This essay is the first in a series called “Shut Out, Not Shut Up” on women through the ages who’ve written despite being dismissed because of their sex. They persisted.
Imagine it’s early spring, and you’re walking on a lane through the countryside. You live in a time when farm machinery consists of implements either attached to oxen or wielded by hand. There’s a chill in the breeze, and the fields are sodden from the recent melt. The sun warms your face, and you smile. Despite that, you’re happy to be wearing a jacket against the wind.
You note a laborer in the field who’s working the soil to prepare it for planting. And having spotted one, your eye now spots the figures of several more workers, stretching into the distance. This is hard work, you think, glad of your privilege to be at leisure today and enjoying the natural splendor. The laborers must have worked up a sweat, judging by their bare forearms; you spy a heap of outerwear discarded in a pile near a tree. You note the workers’ muscles, bunching and flexing as they hoe. They’re made for this labor. You are not.
And then, an idea occurs to you, as you notice the nearest worker’s hem wick up the mud from the ground. They make work for themselves even as they toil, you think. Washing day will be long and laborious, too, a thought prompted by the mud caked on the garment. With yards of material in her skirt, she’ll need those muscles come washing day.
If the initial paragraphs evoked men in shirtsleeves working in the field, you can credit the repetition of this iconic image by male writers through the centuries. The novelist can use a field of laboring men to hold forth on the virile power that animates patriotism and religious values. In contrast, the image of women performing back-breaking work signals something quite different: poverty and the failure of policy.
Vincent van Gogh, dedicated to using pigment and texture to capture the truth of what he saw, stands apart in his depictions of women and men laboring to plant and dig up the meanest of foods. Other artists might place a lithe, lovely female form in the midst of a field during harvest in order to elevate the painting from a landscape into something more dramatic, perhaps a story. When van Gogh centers the human figure working the soil, he insists you confront the grim reality of the poverty that requires a household to grow its own food, without imposing an imagined nobility of labor.
The nobility of the laborer
Stephen Duck was one of those men who extolled the virtues of the working man, as he did in his ode to the noble laborer in “The Thresher’s Labour” in 1730.
The grateful tribute of these rural lays, Which to her patron’s hand the muse conveys, Deign to accept; ‘tis just she tribute bring To him, whose bounty gives her life to sing; To him, whose gen’rous favours tune her voice; And bid her, ‘midst her poverty, rejoice. -Stephen Duck, “The Thresher’s Labour”
Larding his verse with allusions to classical literature, Duck seeks to ennoble his humble protagonists who work the harvest. They take a midday break to eat and rest:
With heat and labour tir’d, our scythes we quit, Search out a shady tree, and down we sit: From scrip and bottle hope new strength to gain; But scrip and bottle too are try’d in vain. Down our parch’d throats we scarce the bread can get; And, quite o’erspent with toil but faintly eat. Nor can the bottle only answer all; The bottle and the beer are both too small. Time flows: again we rise from off the grass; Again each mower takes his proper place; […]
The workday finally concluded, the men return home.
Homewards we move, but spent so much with toil, We slowly walk, and rest at ev’ry stile. Our good expecting wives, who think we stay, Got to the door, soon eye us in the way. Then from the pot the dumplin’s catch’d in haste, And homely by its side the bacon plac’d.
The next day, some women join the work group, and he uses them for contrast against the virtuous male laborer.
Our master comes, and at his heels 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?
The women continue to annoy him with their constant chatter through the work break; he’s glad when the rains interrupt their nattering.
Stephen Duck’s poem enjoyed some renown at the time it was published. It was praised for its ‘most accurate depiction of working life.’ Mary Collier, herself a laborer, disagreed. She wrote “The Woman’s Labour” to correct the record.
The takedown
Collier starts off with an ‘Advertisement’ testifying that she, a washerwoman, is indeed the author. She holds up the ‘genius of Mr Duck,’ which she parodies in the first lines of the poem, saying that although she lacks his genius, she has friends who’ve encouraged her to think she might gain a few readers and a little money too if she writes her own version of labor, from a woman’s perspective.
