Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840–1920

Charlotte Mathieson, Gemma Goodman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317318811
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia britannica

The essays in this collection focus on the ways rural life was represented during the long nineteenth century. Contributors bring expertise from the fields of history, geography and literature to present an interdisciplinary study of the interplay between rural space and gender during a time of increasing industrialization and social change.

1 WOMEN IN THE FIELD

Roger Ebbatson

In The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), Friedrich Engels offered a powerful account of current agricultural conditions, noting in particular how competition and large-scale farming operations now obliged the field-workers ‘to hire themselves as labourers to the large farmers or the landlords’.¹ The ending of the Napoleonic Wars led to a lowering of wages and consequent agricultural distress which was scarcely mitigated by the new Corn Laws. The symbiotic and patriarchal relation between master and man (and woman) disappeared, with the result that, as Engels writes, ‘farmhands have become day-labourers’, being employed ‘only when needed’ and thus often remaining unemployed ‘for weeks together, especially in winter’.² The inception of the harsh New Poor Law, together with ‘the constant extension of farming on a large scale’ in the wake of enclosure, the introduction of threshing and other machines, and the employment of women and children, would lead to a widespread ‘disorganization of the social fabric’.³ Engels’s diagnosis inevitably focused upon the 1830s, the period of the incendiary ‘Swing’ riots and anti-Corn Law agitation; whilst there was an economic recovery in the countryside after this critical juncture, the 1870s saw the onset of the Great Depression which would stretch into Edwardian times. A succession of wet summers in the 1870s and early 1880s affected harvest yields and promoted pneumonia in cattle and foot rot in sheep, whilst refrigerated shipping began to bring imports of wheat and mutton, cheese and bacon, which affected the domestic market. Increased reliance on mechanization and shifting patterns of land use reduced the aggregate demand for labour throughout the period. The keynote of these trends, therefore, was the permanent existence of a new ‘surplus population’ which lived by hiring out its labour, an important fraction of which comprised women field-labourers. The overall impact of such changes was succinctly summarized by Karl Marx himself: ‘By the nineteenth century, the very memory of the connection between the agricultural labourer and communal property had, of course, vanished’.⁴

This chapter sets out to examine the validity of this Marxian contention specifically in relation to the question of female land-labour during the period of the Great Depression. It will be argued that overall the critical situation of the female field-worker in the labour market was typically described, analysed and represented by male ‘authorities’, and that the contested role of women in the fields was symptomatically inflected through ideological concepts of womanliness. This was evidently the case in the well-informed and extensive agricultural journalism and fictionalized sketches of Richard Jefferies, whose work offers a sympathetic and cogent account of the hardship of female labour at this juncture, whilst remaining anchored in a predominantly patriarchal set of values. Thomas Hardy would imaginatively reinscribe many of these issues in his fiction, whilst similarly retaining an overall ideal of a normative femininity in the ‘unconscious’ of the text. His novels, overtly sympathetic as they are to the individual female labourer (Tess Durbeyfield, Marty South), tend to mask or moderate class tensions in favour of a humanistic individualism.

How it rained

When we worked at Flintcomb-Ash,

And could not stand upon the hill

Trimming swedes for the slicing-mill.

The wet washed through us – plash, plash, plash:

How it rained!

How it snowed

When we crossed from Flintcomb-Ash

To the Great Barn for drawing reed,

Since we could nowise chop a swede. –

Flakes in each doorway and casement-sash:

How it snowed!

How it shone

When we went from Flintcomb-Ash

To start at dairywork once more

In the laughing meads, with cows three-score,

And pails, and songs, and love – too rash:

