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1 WOMEN IN THE FIELD
Roger Ebbatson
In Th e Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), Friedrich Engels off ered
a powerful account of current agricultural conditions, noting in particular how
competition and large-scale farming operations now obliged the fi eld-workers
‘to hire themselves as labourers to the large farmers or the landlords’.^1 Th e ending
of the Napoleonic Wars led to a lowering of wages and consequent agricultural
distress which was scarcely mitigated by the new Corn Laws. Th e symbiotic
and patriarchal relation between master and man (and woman) disappeared,
with the result that, as Engels writes, ‘farmhands have become day-labourers’,
being employed ‘only when needed’ and thus oft en remaining unemployed ‘for
weeks together, especially in winter’.^2 Th e inception of the harsh New Poor Law,
together with ‘the constant extension of farming on a large scale’ in the wake of
enclosure, the introduction of threshing and other machines, and the employ-
ment of women and children, would lead to a widespread ‘disorganization of the
social fabric’.^3 Engels’s diagnosis inevitably focused upon the 1830s, the period
of the incendiary ‘Swing’ riots and anti-Corn Law agitation; whilst there was an
economic recovery in the countryside aft er this critical juncture, the 1870s saw
the onset of the Great Depression which would stretch into Edwardian times. A
succession of wet summers in the 1870s and early 1880s aff ected harvest yields
and promoted pneumonia in cattle and foot rot in sheep, whilst refrigerated
shipping began to bring imports of wheat and mutton, cheese and bacon, which
aff ected the domestic market. Increased reliance on mechanization and shift ing
patterns of land use reduced the aggregate demand for labour throughout the
period. Th e keynote of these trends, therefore, was the permanent existence of
a new ‘surplus population’ which lived by hiring out its labour, an important
fraction of which comprised women fi eld-labourers. Th e overall impact of such
changes was succinctly summarized by Karl Marx himself: ‘By the nineteenth
century, the very memory of the connection between the agricultural labourer
and communal property had, of course, vanished’.^4
Th is chapter sets out to examine the validity of this Marxian contention spe-
cifi cally in relation to the question of female land-labour during the period of