into the husband's hands for his uncontrolled use. Or mayhap this German wife works in the field harnessed by the side of a cow, while her husband-master holds the plough and wields the whip. Or perhaps, harnessed with a dog, she serves the morning's milk, or drags her husband home from work at night.
In France women act as porters, carrying the heaviest burdens and performing the most repulsive labors at the docks, while eating food of so poor a quality that the lessening stature of the population daily shows the result. In Holland and Prussia women drag barges on the canal, and perform the most repulsive agricultural duties. On the Alps[1] husbands borrow and lend their wives, one neighbor not scrupling to ask the loan of another's wife to complete some farming task, which loan is readily granted, with the understanding that the favor is to be returned in kind. In England, scantily clothed women work by the side of nude men in coal pits, and, harnessed to trucks, perform the severe labor of dragging coal up inclined planes to the mouth of the pit, a work testing every muscle and straining every nerve, and so severe that the stoutest men shrink from it; while their degradation in brick-yards and iron mines has commanded the attention of philanthropists and legislators.[2]
A gentleman recently travelling in Ireland blushes for his sex when he sees the employments of women, young and old. They are patient drudges, staggering over the bogs with heavy creels of turf on their backs, or climbing the slopes from the seashore, laden like beasts of burden with the heavy sand-dripping seaweed, or undertaking long journeys on foot into the market towns, bearing weighty hampers of farm produce. In Montenegro, women form the beasts of burden in war, and are counted among the "animals" belonging to the prince. In Italy, that land which for centuries led the world in art, women work in squalor and degradation under the shadow of St. Peter's and the Vatican for four-pence a day; while in America, under the Christianity of the nineteenth century, until within twenty years, she worked on rice and cotton plantations waist-deep in water, or under a burning sun performed the tasks demanded by a cruel master, at whose hands she also suffered the same kind
- ↑ The Fair Sex in the Alps.—The farmers In the Upper Alps, though by no means wealthy, live like lords in their houses, while the heaviest portion of agricultural labors devolves on the wife. It is no uncommon thing to see a woman yoked to the plough with an ass, while her husband guides it. An Alpine farmer accounts it an act of politeness to lend his wife to a neighbor who has too much work, and the neighbor in return lends his wife for a few days' labor whenever requested.
- ↑ Lord Shaftesbury bringing the subject before Parliament.
