THE

EDINBURGH REVIEW,.

APRIL, 1859.

No. CCXXII.

ART. I.-1. The Results of the Census of Great Britain in 1851. By EDWARD CHESHIRE. London: 1853.

2. Report of Assistant Poor-law Commissioners on the Employment of Women and Children in Agriculture. 1843.

3. Minutes of the Committee of Council of Education. 1855-6. 4. Reports of the Governesses' Benevolent Institution.

5. The Industrial and Social Position of Women in the Middle and Lower Ranks. London: 1857.

6. Women and Work. By B. L. SMITH (Mrs. BODICHON). London: 1857.

7. Two Letters on Girls' Schools, and on the Training of Working Women. By Mrs. AUSTIN. 1857.

8. Experience of Factory Life. By M. M. 1857.

9. The Lowell Offering. Lowell, Massachusetts, United States.

10. The Laws of Life, with Special Reference to the Physical Education of Girls. By ELIZABETH BLACKWELL, M.D. New York: 1858.

THERE was a time when continental visitors called England

the hell of horses, the purgatory of servants, and the 'paradise of women,' from the two former having everything to do, and the latter nothing. The lapse of centuries has materially altered this aspect of affairs. The railways have annihilated the hardest-worked class of horses; improvements in the arts of life have relieved our servants of a great amount of toil, while on the whole elevating their condition; whereas

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the women of the United Kingdom have been led forth from their paradise into a life of labour and care, more strongly resembling that of men than either the men or women of old times could have anticipated. Wearied as some of us are with the incessant repetition of the dreary story of spirit-broken governesses and starving needlewomen, we rarely obtain a glimpse of the full breadth of the area of female labour in Great Britain; and it requires the publication of the 'Results of 6 the Census,' or some such exhibition of hard facts, to make us understand and feel that the conditions of female life have sustained as much alteration as the fortunes of other classes by the progress of civilisation. of civilisation. Sooner or later it must become known, in a more practical way than by the figures of the census returns, that a very large proportion of the women of England earn their own bread; and there is no saying how much good may be done, and how much misery may be saved, by a timely recognition of this simple truth.

The idea itself expressed by the form of words earning one's 'bread,' is somewhat modern,-except indeed in the primitive sense in which Adam was set to do it. In the modern sense of earning one's bread,' the position arose, for men first, and subsequently for women, after the creation of a middle class of society. The thing and the name have been recognised for some centuries in regard to men. Women have been more and more extensively involved in the thing, especially during the last half-century; but the name is new and strange; and the extent to which they work for a maintenance is a truth known scarcely to one in ten thousand of us. It is as well to know it; and timely attention to the fact is the best way of knowing it to practical purpose.

There is no reason to suppose that women's lives were less laborious than now, in the early days when they had no responsibility about their own maintenance. When there was no middle-class, and no shopping and marketing, the mere business of living was very hard work, both to men and women. They belonged to somebody, except the few who owned the rest; and the owners had perhaps as much on their hands as the dependents. The gentlewoman of ancient times had to overlook the preparation of every article of food, clothing and convenience, for a whole settlement, in days when the corn had to be grown, reaped, and dressed at home; and the wool and hemp the same; and all the materials of building, furnishing, and adorning. The low-born women had to grind the corn before they could make the bread; to spin the wool, and dye and weave it before they could make the clothes. Every pro

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cess was gone through on every estate. Every step of daily life was laborious; and all working men and women were slaves. Not a few of them were called so in the days when the Irish used to purchase their workpeople from England. The spindle side of the house, as King Alfred called the gentlewomen, ascertained how many hands were necessary to do the women's work of the establishment; and the useless were got rid of, by one method or another, and chiefly by sale to Ireland, or the estate suffered. In those times, there was no such idea afloat as that of self-dependence for subsistence. The maintenance was a matter of course; and hard work a common necessity, everywhere outside of the convent.

The lot of the labourer seems to have been little lightened when the middle class began to grow, though more and more articles were to be had by purchase, and much toil and time were saved by new arts of life. It was a great matter when the mill saved the pounding of corn. It was a great matter when the first Flemish weavers came over with their looms, and spared the women a world of trouble about homespun.' Before that, the foreigners used to say that the English were scarcely anything but shepherds and wool producers. More wool than ever was wanted; but the saving of the women's time and labour led to an increased production of poultry and eggs, butter and cheese, and many other good things. Still, the work must have been as hard as any that is known now. The days of the small yeomen had come on; the trading-class was beginning to appear; and all domestic matters rested on the women as entirely in the farmhouse and cottage as in the castle or mansion. To winnow all manner of corn, to make 'malt, to wash, and to make hay, shear corn, and in time of 'need, help her husband to fill the muck-wain or dung-cart, 'drive the plough, to load hay, corn, and such other, to go to 'market and sell butter or pigs, fowls or corn,'-such was the duty of the farmer's wife, according to Fitzherbert, in the first English work on husbandry. The women had to make the straw or flock beds, and the chaff pillows, when that luxury replaced the log of wood. They had to spin, weave, and dye the coverlets, and all the fabrics worn by the household, not being wealthy enough to employ the Flemings as the higher orders did. All the measuring and administration of the corn and pulse was the women's business, and the preparation of the winter food; that is, the salting and drying of the lean cows which were killed in autumn because no way was known of keeping cattle alive till the spring grasses were ready. The women made the candles and the salt, and the soap; and the