How it shone!⁵

Thomas Hardy’s poem, which refracts or condenses scenes from Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), raises crucial issues relating to voice, agency and gender ideology in the representation of female rural labour in the nineteenth century. Expressive of a deep sympathy for the ‘cavalry of labour’ experienced by Tess, Marian and the other former milkmaids, the poem attempts to inhabit a female self whilst retaining a sense of distance consonant with a middle-class readership. The poet, for instance, eschews the kind of dialect speech patterns which would inform the language of this class fraction in order to offer a telling but external picture of female labour. In her exemplary study of the nineteenth-century female rural labourer, Karen Sayer demonstrates how, in the late-Victorian period of the agricultural Great Depression, ‘working women were constructed as a threat to English labouring men’s jobs, wages, and liberty, in other words, as a threat to their masculinity’.⁶ Certainly the Agricultural Labourers’ Union (from which women were debarred), established in 1872, promulgated a programme of discouraging women’s field labour, and their newspaper looked to the day when the labourer’s wife was ‘no longer a drudge in the fields, but a managing, economical housewife’.⁷ Although, as Sayer demonstrates, female workers were politically active and took part in strikes and related protests, with some exceptions their voices were muffled and their participation ‘remained largely hidden’.⁸ Nonetheless, actions such as the 1867 strike by Oxfordshire women day-labourers, or their 1873 intervention against blacklegs in the same county, meant that, in Sayer’s terms, ‘the dominant definitions of masculinity and femininity were called into question … as were the supposed organic class relations in the countryside’.⁹ Whether in the form of officially endorsed parliamentary reports or individual social analyses, however, it remained the case throughout the period that women field-labourers possessed virtually no voice of their own, their situation being represented, debated and analysed by paternalist male ‘authorities’. In addition, it is clear that, in the late nineteenth century overall, as Alan Armstrong observes, ‘the role of women was becoming confined to home-making’, and that in the field their role was limited ‘to subsidiary tasks such as gathering and binding’.¹⁰

The issue of the (mis)representation of the late-Victorian female country labourer raises key questions of agency and perspective which may briefly be illustrated with reference to two of the leading male authors on rural affairs at this juncture. Richard Jefferies first came to prominence with a series of letters to The Times on agricultural matters in the early 1870s, and in a subsequent essay published in the Graphic in 1875 he dealt specifically with the question of ‘Women in the Field’. This piece offers a naturalistic and telling description of the women’s working conditions:

The cold clods of earth numb the fingers as they search for the roots and weeds. The damp clay chills the feet through thick-nailed boots, and the back grows stiff with stooping. If the poor woman suffers from the rheumatisms so common among the labouring class, such a day as this will make every bone in her body ache.¹¹

As Jefferies depicts them, the women are impervious to the natural beauty of spring, the woods ‘carpeted with acres upon acres of the wild hyacinth, or bluebell’, the nightingale ‘in the hazel copse, the skies full of larks’. Indeed, being virtually illiterate, the women ‘can call up no beautiful thoughts’ with the result, according to Jefferies, that ‘she cannot see, that is, appreciate or feel with, the beauty with which she is surrounded’.¹² The male anxiety surrounding rural female sexuality surfaces in Jefferies’s analysis when, remarking upon summer haymaking, he informs his readers that ‘much mischief is done by the indiscrim inate mixing of the sexes’, and adds laconically, ‘the language of the hay-field is not that of pastoral poetry’.¹³ But he also emphasizes here the unhealthy nature of the work in ‘the blazing heat of the long summer day’, a stress of labour whose ‘effects are visible in the thin frame, the bony wrist, the skinny arm showing the sinews, the rounded shoulders and stoop, the wrinkles and lines upon the sunburnt faces’. The women need the work, but technology is inexorably altering conditions and reducing the level of casual labour; as Jefferies remarks, ‘machinery has taken their employment away’. His solution, marked by an unconscious paternalism, is to conclude that young country girls now being taught in the new village schools should be provided ‘with situations as domestic servants, for whom there is an increasing demand’.¹⁴ Elsewhere, Jefferies would describe the ‘excessive and continuous labour’ of the harvest field, saying it was remarkable ‘how the women endure it’:

The woman’s bare neck is turned to the colour of tan; her thin muscular arms bronze right up to the shoulder. Short time is allowed for refreshment; right through the hottest part of the day they labour. It is remarkable that none, or very few, cases of sunstroke occur. Cases of vertigo and vomiting are frequent, but pass off in a few hours. Large quantities of liquor are taken to sustain the frame weakened by perspiration.¹⁵

Jefferies notes that in winter ‘there is nothing for women to do’, and also maintains that they ‘never or rarely milk now’, but ‘in arable districts the women do much work, picking couch grass – a tedious operation – and hoeing’.¹⁶ In his authoritative account of the agricultural scene, Hodge and His Masters (1880), Jefferies once again avers that the field-women ‘do not find much work in the fields during the winter’, and he adds:

Now and then comes a day’s employment with the threshing-machine when the farmer wants a rick of corn threshed out. In pasture or dairy districts some of them go out into the meadows and spread the manure. They wear gaiters, and sometimes a kind of hood for the head. If done carefully, it is hard work for the arms – knocking the manure into small pieces by striking it with a fork swung to and fro smartly.¹⁷

In sum, he claims, ‘the number of women working in the fields is much less than was formerly the case’, and notes that ‘there are signs that female labour has drifted to the towns quite as much as male’.¹⁸ The physical cost to the field-women who remain is again tellingly indicated in Jefferies’s powerful essay, ‘One of the New Voters’:

Look at the arm of a woman labouring in the harvest-field – thin, muscular, sinewy, black almost, it tells of continual strain. After much of this she becomes pulled out of shape, the neck loses its roundness and shows the sinews, the chest flattens. In time the women find the strain of it tell severely.¹⁹

A similar documentary realism is deployed in the short story, ‘The Field Play’ (1883), a tale of rural seduction which notably eschews the portentous symbolism of Tess of the d’Urbervilles. The narrative is split into two parts, ‘Uptill-a-Thorn’ and ‘Rural Dynamite’, the central figure, Dolly, being presented at the outset as a ‘good-looking, careless hussy’ who, at harvest time, boldly cultivates the company of the men to the disapproval of her fellow female labourers:

The women accused her of too free a carriage with the men; she replied by seeking their company in the broad glare of the summer day. They laughed loudly, joked, but welcomed her; they chatted with her gaily; they compelled her to sip from their ale as they paused by the hedge. By noon there was a high colour on her cheeks; the sun, the exercise, the badinage had brought it up.²⁰

Dolly is the focus of attraction for Big Mat, ‘a powerful fellow, big-boned, big everywhere, and heavy-fisted’, who kisses her in full view of the labouring crowd, but she is also admired by the farmer’s son, Mr Andrew, who is attracted by ‘those soft brown eyes, that laughing shape’.²¹ Andrew however remains ‘too knowing of town cunning and selfish hardness to entangle himself’.²² After high summer in the fields, a significant change is perceived in Dolly, who displays symptoms of ill-health: ‘There were dark circles round her eyes, her chin drooped to her breast; she wrapped herself in a shawl in all the heat’.²³ Although she eventually recovers, ‘something of her physical buoyancy, her former light-heartedness never returned’, and it seems ‘as if her spirit had suffered some great wrong’.²⁴ By the time of the next harvest Dolly is living with Mat, ‘unhappily not as his wife’, and there is now ‘a child wrapped in a red shawl with her in the field’, and ‘placed under the shocks while she worked’.²⁵ Mat takes to drink, hits Dolly and puts out one of her eyes. On encountering her again in the village Mr Andrew witnesses a shocking transformation: ‘The stoop, the dress which clothed, but responded to no curve, the sunken breast, and the sightless eye, how should he recognize these? This ragged, plain, this ugly, repellent creature – he did not know her’.²⁶ Jefferies closes this first part with a resonantly metaphorical reflection, which speaks eloquently of the vicissitudes of rural labour:

The poppies came and went and went...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• Introduction: Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840-1920 - Gemma Goodman and Charlotte Mathieson
• 1 Women in the Field - Roger Ebbatson
• 2 ‘Between Two Civilizations’: George Sturt’s Constructions of Loss and Change in Village Life - Barry Sloan
• 3 At Work and at Play: Charles Lee’s Cynthia in the West - Gemma Goodman
• 4 ‘Going Out, Going Alone’: Modern Subjectivities in Rural Scotland, 1900-21 - Samantha Walton
• 5 ‘Drowned Lands’: Charles Kingsley’s Hereward the Wake and the Masculation of the English Fens - Lynsey McCulloch
• 6 ‘Wandering Like a Wild Thing’: Rurality, Women and Walking in George Eliot’s Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss - Charlotte Mathieson
• 7 ‘I Never Liked Long Walks’: Gender, Nature and Jane Eyre’s Rural Wandering - Katherine F. Montgomery
• 8 Gertrude Jekyll: Cultivating the Gendered Space of the Victorian Garden for Professional Success - Christen Ericsson-Penfold
• 9 From England to Eden: Gardens, Gender and Knowledge in Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out - Karina Jakubowicz
• 10 The Transnational Rural in Alicia Little’s My Diary in a Chinese Farm - Eliza S. K. Leong
• Notes
• Index