She states her bona fides: she too has spent many summers ‘in throwing, turning, making hay.’ However, she’s never witnessed what Duck described, ‘Our wages paid for sitting on the ground.’ She admits that when the hay is cut and drying in the sun, the women too take a meal break: wouldn’t you give women ‘time to eat’? To his displeasure in hearing women talk at work, she counters that as Duck claims his liberty to say what’s on his mind, why shouldn’t women?
She has the receipts
Collier soon starts her own catalogue enumerating the labors of women.
When ev’ning does approach we homeward hie, And our domestic toils incessant ply: Against your coming home prepare to get Our work all done, our house in order set; Bacon and dumpling in the pot we boil, Our beds we make, our swine we feed the while; Then wait at door to see you coming home, And set the table out against you come: Early next morning we on you attend; Our children dress and feed, their clothes we mend; And in the field our daily task renew, Soon as the rising sun has dry’d the dew.” -Mary Collier, “The Woman’s Labour”
Whatever needs be done in the field, ‘in the work we freely bear a part, / And what we can, perform with all our heart.” So willing are women that they bring their babies to work with them, wrapping them ‘in our clothes to keep them warm, / While round about we gather up the corn.” And the kids aren’t laying about either: “Our children that are able bear a share / In gleaning corn, such is our frugal care.”
She works into a lather at his suggestion that women, returning home at night, have the luxury that men do to rest at every stile, for:
We must make haste, for when we home are come, Alas! We find our work but just begun; So many things for our attendance call, Had we ten hands we could employ them all. Our children put to bed, with greatest care, We all things for your coming home prepare: You sup, and go to bed without delay, And rest yourselves till the ensuing day; While we, Alas! But little sleep can have, Because our froward children cry and rave; Yet, without fail, soon as daylight doth spring, We in the field again our work begin,
The poem goes on to explore the domestic tasks (like washing, shining pewter kitchen wares, brewing beer) women perform for other households for pay, in addition to the work they perform in fields and in their own homes that is unpaid. Women’s work, she concludes, is never done:
But to rehearse all labour is in vain, Of which we very justly might complain: For us, you see, but little rest is found; Our toil increases as the year runs round. 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. So the industrious bees do hourly strive To bring their loads of honey to the hive; Their sordid owners always reap the gains, And poorly recompense their toil and pains.
Not only do women work tirelessly, they don’t profit from it. Her husband controls his wife’s earnings, and uses it as he sees fit. Women are, Collier argues, effectively working in servitude to men. Can anyone blame women for being incensed that men ridicule their work?
Who is Mary Collier and why don’t I know about her?
Touted as the ‘washerwoman poet’ in her day, Mary Collier was a working-class English woman raised in poverty. Her great fortune was to be born to parents who taught her to read. Needing to work from childhood on, and to care for her sick father after the death of her mother, she never received a formal education. However, she used her reading skills to educate herself through childhood and her adult life. She worked as a washerwoman until age 62, and managed a farmhouse until she retired at 70, having never married nor had children. Throughout her adult life, she also wrote poetry.
What we know of Collier’s life comes from her introduction to the 1762 publication of her Poems, on Several Occasions, since she wasn’t seen as an important figure whose life was worth writing about. She paid for the publication of “The Woman’s Labour,” which went through three printings. In subsequent printings she continued to add a note attesting to the fact that the author was indeed a working woman. She developed enough of a local following to encourage her to publish a few more poems. After her death she was largely unrecognized until the 1980s.
Collier was a fiercely intelligent woman, an autodidact whose literary references came from reading literature at the end of long days of toil. Since she didn’t have the family demands of a married woman with children, she had time she could devote to the interests of her own mind. She must have managed money well, since she had saved enough capital to invest in publishing her work.
Collier’s intelligence and curiosity were apparent to others, to the extent that one employer urged her to publish. Collier was courageous. She claimed for herself the freedom to write about the experiences of woman and to rebut the opinion of a man who was comfortably writing within a patriarchal tradition. She was gutsy in calling out men in plainspoken verse. She could have hidden her criticism behind rhetorical flourishes and classical allegories. Instead, she points out: what you said is rubbish and here are the receipts.
