‘Sith you and I cannot agree,
Let’s change our work’—‘Content,’ quoth she.
‘My wheel and distaff, here, take thou,
And I will drive the cart and plow.’
This was concluded ’twixt them both:
To cart and plow the good wife goeth.
The good man he at home doth tarry,
To see that nothing doth miscarry.
An apron he before him put:
Judge:—Was not this a handsome slut?
He fleets the milk, he makes the cheese;
He gropes the hens, the ducks, and geese;
He brews and bakes as well’s he can;
But not as it should be done, poor man.
As he did make his cheese one day
Two pigs their bellies broke with whey:
Nothing that he in hand did take
Did come to good. Once he did bake,
And burnt the bread as black as a stock.
Another time he went to rock
The cradle, and threw the child o’ the floor,
And broke his nose, and hurt it sore.
He went to milk, one evening-tide,
A skittish cow, on the wrong side—
His pail was full of milk, God wot,
She kick’d and spilt it ev’ry jot:
Besides, she hit him a blow on th’ face
Which was scant well in six weeks’ space.
Thus was he served, and yet to dwell
On more misfortunes that befell
Before his apron he’d leave off,
Though all his neighbours did him scoff.
Now list and mark one pretty jest,
’Twill make you laugh above the rest.
As he to churn his butter went
One morning, with a good intent,
The cot-quean fool did surely dream,
For he had quite forgot the cream.
He churned all day with all his might,
And yet he could get no butter at night.
’Twere strange indeed, for me to utter
That without cream he could make butter.
Now having shew’d his huswivery,
Who did all things thus untowardly,
Unto the good wife I’ll turn my rhyme,
And tell you how she spent her time.
She used to drive the cart and plow,
But do’t well she knew not how.
She made so many banks i’ th’ ground,
He’d been better have given five pound
That she had never ta’en in hand,
So sorely she did spoil the land.
As she did go to sow likewise,
She made a feast for crows and pies,
She threw away a handful at a place,
And left all bare another space.
At the harrow she could not rule the mare,
But bid one land, and left two bare:
And shortly after, well-a-day,
As she came home with a load of hay,
She overthrew it, nay, and worse,
She broke the cart and kill’d a horse.
The goodman that time had ill-luck;
He let in the sow and killed a duck,
And, being grieved at his heart,
For loss on’s duck, his horse and cart,
The many hurts on both sides done,
His eyes did with salt water run.
‘Then now,’ quoth he, ‘full well I see,
The wheel’s for her, the plow’s for me.
I thee entreat,’ quoth he, ‘good wife,
To take my charge, and all my life
I’ll never meddle with huswivery more.’
The goodwife she was well content,
And about her huswivery she went;
He to hedging and to ditching,
Reaping, mowing, lading, pitching.
And let us hope that, like the Prince and Princess in the fairy tale, they lived happily ever afterwards. But I have my doubts.
VI.—Women in Men’s Employments.
That Woman’s true profession is marriage is a fact commonly blinked in these times when, owing to their greater numbers, it is become inevitable that many women must go through life as spinsters. Not every woman may become the mistress of a home in these days when the proportion of females to males is growing larger and more evident year by year: not all the women and girls can attain to that ideal of marriage which they so ardently desire, now that women outnumber the men in Great Britain and Ireland alone by nearly a million; and so, to cover their failure in life, the unmarried have started the heresy that woman’s mission is domination rather than submission; that woman’s sphere of action and influence is not properly confined to the home, but is rightly universal, and that marriage is an evil which destroys their individuality. These failures, rightly to call those who cannot achieve legalised coverture, are, of course, of all classes, but chiefly and equally of course, they belong to the wage-earning class, and must seek employment wherewith to support their existence in an undesired spinsterhood. The growing competition of women with one another in feminine employments, the higher education of modern girls, the increasing tendency of men to defer marriage, or to remain bachelors altogether—all these causes have led to woman’s turning from the long-since overstocked markets for woman’s work to the more highly-paid functions fulfilled by men. Then, also, the new employments and professions evolved from the increasingly complex civilisation of this dying nineteenth century, have been almost exclusively feminised by the femmes soles who are occupied nowadays as clerks, shorthand writers, journalists, type-writers—vulgo ‘typists’—doctors, dentists, telephonists, telegraphists, decorators, photographers, florists, and librarians. A lower social stratum takes to such employments as match-box making, printers’ folding and bookbinding, and a hundred other crafts. Where deftness of manipulation comes into request these wage-earning women have proved their right to their new places; but in the occupations of clerks, cashiers, telephonists, telegraphists, and shorthand writers they have sufficiently demonstrated their unfitness, and only retain their situations by reason of the lower wages they are prepared to accept, in competition with men, and through the sexual sentimentality which would rather have a pretty woman to flirt with in the intervals of typewriting than a merely useful and unornamental man. It may be inevitable, and in accordance with the inexorable law of self-preservation, that women will continue to elbow men from their stools; but woman cannot reasonably expect, if she competes with man in the open market, to receive the old-time deference and chivalric treatment—real or assumed—that was hers when woman remained at home, and when the title of spinster was not an empty form. She must be content to forego much of the kindly usage that was hers before she became man’s competitor; and if she fails in market overt, where chivalry has no place, why, she has no just cause of complaint. If the time is past when women were regarded as a cross between an angel and an idiot it is quite by her own doing, and if she no longer receives the deference that is the due of an angel, nor the compassionate consideration usually accorded an idiot, no one is to blame but herself.
