This blog is part of a student project for ENG327: Puritan and Colonial American Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside. Students were requested to upload and share texts written prior to 1800 for research into American colonization.
Jasa
Miller
Dr.
Teresa Coronado
Archive
Assignment
03/29/2016
Mary Collier’s “The Woman’s Labour”
Mary Collier was an English
washerwoman from Petersfield in Hampshire during the eighteenth century. She is
the first working-class poetess to be published in England. Her claim to fame
was the poem, “The Woman’s Labour,” which she wrote as an angry response to the
author Steven Duck of the poem “The Thresher’s Labour,” which includes a
contemptuous description of “lazy” women who work alongside men in hay fields.
Collier’s poem was written in 1739 and was published in London until 1780. “The
Woman’s Labour” was sold in pamphlet shops near the Royal Exchange and by an
independent store owner named J. Roberts of Warwick-lane. The purpose of this
essay is to share a rare glimpse into the life of an English working woman
during the 18th century and to compare and contrast elements of
Collier’s work to Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own” to demonstrate
historically unfavorable attitudes towards women. Woolf’s work stressed the
importance for women to adopt and maintain their own identities. The
impossibility of that concept during Collier’s lifetime strengthens Woolf’s
argument. “The Woman’s Labour” text is important and of interest to history and
literature critics because it was written by one of the first English female literary
commentators who divulges the exploitation of women in the working class. It
also illustrates England’s cultural perspective on indentured servant women’s
socioeconomic status during the 1700’s. The purpose of this essay is to gain
insight to the attitudes towards working women during England’s 18th
century and to encourage readers to formulate ideas as to how those attitudes
shaped perspectives on women in America.
As previously mentioned, “The
Woman’s Labour” was a response to Stephen Duck, author of the poem, “The
Thresher’s Labour.” Duck was an
indentured servant, who worked in hay fields, and was recognized by members of
the English monarchy for his interest in books and for his poetry. He was given
a small house to live in by Queen Caroline. Later in his life, he made Royal
court appearances, became a preacher at Kew Chapel, and wrote an elegy for the
Queen after her death. According to the University of Nebraska Press
Introduction to The Thresher’s Labour:
The
Thresher’s Labour is more than an encomium to industry
and a condemnation of tyranny… In this unjust situation the villain was the
greedy, callous farmer, the victims were the workers. Rural English society was
dividing…the result was the transfer from the village community to the
individual farmer of a whole range of economic decisions which had hitherto
been decided collectively. (Castle Press v).
The intended audiences for Duck’s poem
were sympathetic rural land owners and other indentured servants who could
relate to his daily lamentations. The majority of his work chronicles what he
considers extreme work hazards. He makes allusions to characters of classical
literature such as the Greek nymph Echo in, “So lou’d their Speech, and so
confus’d their Noise, Scarce puzzled Echo can return the Voice” (Duck 21).Of
the twenty-seven pages that comprise his work, four pages are dedicated to his
derisive opinions of working women. The first stanza of Duck’s gender slander
reads:
Soon as the rising Sun has
drank the Dew, Another Scene is open to our View:
Our
Master comes, and at his Hells a Throng, Of prattling females, arm’d with Rake
and Prong; Prepar’d whilst he is here, to make his Hay, Or, if he turns his
Back, prepar’d to play: But here, or gone, sure of this Comfort still; Here’s
Company, so they may chat their Fill, Ah! Were their Hands so active as their
Tongues, How nimbly then would move the Rakes and Prongs! (Duck 20).
Duck was trying to reach a sympathetic
audience to illustrate the injustices of a changing society, complicated tax amendments,
and being subjected to greed and lack of pay, having to deal with lazy, gossipy
females was to him the last straw. Yet, to Collier, reading his opinions were
just the tip of the iceberg for protesting working-class women’s rights. One
can sense the anger and defiance in Collier’s work firstly by its title, next
by her mocking tone when quoting parts of “The Thresher’s Labour”, and by her
own allusions to classical literature.
Collier’s poem is a rare glimpse into
the personal life of the indentured female servant. She informs the world of working-class
female exploitation in eighteenth century England with the following
statements: “The Washing is not all
we have to do: We oft change Work for Work as well as you” and “When Ev’ning’s
come, you Homeward take your Way, We, till our Work is done, are forc’d to
stay; And after all our Toil and Labour past, Six-pence or Eight-pence pays us
off at last; For all our Pains, no Prospect can we see, Attend us, but Old Age and Poverty” (Collier 15). In these statements, Collier informs the
reader that female hired help is not restricted to the duties of their titles. For example, Collier was a washerwoman, which is a woman who tends
to the laundry of her employers’ household. She speaks of the endless list of
household chores that await for the women after they are done in the fields:
mending her master and mistresses’ clothing, cooking dinner, scrubbing pots and
pans, polishing silverware, doing laundry, assisting the masters as they ready
for bed, and any other task that is demanded of them. The aforementioned tasks
are in addition to Collier’s official
duty as washerwoman.
