20 Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840–1920
Th is was the girl who had lingered in the lane to help the boy pick watercress, to
gather a fl ower, to listen to a thrush, to bask in the sunshine. Open air and green fi elds
were to her life itself. Heart miseries were always better borne in the open air. How
just, how truly scientifi c, to shut her in a steaming wash-house!^29Jeff eries’s general conclusions on this vexed issue off er a sympathetic and yet
ambiguous summing-up of female labour:
Th e position of agricultural women is a painful one to contemplate, and their lives
full of hardships; but fi eld-labour cannot be fairly accused as the cause of the evils they
endure. Th eir strength is overstrained in the cornfi eld; but what can you do? It is their
gold-mine – their one grand opportunity of getting a little money ... Farm-labour
is certainly to be preferred to much of the work that women do in manufacturing
districts. At least there is no overcrowding ; there is plenty of fresh air, and the woman
who works in the fi eld looks quite as robust and healthy as her sister sitting all day in
a confi ned factory.^30Th omas Hardy also mulled over these questions in his 1883 essay on ‘Th e Dor-
setshire Labourer’ where he suggests that, because of increased mobility in the
countryside, female workers ‘have, in many districts, acquired the rollicking air
of factory hands’.^31 As Hardy observes, female labour is specifi cally required for
turnip-hacking in winter, for haymaking in summer, and also for threshing the
corn. As regards the latter he remarks, ‘not a woman in the county but hates the
threshing-machine’, and he goes on:
Th e dust, the din, the sustained exertion demanded to keep up with the steam tyrant,
are distasteful to all women but the coarsest. I am not sure whether, at the present
time, women are employed to feed the machine, but some years ago a woman had
frequently to stand just above the whizzing wire drum, and feed from morning to
night – a performance for which she was quite unfi tted.^32Hardy describes the dizzying eff ects of such labour upon a ‘thin, saucer-eyed
woman of fi ft y-fi ve’ who was so disorientated she wandered around the fi elds
‘bewildered and terrifi ed, till three o’clock in the morning’.^33 Th e essay’s judiciously
neutral posture takes on a more apocalyptic tone in Hardy’s later fi ctionalization
of this passage when in Tess of the d’Urbervilles he depicts the operations of the
steam threshing machine on the bleak upland farm at Flintcomb-Ash:
Close under the eaves of the stack, and as yet barely visible was the red tyrant that the
women had come to serve – a timber-framed construction, with straps and wheels
appertaining – the threshing-machine, which, whilst it was going, kept up a despotic
demand upon the endurance of their muscles and nerves.^34Th e machine’s operations are directed by an ‘indistinct fi gure’ dressed in black,
his engine functioning as ‘the primum mobile of this little world’. Th e engine
man, ‘a sooty and grimy embodiment of tallness’ who speaks ‘in a strange north-