This hour cannot be better employed than in opening to you some of the
mysteries of woman's work in England.
Among the 128,418 women employed in Agriculture, there are 64,000
dairy-women; not women who tend a single cow for a single family, but
women of muscle, who wield large tubs and heavy presses, who turn
cheeses and slap butter by the hundred-weight. Then there are
market-gardeners, who not only raise their stock, but drive it to the
town for sale; bee-mistresses and florists, of whom there are many among
the Quakers; flax-producers, who not only raise the pretty blue-eyed
flowers, but beat the silicious fibres apart; and they are followed by
hay-makers, reapers, and hop-pickers, gracefully garlanding the group.
Naturally connected with this first interest of the soil is the second,
or Mining. It is no longer considered fit for women to work in shafts,
though the need of bread forces many to evade the law. The census,
however, cannot touch them: the seven thousand women it reports as
engaged in Mining are employed in dressing and sorting ore, and as
washers and strainers of clay for the potteries,--heavy and disagreeable
if not unfit work.
The next largest interest is that of the Fisheries. The Pilchard fishery
employs many thousands of women. Jersey oysters alone employ over one
thousand. Then come the--
Herring,
Cod,
Whale, and
Lobster fisheries.
The work in connection with the whale fishery consists chiefly in what
is done after the cargo is landed. Apart from the Christie
Johnstones,--the aristocrats of the trade,--the sea nurtures an heroic
class, like Grace Darling, who stand aghast, as she did, when society
rewards a deed of humanity, and cry out in expostulation, "Why, every
girl on the coast would have done as I did!"