Of how many towns and villages in Europe and America might the same be said?
Of how many women are these terrible descriptions true?
In the evidence given before the Royal Commission on Canal Labour, it was stated in evidence that men and women often worked for seven days and nights on the canals, and in the winter.
Some of the witnesses declared that the work was unfit for women, that it was "degrading." The Royal Commissioners could not understand the word degrading, and asked how it could degrade a woman to steer a boat. Here is one reply given by an angry witness:
Do you think it womanly work to push with a twenty-foot pole a boat laden with 30 tons of coal? If you saw a mother of a family climbing a four-foot wall, you'd think it was no work for women. I have seen a woman knocked into the lock with a child at her breast by a sudden blow of the tiller. I have seen my own sister-in-law climb the lock-gates at one end to go and shut them at the other.
Many of the "cabins" on the narrow boats are about seven feet by five. In such cabins sleep the "captain" and his family; in one case a man and his wife, a girl of ten, a couple of younger children, and two boys of fourteen and sixteen years of age.
Those are a few glimpses of the environment of the women and the children of the poor.
I cannot quit the subject without again telling an experience which hurt me like a wound. It was in a workhouse school: a school where master and matron did the best they could do for the children so unfortunately placed.
Love Hunger
"As we crossed a bridge from one building to another the master said something about a fish-pond, adding, 'We do not catch fish here, but we catch a good many mice.'