16 Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840–1920
the Great Depression. It will be argued that overall the critical situation of the
female fi eld-worker in the labour market was typically described, analysed and
represented by male ‘authorities’, and that the contested role of women in the
fi elds was symptomatically infl ected through ideological concepts of womanli-
ness. Th is was evidently the case in the well-informed and extensive agricultural
journalism and fi ctionalized sketches of Richard Jeff eries, whose work off ers a
sympathetic and cogent account of the hardship of female labour at this juncture,
whilst remaining anchored in a predominantly patriarchal set of values. Th omas
Hardy would imaginatively reinscribe many of these issues in his fi ction, whilst
similarly retaining an overall ideal of a normative femininity in the ‘unconscious’
of the text. His novels, overtly sympathetic as they are to the individual female
labourer (Tess Durbeyfi eld, Marty South), tend to mask or moderate class ten-
sions in favour of a humanistic individualism.
How it rained
When we worked at Flintcomb-Ash,
And could not stand upon the hill
Trimming swedes for the slicing-mill.
Th e wet washed through us – plash, plash, plash:
How it rained!
How it snowed
When we crossed from Flintcomb-Ash
To the Great Barn for drawing reed,
Since we could nowise chop a swede. –
Flakes in each doorway and casement-sash:
How it snowed!
How it shone
When we went from Flintcomb-Ash
To start at dairywork once more
In the laughing meads, with cows three-score,
And pails, and songs, and love – too rash:
How it shone!^5Th omas Hardy’s poem, which refracts or condenses scenes from Tess of the
d’Urbervilles (1891), raises crucial issues relating to voice, agency and gender
ideolog y in the representation of female rural labour in the nineteenth century.
Expressive of a deep sympathy for the ‘cavalry of labour’ experienced by Tess,
Marian and the other former milkmaids, the poem attempts to inhabit a female
self whilst retaining a sense of distance consonant with a middle-class readership.
Th e poet, for instance, eschews the kind of dialect speech patterns which would
inform the language of this class fraction in order to off er a telling but external
picture of female labour. In her exemplary study of the nineteenth-century female
rural labourer, Karen Sayer demonstrates how, in the late-Victorian period of the