Throughout the rest of her poem, the reader
witnesses several other aspects of her daily work, which include duties outside
of her job description. She illustrates long days of exhausting physical work
that begins at midnight and lasts late into the next night in the following
statements:
Often
at Midnight, from our Bed we rise, At other Times, ev’n that will not suffice;
Our Work at Ev’ning oft we do begin, And ‘ere we’ve done, the Night comes on
again… Now Night comes on, from whence you have Relief, But that, alas! Does
but increase our Grief; With heavy Hearts we often view the Sun, Fearing he’ll
set before our Work is done; For either in the Morning, or at Night, We piece
the Summer’s Day with Candle-light” (Collier 16).
From
Collier’s perspective, the working woman’s life was spent in continual
drudgery, exhaustion, and with little hope of financial independence.
Collier speaks also of women having to
bring their young children with them to the fields and having to care for them
while they sweat, bleed, and toil the day away: “To get a Living we so willing
are, Our tender Babes into the Field we bear, And wrap them in our Cloaths to
keep them warm, While round about we gather up the corn; And often unto them
our Course do bend, To keep them safe, that nothing them offend” (Collier 10).
Collier catapults the heroism of working class women by informing Duck, as well
as the reader, that while men toil their days away in sweaty drudgery, (and
their only real annoyance is having to deal with women) women endure the same
sweaty drudgery and take care of
their children while they work. She continually reminds Duck that while men
receive the luxury of supper and relaxation at the end of their work shifts,
women immediately set to work on additional household tasks after laboring in
the fields, while simultaneously tending to children. Duck’s poem makes no
mention of children laboring in the fields. By including the burden of
childrearing on top of daily work, Collier suggests that women actually work
harder than men and should therefore be recognized.
There are several areas of “The Woman’s
Labour” in which Collier unapologetically and shrewdly addresses Duck. In the
first stanza of her poem, Collier scolds Duck for his derisive writing on women
laborers and forgetting his own socioeconomic status with, “Immortal Bard! Thou
Fav’rite of the Nine! Enriched by Peers, advanced by Caroline! Deign to look
down on One that’s poor and low, Remembering you yourself was lately so”
(Collier 5). With this statement, Collier attempts to demonstrate to Duck his
hypocritical self-assessment, as his early socioeconomic standing was nearly
identical to Collier’s.
Another area in which Collier addresses
Duck can be found in, “What fully to declare is part of my Art; So many
Hardships daily we go through, I boldly say, the like you never knew” (Collier 12). This statement was made after
Collier’s several stanzas-long descriptions of child rearing while working in
the fields and several examples of additional work to her title of washerwoman.
While in her Advertisement
introduction, Collier mentions that she published her poem upon the
encouragement of her master and to help gain notoriety, it is clear by her use
of the word you that her intended
audience is only Stephen Duck.
The final examples of Collier directly
confronting Duck can be found in the following verses: “Weary, alas! But ‘tis
not worth our while Once to complain, or rest
at ev’ry Stile;” and in “Our Toil and Labour’s daily so extreme, That we
hardly ever Time to dream.” (Collier
11). Her italicized use of the phrases
rest at ev’ry Stile and Time to dream
are in response to certain verses in “The Thresher’s Labour,” in which Duck
mentions that female laborers enjoy several breaks from work and how in events
of inclement weather, women run for cover and retire for the day. Collier italicizes
those phrases as a means of defying Duck’s accusations and to stress that his
opinion of women in the fields is incorrect.
As previously mentioned, Duck makes references
to classical literature in his poems, and such wordplays were partly what
gained him the attention of British Royals. Collier, in similar fashion, makes
her own allusions to classical literature. In the following statement, she
directly confronts Duck with, “And you, great DUCK, upon whose happy Brow, The
Muses seem to fix the garland now, In your late Poem boldly did declare, Alcide’s’
Labours can’t with your compare” (Collier 7). In this statement, Collier accuses
Duck of comparing his work grievances and daily tribulations to that of Alcide,
also known as Heracles, the Greek hero who was ordered to conclude his Twelve
Labors as repentance to King Eurystheus.
Another example of Collier’s allusions
to classical literature can be found in, “While you to Sisyphus yourselves
compare, With Danaus’ Daughters we may claim a Share; For while he labours hard against the Hill,
Bottomless Tubs of Water they must
fill” (Collier 16). In Greek mythology, Sisyphus was a former king who was
condemned to pushing a massive boulder up a hill only to watch it roll down
again and to repeat for eternity. Danaus’ Daughters were the fifty daughters of
an Egyptian king who were ordered to marry the fifty sons of his twin brother.
