Women in the Field 17
agricultural Great Depression, ‘working women were constructed as a threat to
English labouring men’s jobs, wages, and liberty, in other words, as a threat to
their masculinity’.^6 Certainly the Agricultural Labourers’ Union (from which
women were debarred), established in 1872, promulgated a programme of dis-
couraging women’s fi eld labour, and their newspaper looked to the day when the
labourer’s wife was ‘no longer a drudge in the fi elds, but a managing, economi-
cal housewife’.^7 Although, as Sayer demonstrates, female workers were politically
active and took part in strikes and related protests, with some exceptions their
voices were muffl ed and their participation ‘remained largely hidden’.^8 Nonethe-
less, actions such as the 1867 strike by Oxfordshire women day-labourers, or their
1873 intervention against blacklegs in the same county, meant that, in Sayer’s
terms, ‘the dominant defi nitions of masculinity and femininity were called into
question ... as were the supposed organic class relations in the countryside’.^9
Whether in the form of offi cially endorsed parliamentary reports or individual
social analyses, however, it remained the case throughout the period that women
fi eld-labourers possessed virtually no voice of their own, their situation being rep-
resented, debated and analysed by paternalist male ‘authorities’. In addition, it is
clear that, in the late nineteenth century overall, as Alan Armstrong observes, ‘the
role of women was becoming confi ned to home-making’, and that in the fi eld
their role was limited ‘to subsidiary tasks such as gathering and binding’.^10
Th e issue of the (mis)representation of the late-Victorian female country
labourer raises key questions of agency and perspective which may briefl y be
illustrated with reference to two of the leading male authors on rural aff airs at
this juncture. Richard Jeff eries fi rst came to prominence with a series of letters
to Th e Times on agricultural matters in the early 1870s, and in a subsequent
essay published in the Graphic in 1875 he dealt specifi cally with the question of
‘Women in the Field’. Th is piece off ers a naturalistic and telling description of
the women’s working conditions:
Th e cold clods of earth numb the fi ngers as they search for the roots and weeds. Th e
damp clay chills the feet through thick-nailed boots, and the back grows stiff with
stooping. If the poor woman suff ers from the rheumatisms so common among the
labouring class, such a day as this will make every bone in her body ache.^11As Jeff eries depicts them, the women are impervious to the natural beauty of
spring, the woods ‘carpeted with acres upon acres of the wild hyacinth, or blue-
bell’, the nightingale ‘in the hazel copse, the skies full of larks’. Indeed, being
virtually illiterate, the women ‘can call up no beautiful thoughts’ with the result,
according to Jeff eries, that ‘she cannot see, that is, appreciate or feel with, the
beauty with which she is surrounded’.^12 Th e male anxiety surrounding rural
female sexuality surfaces in Jeff eries’s analysis when, remarking upon summer
haymaking, he informs his readers that ‘much mischief is done by the indiscrim-