mead from the beehives, and the cider from the orchard; and they spent no little time in collecting the finest inner bark in the forest, and the best herbs in the fields, to make bread of when corn and pulse failed. In all the intervals, the spinning was going on;-that art which has given a denomination to the unmarried women of Great Britain and the United States to this day. First, in keeping the cattle, sheep, and swine, the women plied the distaff, as we now see the Alpine girls plying it amidst their goats, and the Arab maidens near almost every well or moist wady in the desert; and then, when the spinning-wheel came in, its whirr was heard all over the land, all day and the last thing at night. It stops a gap, and so must needs be,' was the reason assigned by the men; and in every house or hovel, there stood the wheel for every woman to sit down to, in the intervals of other business.

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The gentlewomen first exhibited the change wrought by the rise of a shop-keeping class. It gave them more time than English women ever had before. There were seasons when, in the absence of husband or father, they had to govern large households or small districts, with millions of details to attend to; but even then, from the time when the miller ground the corn, and the vintner supplied the wine, and stuffs were to be had from the merchant, the mistress of an establishment had something of the leisure of a princess for doing what she had a fancy for;and that was, for the most part, working tapestry. While the priest wrote the letters, and the steward kept the accounts and made the purchases, the lady could overlook the garden from her lattice, and the kitchen from the gallery, without much interruption to the grave labour of stitching the siege of Troy, or the finding of Moses, in coloured wools or silks. These coloured silks bring us to a point of view whence we can get a glimpse of a change in the life of those times. When shops were so established an institution as that laws were made from year to year to regulate measures and weights, and exportation and importation, a rabid hatred sprang up against the Lombards who brought in silk ready for use, (deceitfully wrought') so as to destroy the mystery of the silkwomen and spinners, and all such virtuous occupations of women.' This was in 1455. Half a century later, the new prohibitions of small articles of wrought silk from abroad went by the name of enactments for silkwomen; and it seems as if there were really women who made 'knit articles,' girdles, cauls, nets, laces, &c., for profit, as well as for household use. While reading the pulpit censures aimed at the ladies' dress, in those days when silk was a bewitch ing novelty, the headdresses, horns, tails, and ornaments of

pomp,' we can easily imagine that there was a demand for 'silkwomen' beyond what separate households could supply; and hence the rise of one of the earliest branches of female industry.

We can, at this moment, recall very few others capable of yielding a subsistence. In all ages and all nations there has been a tendency to commit medical and surgical practice to old women. It is so now, in the heart of Africa, and in the backwoods of America, and in the South-sea islands, and in remote parts of some islands which lie in a northern sea. One of the earliest figures in the lengthening series of female bread-winners is that of the doctress, with her simples and her ointments, and her secrets, and her skill in dressing wounds. By a similar mysterious adaptation, the doctress has been, in all times, the fortune-teller, or the witch, or at lowest the match-maker, vocations by any of which a good deal of money has been obtainable from age to age. In some analogy with these is, or was, the vocation of cook, a profitable one also. Sending her messes from her own fire, or carrying her own saucepans and spices and herbs to the rich neighbour's kitchen, or the lady's still-room, the skilful cook was more patron than client, in times when English banquets were emerging from utter barbarism. There seems to have been little besides, in the way of paid industry. The occasional foster-mother took the infant home to be reared. The sick nurse was either one of the household, or the doctress. Orphans, or the daughters of impoverished gentlemen, entered the household of some great lady, as maidsof-honour did those of queens: but, beyond this, it does not appear that women sustained themselves by any other industry than the kinds we have indicated.

In those days, therefore, the supposition was true which has now become false, and ought to be practically admitted to be false; that every woman is supported (as the law supposes her to be represented) by her father, her brother, or her husband. In those days, unmarried women were rare; and convents were the refuge of celibacy. It was not only in royal families that children were betrothed in their cradles. In all ranks, parents made matches for their children at any age that suited the family convenience; and the hubbub that ensued, when a daughter refused to marry at her parents' bidding, shows what a disaster it was considered to have a woman in the house who would neither marry nor become a There was, in such a state of society, no call for female industry, except within the establishment,-whether it were the mansion, the farm, the merchant's dwelling, or the cottage.

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