Is a woman who writes a hobbyist or an artist?
Collier is said to have written poetry for her own pleasure, prior to publishing “The Woman’s Labour.” I don’t question whether the author found pleasure in writing, but the phrasing suggests that writing was a hobby for her, whereas true artists devote their lives to making art. This argument denigrates the art of anyone who doesn’t have access to investors who are necessary to fund their art. It’s an argument male arbiters of art have crafted.
Only a man could write the poem “The Choice”: “The intellect of man is forced to choose / perfection of the life, or of the work” (and this particular man was named William Butler Yeats). Mary Collier, and her poem “The Woman’s Labour,” clarify that women don’t have the luxury of a binary choice. Nothing of a woman’s life (including her art) can be ‘perfected’ by her because living is antithetical to perfection when you serve the needs of others, as women do. That Collier had the courage, audacity, and perseverance to put her thoughts into rhymed verse testifies to her fierce ambition despite her social standing.
If she wrote many unpublished works, we can imagine various motivations other than the ‘pleasure’ that could also be gotten from embroidery or singing or whittling or playing cards. Apparently she wrote to learn her craft, since her published pieces demonstrate skill that a novice couldn’t have produced. She wrote to acquire a voice that was uniquely hers, while recognizably meeting artistic expectations. She may have written in hopes that her poems would find an appreciative audience. She could have written because her mind worked over words while her hands performed the repetitive tasks that paid her bills. Perhaps she wrote because she was a poet.
There have always been trolls telling women who they really are
In each subsequent printing of her popular first poem, she inserted a testimony to her authorship. The ancestors of today’s trolls who anonymously stalk online accounts with ad hominem attacks claiming to know who the writer really is (“You’re a [fill-in-the-blank with any preposterous and unfounded attack]”), Collier’s critics used her own work as evidence that she wasn’t who she said at all. No woman can write like this, and certainly no washerwoman. She had to claim her identity with every printing. This, too, is tiring work.
The fact that a poor working woman produced a work of art threatened the gate keepers. She used their art form and turned it against them. They heard a voice they’d silenced until then, and they didn’t like hearing what it had to say about them. Most frightening of all: what if art can be made by people outside their gates? What does that say about the value of their own art?
Collier’s vision of an alternative universe in which women are artists
Her poem “An Epistolary Answer,” is one of those pieces in which she claims her authorship. After ripping a critic’s comments (she really doesn’t hold back), she ends with this:
Tho’ if we education had Which justly is our due, I doubt not many of our sex Might fairly view with you. -Mary Collier, An Epistolary Answer
Collier recognized that the way she educated herself wasn’t scalable to all women. Only by education can intelligence be nurtured and given the tools to pursue art. Men were ascendant in the arts because they’d been afforded the advantages of education and apprenticeships. To point to the absence of women in the arts as proof of their unworthiness is illogical. Women’s art is absent not because it was unworthy, but because women, being excluded from the start, haven’t been allowed to make it. Collier was an exception amongst women because she didn’t have the demands of a husband and children, which would have made study and poetry nearly impossible.
In “The Woman’s Labour,” Collier raises the work of women to the realms of art. Through it, we understand the extent of women’s labor, paid and unpaid, and can appreciate the asymmetry of the labor burden between men and women. The poem claims that labor for the sake of art is also women’s work. Were the world more fair, it would be the work of more women, and their work would rival that of established artists.
To every woman whose days—as long as you can remember—consisted of putting in a full day of work, picking up kids, running errands on the way home, getting the kids sorted with a snack and a start on homework, pulling together a dinner in time for the family to eat together, then washing up, getting the kids ready for bed, then feeling bone-tired as you yourself crawl into bed, where you lie awake thinking of what the next day holds: you will see yourself in “The Woman’s Labour.”
Plus ça change, plus c’est la meme chose.
Ellie’s Corner
Dog’s labors deserve a poem. This old girl was taking her post-breakfast nap, waking up only to watch me work. For some reason she can’t fathom, I work despite not getting treats. The dog math doesn’t add up.
Thanks for reading,