Woman and Labour | Page 7

as man bore his wounds, silently;
and we were content.
Then again a change came.
Ages passed, and time was when it was no longer necessary that all
men should go to the hunt or the field of war; and when only one in
five, or one in ten, or but one in twenty, was needed continually for
these labours. Then our fellow-man, having no longer full occupation
in his old fields of labour, began to take his share in ours. He too began
to cultivate the field, to build the house, to grind the corn (or make his
male slaves do it); and the hoe, and the potter's tools, and the
thatching-needle, and at last even the grindstones which we first had
picked up and smoothed to grind the food for our children, began to
pass from our hands into his. The old, sweet life of the open fields was
ours no more; we moved within the gates, where the time passes more
slowly and the world is sadder than in the air outside; but we had our
own work still, and were content.
If, indeed, we might no longer grow the food for our people, we were
still its dressers; if we did not always plant and prepare the flax and

hemp, we still wove the garments for our race; if we did no longer raise
the house walls, the tapestries that covered them were the work of our
hands; we brewed the ale, and the simples which were used as
medicines we distilled and prescribed; and, close about our feet, from
birth to manhood, grew up the children whom we had borne; their
voices were always in our ears. At the doors of our houses we sat with
our spinning-wheels, and we looked out across the fields that were once
ours to labour in--and were contented. Lord's wife, peasant's, or
burgher's, we all still had our work to do!
A thousand years ago, had one gone to some great dame, questioning
her why she did not go out a-hunting or a-fighting, or enter the great
hall to dispense justice and confer upon the making of laws, she would
have answered: "Am I a fool that you put to me such questions? Have I
not a hundred maidens to keep at work at spinning-wheels and needles?
With my own hands daily do I not dispense bread to over a hundred
folk? In the great hall go and see the tapestries I with my maidens have
created by the labour of years, and which we shall labour over for
twenty more, that my children's children may see recorded the great
deeds of their forefathers. In my store-room are there not salves and
simples, that my own hands have prepared for the healing of my
household and the sick in the country round? Ill would it go indeed, if
when the folk came home from war and the chase of wild beasts, weary
or wounded, they found all the womenfolk gone out a- hunting and
a-fighting, and none there to dress their wounds, or prepare their meat,
or guide and rule the household! Better far might my lord and his
followers come and help us with our work, than that we should go to
help them! You are surely bereft of all wit. What becomes of the
country if the women forsake their toil?"
And the burgher's wife, asked why she did not go to labour in her
husband's workshop, or away into the market-place, or go a-trading to
foreign countries, would certainly have answered: "I am too busy to
speak with such as you! The bread is in the oven (already I smell it
a-burning), the winter is coming on, and my children lack good
woollen hose and my husband needs a warm coat. I have six vats of ale
all a-brewing, and I have daughters whom I must teach to spin and sew,

and the babies are clinging round my knees. And you ask me why I do
not go abroad to seek for new labours! Godsooth! Would you have me
to leave my household to starve in summer and die of cold in winter,
and my children to go untrained, while I gad about to seek for other
work? A man must have his belly full and his back covered before all
things in life. Who, think you, would spin and bake and brew, and rear
and train my babes, if I went abroad? New labour, indeed, when the
days are not long enough, and I have to toil far into the night! I have no
time to talk with fools! Who will rear and shape the nation if I do not?"
And the young maiden at the cottage door, beside her wheel, asked why
she was content and