If she would be content to earn her wages in those manly employments she has poached, and to refrain from the cry of triumph she cannot forbear, she would be a much more gracious figure, and, indeed, entitled to some sympathy; but foolish women are clamorously greedy of self-glorification, and still instant, in and out of season, in reviling the strength and mental agility of men which surpass their own and forbid for ever the possibility of female domination. And yet women, one might reasonably suppose, have no just cause of complaint in the matter of their mental and physical inferiority. The feminine quality of cunning has ever stood them in good stead, and by its aid they have grasped advantages that could not have been theirs by right of their muscles or their reason. Cunning has taught them to use their shortcomings as claims for consideration, and to urge courtesy as their due in order to handicap men in the race. In the same manner Mr. Gladstone was wont, when all reasonable arguments had failed him, to urge his age as a claim to attention and a compliance with his policy; and, whenever a cricket match is played between an eleven of gentlemen and a corresponding number of ladies, the men must fain tie one hand behind their backs and fend as best they may with the other, and use a stump in place of a bat. Again, when gloves are wagered on a race, who ever heard of pretty Fanny paying when her wager was lost? You shall see an instance of feminine unreasonableness in competition with man in this tale of a race:—Mrs. Thornton, the wife of a Colonel Thornton, rode on horseback, in 1804, a match with a Mr. Frost, on the York racecourse. The course was four miles, and the stakes were 500 guineas, even. The race was run before an immense concourse, and eventually the lady lost! She could not, of course, considering her sex, contain herself for indignation, and her letter to the York Herald which followed made complaint against Mr. Frost for having been lacking in courtesy in ‘distancing her as much as he could.’ She challenged that discourteous sportsman to another match, but he very rightly considered that sport is masculine, and did not accept.
Many thousands of girls and unmarried women live nowadays upon their earnings in a solitary existence. They are of all grades and classes; they have entered the professions, and even invention is numbered among their occupations, although the inability of women to originate is notorious. According to a statement in the Times of December, 1888, ‘out of 2500 patents issued to women by the Government of the United States, none reveal a new principle.’
We have not many women inventors in these islands. Women have not had sufficient courage or rashness for dabbling in applied science, or meddling with mechanics. They owe even the sewing-machine, and all the improvements upon its crude beginnings, to man, and would have been content to wield the needle in slow and painful stitches for all time but for his intervention.
It was left for the Government to bring the employment of women forward, and successive Postmasters-General have sanctioned their introduction to post-offices; but as post-office clerks they have failed to give satisfaction. They readily assume official insolence, and carry it to an extent unknown even to Foreign Office male clerks, who were, before the introduction of women into the Civil Service, supposed to have attained the utmost heights of ‘side’ and official offensiveness. Many have been the bitter letters addressed to the Times—that first resort of the aggrieved—upon the neglect and contumely heaped upon the public by the Postmaster-General’s young ladies. But this neglect and studied insolence has, it must be owned, been chiefly shown by these Jacquettas in office to their own sex; and ladies have been observed to wait, with rage and vexation, for the tardy pleasure of female post-office clerks in condescending to notice their presence.