Women in the Field 23
character’.^50 It is generally held that women’s fi eld labour noticeably diminished
in the later nineteenth century, and this is confi rmed by Flora Th ompson, who
recalls former times in Oxfordshire when ‘there had been a large gang of fi eld
women, lawless, slatternly creatures, some of whom had thought nothing of hav-
ing four or fi ve children out of wedlock’.^51 However, she notes that in the 1880s
‘a few women still did fi eld work’, not alongside the men ‘but at their own special
tasks, weeding and hoeing, picking up stones, and topping and tailing turnips
and mangle; or, in wet weather, mending sacks in a barn’.^52 Until the late 1860s,
much of the labour force in the countryside was composed of ‘gang’ work, casual
labour done by women and children. As Bethe Schoenfeld argues, there were
three key factors which altered this state of aff airs: ‘the decline in the number of
casual and/or migrant workers, wholesale depopulation of rural areas, and ... the
introduction of fi eld machinery’.^53
To sum up: this body of writing, overtly sympathetic and responsive as it is
to the lives and working conditions of the ‘women of the fi eld’, unconsciously
refracts relations of dominance and subordination between the sexes and
between classes. Th e contradictions inherent in the ideological practices and
complex class positions of the two writers refl ect tensions in the wider social
formation, not least in relation to issues of gender. Th eir resonant imaginative
response to the question of rural labour, in the blindness of its insight, remains
unaware of or unreceptive to Marx’s dictum that ‘the seller of labour-power, like
the seller of any other commodity, realizes its exchange-value and parts with its
use-value’.^54 Th e representations of female rural labour examined here, as in the
related writings of Flora Th ompson, George Sturt and Alfred Williams consid-
ered by Barry Sloan, serve an ideological agenda which enables a paradoxically
simultaneous masking and revelation of the realities of female rural labour in late
nineteenth-century England.