All but one daughter murdered her new husband, and all fifty daughters were
punished by carrying water in sieve containers to fill a vessel. However, their
sieves constantly leaked and the vessel was never filled. Both the story of
Sisyphus and the story of Danaus’ Daughters exemplify punishment by a
repetitive task that can never be completed. In this example, Collier reminds Duck
that their lives and circumstances are more alike than they are different.
Though Collier makes mention that Duck was socially advanced by Queen Caroline
at the very beginning of her poem, in this statement she reminds him that had
the Queen’s intervention never happened, Duck would be in the same
socioeconomic situation as Collier and that neither laborer is superior to the
other.
During
research for “The Woman’s Labour” I remembered an essay by Virginia Woolf
called “A Room of One’s Own” and drew some parallels to both Collier’s and
Woolf’s written works and their perspectives on women. The beginning of the Woolf’s essay laid a
perfect groundwork for her narrative on a less common but important role of
women in Western culture. Woolf argued that aside from stereotypical
child-rearing and household slavery, the woman’s role in society was to feed
the narcissistic side of man;
Women
have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and
delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.
Without that power probably the earth would still be swamp and jungle… That
is why Napoleon and Mussolini both insist so emphatically upon the inferiority
of women, for if they were not inferior, they would cease to enlarge (Woolf).
What
Woolf meant is that men could not indulge in an image of greatness, or be seen
as leaders, if there were not less desirable existences to compare those images
to. So women became the default negative, inferior class, to which men had a
reason to outshine.
The idea of women existing as looking-glasses is comparable
to Collier’s idea of women as men’s source for greatness in following verses:
Our
first Extraction from a Mass refin’d, Could never be for slavery design’d, That
happy State our Sex at first enjoy’d. When Men had us’d their utmost Care and
Toil, Their recompense was but a Female Smile; When they by Arts or Arms were
render’d Great, They laid their Trophies at a Woman’s Feet; They, in those
Days, unto our Sex did bring, Their Hearts, their All, a Free-will Offering;
And as from us their Being they derive, They back again should all due Homage
give (Collier 6).
In
this example, Collier first speaks of a time when men appreciated women and
would acknowledge them for their support
and inspiration in a man’s life. In
her last sentence, “And as from us their Being they derive, They back again
should all due Homage give,” Collier instructs future generations of men to
purge themselves of superiority complexes over women and give them credit for
their assertive livelihood as she feels is due.
Another similarity between “The Women’s Labour” and “A
Room of One’s Own” lies in Woolf’s description of the history of women prior to
the eighteenth century. Woolf identifies an interesting fact that not much is
recorded about women before the 18th century. She mentions that
basic information like dates of birth, baptism, or marriage could be found in
official registries. But one cannot find any literature from women before that
time. It is sad to think that a women’s worth was that of a farm animal such as
a cow or a horse. British society continually viewed a woman as a piece of
property that was certified and valued only for what kind of profit she could
yield and not for any significant contributions to the home.
Woolf also introduced readers to an idea she called
“Shakespeare’s sister, Judith.” Judith was a woman born in the mid to late
1500’s. She was adventurous, smart, intellectually curious, and just as
talented as her brother William Shakespeare. But she was born female. She did
not enjoy education at schools but was forced to work in the home and forced to
marry at a young age. Because of the lack of opportunities for women in the
arts during her time, Judith went mad and eventually committed suicide out of
desperation, and was buried in obscurity. Two hundred years later, during Mary
Collier’s lifetime, the attitudes towards women in England were virtually
unchanged. While female indentured servants were able to receive petty wages
for honest work during the eighteenth century, opportunities for education and
financial independence were all but impossible, and their roles as property
remained the same.
Speaking out against social injustices, especially as a
working-class servant woman, was radical during Mary Collier’s lifetime. At the
suggestion of her employers, Collier brought to life the old adage: “The pen is
mightier than the sword” by exercising her right to protest unjust and
inaccurate judgments upon women with language that is clever, shrewd, and
unapologetic while simultaneously remaining delightfully polite. Although she was a lowly
washerwoman, Collier is a strong woman exuding with unintentional bravado and
is worthy of respect and admiration. She spoke out about the inequalities among
the sexes in the working class before they became hot political issues. Her
words were powerful enough that they garnered attention from people higher on
the social ladder than she, and who encouraged her to circulate her thoughts
into immortality via publication. She never gained international fame. Her
plight into the literary world was a brief one and she lived the rest of her
life out in obscurity. However, reprints of her work remain as a reminder of
what life was like for women in history and how far they have come. She is an
exemplary model of strength and smarts, of sass and significance, for women of
all ages and backgrounds, for several generations to come.
Works Cited
Duck,
Stephen. The Thresher’s Labour.
Pasadena: Castle Press, 1985. Print.
Collier,
Mary. The Women’s Labour. Pasadena:
Castle Press, 1985. Print.
Woolf,
Virginia. A Room of One’s Own.
Haverford University. Web. 29 Feb 2016.
