w from their husbands. Most of them get a
moderate amount of thrashing in the course of their lives, and take it
much as they take the hardships and poverty of their condition, as a
necessity not to be escaped. The labourer is not downright brutal to his
wife, but he certainly thinks he has a right to chastise her when she
displeases him. Once in authority, the labourer is stern, hard, and
inconsiderate of the feelings of others, and he is in authority in his
own cottage. The wife has been accustomed to such treatment more or less
from her childhood; she has been slapped and banged about at home, and
therefore thinks comparatively little of a blow from her husband's hand.
The man does not mean it so brutally as it appears to outsiders. This
semi-wife-beating is only too prevalent.

Does the incessant labour undergone by an agricultural woman result in
ill effects to her physical frame? The day-work in the fields, the
haymaking, and such labour as is paid for by the day and not by the
piece, cannot do any injury, for it is light, and the hours are short.
In some districts the women do not come before half-past eight, and
leave a little after four, and they have a long hour out for dinner. It
is the piece-work of the corn-harvest that tries the frame, when work
begins at sunrise or shortly after, and lasts till the latest twilight,
and when it is work, real muscular strain. This cannot but leave its
mark. Otherwise the field is not injurious to the woman so far as the
labour is concerned, and the exposure is not so great as has been
supposed, because women are scarcely ever expected to work in wet
weather. The worst of the exposure is probably endured upon the arable
fields in the bitter winds of spring; but this does not last very long.
In what way field-labour is degrading to the women it is difficult to
understand. The only work of a disgusting nature now performed by women
is the beating of clots on pasture-land, and that is quickly over. After
all, there is nothing so very dreadful in it. Stone-picking,
couch-clearing, hoeing, haymaking, reaping, certainly none of these are
in any way disgusting operations. Women do not attend to cattle now. As
to the immorality, undoubtedly a great deal of what is coarse and rude
does pass upon the hayfield, but the hayfield does not originate it; if
the same men and women met elsewhere, the same jokes would be uttered
and conduct indulged in. The position of agricultural women is a