
the blows of the smith, or the outrage of a market-sale?
Because God has laid down a responsibility by the side of every
privilege, and requires us to labor not merely to set such women free,
but to establish a freedom and security _by law_,--the law of custom as
well as the law of courts, which we only possess through usurpation or
indulgence.
I will not leave these English shores without alluding to the physical
strength shown by that lovely paralytic, Anna Gurney. Deprived of the
use of her limbs in very early life, she acquired the Latin, Greek, and
Hebrew, and finally the Teutonic tongues, with a facility and
thoroughness that her Anglo-Saxon translations show. Men might be
excused if they sheltered from contact with the world this infirm
creature, dependent upon artificial aid for every movement; but what did
she choose for herself?
In 1825, after her mother's death, she went to live at Northrepps. At
her own expense, she procured one of Manby's apparatus for saving the
lives of seamen cast upon that dangerous coast; and, in cases of great
urgency and peril, she caused herself to be carried down to the beach,
and, from the sick chair which she wheeled over the sand, directed every
movement for the rescue and recovery of the half-drowned men.
Look at the pictures! See that grimy, tangled woman in harness,
straining, in full health, along the coal-shafts! See, nearer, this
lovely cripple, the Quaker cap folded over her soft, brown hair, her
soul erect and noble, doing the duty of a Grace Darling! The first
labors like the brute beast, the victim of human misgovernment and
heathenish ignorance; the last chooses for herself a conflict with the
storm, and earns, with as full right as any brother, the meed of the
world.
Let us pass over to America. The Caribs of Honduras are a hardy race,
and do not share the prejudices of Massachusetts on the subject of
labor. Each man has several wives. For each he clears a plantation and
builds a house. In a year, she has every kind of breadstuff under
cultivation; and hires creers, which she freights for Truxillo and
Belize, her husband often commanding for her. If her agricultural labors
prove too heavy, as a thrifty woman will sometimes make them, she hires
her husband to work for her at two dollars a week.
So the Northern Indian glides nimbly through the woods; while the squaw
carries on her unlucky back their common food and covering, or perhaps
hauls the canoe across the portage. A Jesuit priest rebuked an Orinoco
woman for infanticide. "I wish _my_ mother had been brave enough to part
with me!" was her reply. "Our husbands go to hunt; and we drag after
them, one baby at the breast, another on our back. When we return, we
cannot sleep, but must grind maize all night for their chica. Drunken,
they beat us, or stamp us under foot; and, after twenty years of such
labor, a young wife is brought home to abuse us and such children as we
have not killed. What ought I to do?"
At Santa Cruz, Theodore Parker writes to Francis Jackson that men and
women work together to repair the public highway; hoeing the earth into
trays, and throwing it into a cart which they drag and push together.
In Ohio, last year, about thirty girls went from farm to farm, hoeing,
ploughing, and the like, for sixty-two and a half cents a day. At Media,
in Pennsylvania, two girls named Miller carry on a farm of three
hundred acres; raising hay and grain, hiring labor, but working mostly
themselves. These women are not ignorant: they at one time made
meteorological observations for an association auxiliary to the
Smithsonian Institute. But labor attracts them, as it would many women
if they were not oppressed by public opinion.
"In New York," writes a late correspondent of the "Lily," "I saw women
performing the most menial offices,--carrying parcels for grocers, and
trunks for steamboats. They often sweep the crossings in muddy weather;
and I once saw one carrying brick and mortar for a mason."
During the late terrible destruction of property at the Lawrence mills,
the women, heroic in every department, did not excuse themselves from
the severest labor. When, after hours of extreme exertion, the firemen,
worn down and quite exhausted, called for help, a bevy of ladies, who
were standing on the sidewalk in Canal Street, flew over to the engines,
and, "manning" the brakes, worked the machine, amid the cheers of the
firemen.
