According to the census of 1870 there were in the United States, out of a total population of 38,500,000, less than 400,000 females occupied in the labor of agriculture, either as field-hands or indoor workers. Of this number, 373,332 were hired laborers, and 22,681 the cultivators of their own lands. All of the former, and two-thirds of the latter, were freed-women in the late Slave States, and only 7994 females were employed in agriculture, either as laborers or proprietors, in or out of doors, in the Free States.
The States in which these few farm-women of the North were chiefly found were Wisconsin, which claimed 1387; Pennsylvania, 1279; and Illinois, 1034. In Pennsylvania the farm-women belonged almost exclusively to the population known as the "Pennsylvania Dutch," descendants of the Hessians and other Germans who settled in the State at the close of the Revolutionary War; in Illinois and Wisconsin they were recent immigrants from Europe, chiefly Germans, and for the most part, it is presumed, widows, who preferred to till the land left by their husbands rather than part with it.
With the exception of these trifling numbers, which, including even the freed-women, amount to but seven per cent. of the whole number of males employed in agriculture, it may be said, with entire correctness, that in the United States woman has been raised above the necessity of field-labor.
This is so far from being the case in Europe that in some countries all the women, except the few belonging to the aristocratic and bourgeois classes, are employed in the fields. One-third of the entire rural laboring population of Prussia and one-half of that of Russia are females. The following figures are from official sources:
| COUNTRY. | Total population. | Total occupied in agriculture. |
| United States, 1870 | 38,558,371 | 5,922,471 |
| Prussia, 1867 | 19,607,710 | 3,286,954 |
| Europ. Russia, exclud. | ||
| Baltic Provs., 1863 | 59,097,859 | 26,362,435 |
| Of whom Males. | Females. | Percentage of female to male agriculturists. |
| 5,525,503 | 396,968 | 7 |
| 2,232,741 | 1,054,213 | 47 |
| 13,444,842 | 12,917,593 | 98 |
To every 100 men employed in field-work, there are in Russia 98 women, in Prussia 47, and in the United States but 7; and of the latter, nearly all are freed-women of the African race. I have heard men sneer at this statement, which I regard as matter for boasting—men who regretted it was true: "You Americans make too much of your women. You educate them above their rank in life, dress them like dolls and keep them for show. They are idle, and become enfeebled and vicious, and their progeny, if indeed they have any, partake of the same characteristics."
It is not alone foreigners who hold this language. There is among our own countrymen a growing class of admirers of what they are pleased to term the robust female, and "robust" with this class means hard-worked.
We have already seen the debased condition to which field-work, apparently, has reduced the peasant-women of continental Europe: we have seen that they resemble animals as much as they do women, so heavy and unremitting is the toil with which they are burdened.
"This only makes them hardy," cries the advocate of the robust school, who believes that hard work is good for everybody, even for women, yet carefully avoids it himself—avoids even hard thinking, which might teach him better doctrine. "It is thus that women become the mothers of a race of heroes."
Heroes! Moon-calves, rather; but we shall see.