Look at the pictures! See that grimy, tangled woman in harness, straining, in full health, along the coal-shafts! See, nearer, this lovely cripple, the Quaker cap folded over her soft, brown hair, her soul erect and noble, doing the duty of a Grace Darling! The first labors like the brute beast, the victim of human misgovernment and heathenish ignorance; the last chooses for herself a conflict with the storm, and earns, with as full right as any brother, the meed of the world.
Let us pass over to America. The Caribs of Honduras are a hardy race, and do not share the prejudices of Massachusetts on the subject of labor. Each man has several wives. For each he clears a plantation and builds a house. In a year, she has every kind of breadstuff under cultivation; and hires creers, which she freights for Truxillo and Belize, her husband often commanding for her. If her agricultural labors prove too heavy, as a thrifty woman will sometimes make them, she hires her husband to work for her at two dollars a week.
So the Northern Indian glides nimbly through the woods; while the squaw carries on her unlucky back their common food and covering, or perhaps hauls the canoe across the portage. A Jesuit priest rebuked an Orinoco woman for infanticide. "I wish my mother had been brave enough to part with me!" was her reply. "Our husbands go to hunt; and we drag after them, one baby at the breast, another on our back. When we return, we cannot sleep, but must grind maize all night for their chica. Drunken, they beat us, or stamp us under foot; and, after twenty years of such labor, a young wife is brought home to abuse us and such children as we have not killed. What ought I to do?"
At Santa Cruz, Theodore Parker writes to Francis Jackson that men and women work together to repair the public highway; hoeing the earth into trays, and throwing it into a cart which they drag and push together.
In Ohio, last year, about thirty girls went from farm to farm, hoeing, ploughing, and the like, for sixty-two and a half cents a day. At Media, in Pennsylvania, two girls named Miller carry on a farm of three hundred acres; raising hay and grain, hiring labor, but working mostly themselves. These women are not ignorant: they at one time made meteorological observations for an association auxiliary to the Smithsonian Institute. But labor attracts them, as it would many women if they were not oppressed by public opinion.
"In New York," writes a late correspondent of the "Lily," "I saw women performing the most menial offices,—carrying parcels for grocers, and trunks for steamboats. They often sweep the crossings in muddy weather; and I once saw one carrying brick and mortar for a mason."
During the late terrible destruction of property at the Lawrence mills, the women, heroic in every department, did not excuse themselves from the severest labor. When, after hours of extreme exertion, the firemen, worn down and quite exhausted, called for help, a bevy of ladies, who were standing on the sidewalk in Canal Street, flew over to the engines, and, "manning" the brakes, worked the machine, amid the cheers of the firemen.
You know what bodily strength and nervous energy carried Mary Patton round Cape Horn. Well, on the 25th of June, 1858, the British ship "Grotto" left Cuba; and, on the second day, the yellow-fever broke out in the worst form. Seven days after, so many had died, that there remained only the captain, his wife, and two of the crew. Then the captain was taken ill; and, beside nursing him, the poor wife, who had already nursed officers and men, took her station at the wheel, and steered by his instructions for Sandy Hook. There the steam-tug "Huntress" found them, the heroic woman at the wheel, the husband at that moment struggling with death; and, when they reached New York, three out of eleven, one of them the suffering wife, survived to tell the tale, and show how a woman can work. So common are such instances becoming, that you have hardly heard the name of this Mrs. Nichols, for whom tender charity soon cared.
A mutiny on board the ship "Maria," of New York, was put down Nov. 10, 1860, by the energy and decision of the wife of the master, Captain Clark, who, with pistols in her hands, threatened to shoot one of the mutineers if he did not desist. He was cowed into submission; and, a signal being made to the revenue cutter, the mutineers were taken into custody. The mate would have been killed, but for the heroic woman's intrepidity.
But all such labor is the result of compulsion,—compulsion of barbarism, of slavery, of unfair competition, or dire disease. Let us close this branch of our subject with a picture homely but attractive. "According to thy request," writes a Quaker friend from Wilmington, Del., "I send thee some facts concerning Sarah Ann Scofield. Some fifteen years since, her father became very much involved in debt. He owed some ten or twelve hundred dollars; having lost largely by working for cotton and woollen mills. His business was making spindles and fliers. His daughter, then just sixteen, proposed to go into her father's shop and assist him; she being the oldest of seven children. He accepted her offer, and told me himself, that, in twelve months, she could finish more work, and do it better, than any man he had ever trained for eighteen. She earned fifteen dollars a week at the rate he then paid other hands. Her father died. Her two oldest brothers learned the trade off her, and went away. She has now two younger sisters in apprenticeship, and a brother fourteen years of age, all working under her; turning, polishing, filing, and fitting all kinds of machinery. I went out to see her last week. She was then making water-rams to force streams into barns and houses. She is also beginning to make many kinds of carriage-axles. She is her own draughtsman, and occasionally does her own forging. To use her own words, 'What any man can do, I can but try at.' She has a steam-engine, every part of which she understands; and I know that her work gives entire satisfaction. When they have steady employment, they clear sixty dollars a week; and she says she would rather work at it for her bread, than at sewing for ten times the money. The truth is, it is a business she is fond of."