You know what bodily strength and nervous energy carried Mary Patton
round Cape Horn. Well, on the 25th of June, 1858, the British ship
"Grotto" left Cuba; and, on the second day, the yellow-fever broke out
in the worst form. Seven days after, so many had died, that there
remained only the captain, his wife, and two of the crew. Then the
captain was taken ill; and, beside nursing him, the poor wife, who had
already nursed officers and men, took her station at the wheel, and
steered by his instructions for Sandy Hook. There the steam-tug
"Huntress" found them, the heroic woman at the wheel, the husband at
that moment struggling with death; and, when they reached New York,
three out of eleven, one of them the suffering wife, survived to tell
the tale, and show how a woman can work. So common are such instances
becoming, that you have hardly heard the name of this Mrs. Nichols, for
whom tender charity soon cared.
A mutiny on board the ship "Maria," of New York, was put down Nov. 10,
1860, by the energy and decision of the wife of the master, Captain
Clark, who, with pistols in her hands, threatened to shoot one of the
mutineers if he did not desist. He was cowed into submission; and, a
signal being made to the revenue cutter, the mutineers were taken into
custody. The mate would have been killed, but for the heroic woman's
intrepidity.
But all such labor is the result of compulsion,--compulsion of
barbarism, of slavery, of unfair competition, or dire disease. Let us
close this branch of our subject with a picture homely but attractive.
"According to thy request," writes a Quaker friend from Wilmington,
Del., "I send thee some facts concerning Sarah Ann Scofield. Some
fifteen years since, her father became very much involved in debt. He
owed some ten or twelve hundred dollars; having lost largely by working
for cotton and woollen mills. His business was making spindles and
fliers. His daughter, then just sixteen, proposed to go into her
father's shop and assist him; she being the oldest of seven children. He
accepted her offer, and told me himself, that, in twelve months, she
could finish more work, and do it better, than any man he had ever
trained for eighteen. She earned fifteen dollars a week at the rate he
then paid other hands. Her father died. Her two oldest brothers learned
the trade off her, and went away. She has now two younger sisters in
apprenticeship, and a brother fourteen years of age, all working under
her; turning, polishing, filing, and fitting all kinds of machinery. I
went out to see her last week. She was then making water-rams to force
streams into barns and houses. She is also beginning to make many kinds
of carriage-axles. She is her own draughtsman, and occasionally does her
own forging. To use her own words, 'What any man can do, I can but try
at.' She has a steam-engine, every part of which she understands; and I
know that her work gives entire satisfaction. When they have steady
employment, they clear sixty dollars a week; and she says she would
rather work at it for her bread, than at sewing for ten times the money.
The truth is, it is a business she is fond of."
I have shown you that a very large number of women are compelled to
self-support; that the old idea, that all men support all women, is an
absurd fiction; and, if you require other evidence than mine, you may
find it in the English courts, under the working of the new Divorce
Bill. Nearly all the women who have applied for divorces have proved
that the subsistence of the family depended upon them. Out of six
million of British women over twenty-one years of age, one-half are
industrial in their mode of life, and more than two millions are
self-supporting in their industry like men. Put this fact fully before
your eyes.
Driven to self-support, you have seen, also, that low wages and
comparatively few and overcrowded avenues of labor compel women to
vicious courses for their daily bread. The streets of Paris, London,
Edinburgh, New York, and Boston, tell us the same painful story; and in
glaring, crimson letters, rises everywhere the question,--"Death or
dishonor?" I have shown you that there is encouragement for moral
effort, because these women escape from vice as fast as they find work
to do. "Have they strength for the conflict," you ask, "or desire to
enter such fields?" Find your answer in what they have done from the
earliest ages, with the foot of Confucius and Vishnu, of capital and
interest, upon their necks. In the lovely lives of Bertha and Ann
Gurney, and the powerful attraction of Sarah Scofield, you have found
pleasanter pictures whereon to rest your eyes. Let no man taunt woman
with inability to labor, till the coal-mines and the metal-works, the
rotting cocoons and fuzzing-cards, give up their dead; till he shares
with her, equally at least, the perils of manufactures and the press of
the market. As partners, they must test and prove their comparative
power.
We must next consider what need woman's moral nature has of work, and
what sort of opposition man practically offers her.