SOURCE: Landry, Donna. “The Resignation of Mary Collier: Some Problems in Feminist Literary History.” In Muses of Resistance: Labouring-Class Women's Poetry in Britain, 1739-1796, pp. 56-77. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

[In the following essay, Landry argues for the importance of Collier's “The Woman's Labour” and discusses how the poet resigned herself to her life of servitude, while at the same time offering resistance to the status quo through a new mode of poetry.]

Tho' She pretends not to the Genius of Mr. Duck, nor hopes to be taken Notice of by the Great, yet her Friends are of Opinion that the Novelty of a Washer-Woman's turning poetess, will procure her some Readers.

(Advertisement to the first edition of The Woman's Labour [1739])

It should be clear that working class women's oppression poses the key theoretical problem here; for unlike women's subordination in feudal society or within the bourgeoisie, it cannot be related to male control of property.¹

(Brenner and Ramas, “Rethinking Women's Oppression”)

Mary Collier appears to have been the first published laboring-class woman poet in England. So far as we know, the publication of her poems brought her little remuneration and no escape from her work as a laundress, housekeeper, and occasional field hand in West Sussex and Hampshire. Her most important poem, “The Woman's Labour: An Epistle To Mr. Stephen Duck” (1739), is beginning to receive some scholarly attention, but until recently she was a poet almost entirely forgotten by literary history.² “The Woman's Labour” is an important text for at least three reasons. First, the poem's appearance as early as 1739 suggests that English laboring- or working-class feminism has a history that predates its usual association with the nineteenth century. Second, the poem demonstrates that a plebeian poet such as Collier can take aesthetic advantage of her distance from the dominant literary culture by ostensibly filling a familiar vessel—the georgic, the neoclassical epistle—with strong new content. And in so doing, she can challenge some of the sexual and socio-political assumptions of the very culture from which she has so skillfully appropriated her aesthetic materials. Finally, the poem articulates an emergent working-class consciousness with an emergent feminist critique of the misogynist tendencies embedded in that consciousness.

“The Woman's Labour” directly redresses traditional historical silences regarding laboring women's oppression; the triple burden of wage labor, housework, and childcare;³ and the gender ideology that places women illusively outside both material production and language. Collier thus rewrites the georgic more radically than Stephen Duck had done in The Thresher's Labour (1736); she definitively alters traditional maps of eighteenth-century literary history. At the same time, there are significant limits to the radical potential of this and other poems by Collier which must be addressed if we are to understand such women's histories in a nuanced way, alert to the often limiting material and social exigencies of their situations. When the woman in question is herself a writer, we can begin by examining the way she figures herself as a writing subject, for the self-who-writes is socially constructed.

In “The Woman's Labour” Collier locates herself quite clearly in relation to the act of writing as well as in relation to the social space from which her writing emerges. At the point of departure for her speculative flight on the prehistoric origins of sexual relations, Collier figures herself as follows:

Oft have I thought as on my Bed I lay,
Eas'd from the tiresome Labours of the Day.(4)

(11-12)

Poor women, taken collectively, may have little time to sleep or dream, as we shall see, but the poet inscribes herself here as conceiving her arguments for verse in repeated moments of meditation that border on dream-work. The source of Collier's productivity as a poet is also the source of her “purity,” as well as her “peace” of mind: her relatively exceptional status as a single woman, without children.⁵ Despite the poverty that so often accompanied life as a single woman in this period, her working life is more circumscribed, her waking hours are less restricted than those of the married majority of her class, the women on whose behalf she writes “The Woman's Labour.” She works only a double (wage labor, housework), not a triple shift. That is presumably the difference that counts for her, that separates her from other working women: her literacy, her talent, her desire to devote her leisure time to books and writing are in a sense supererogatory. If she had a husband and children to tend, her literariness would be effectively cancelled in advance. Such was not the case with Yearsley, who, by the time of her discovery in 1784, had borne seven children, of whom six had survived.⁶ But Yearsley appears to be the exception here. For Collier, as for a significant number of other, particularly lower-class, women writers, the single life was seen as crucial to the liberty of literary production.

The one form of “labor” omitted from Collier's poem is the “labor” of human reproduction as childbirth. In place of the labor of birth, Collier gives us a textualization of women's work as social and material, but not exclusively or primarily biological, reproduction. This she can write about knowledgeably, and link with her literary endeavors. Such general social and cultural work is the compensatory prerogative of the spinster, reputedly always with time on her hands, available for child-minding or night-nursing or more public good causes.⁷

If Collier's talents might have been wasted without leisure, her leisure would certainly have been unrewarding to her without education. Not that she received much; as she writes in “Some Remarks of the Author's Life,” her “poor, but honest” parents taught her to read when “very Young.” But she was never sent to school; at some unspecified time she learned to write “to assist” her memory (p. iii, p. iv). Throughout her life, she claims, reading books and composing verses have been her chief, if not her only, recreation. In “An Epistolary Answer To an Exciseman, Who doubted her being the Author of the Washerwoman's Labour,”⁸ Collier asserts that women's inferior education is the basis of their social subordination, and not merely an effect of it. This poem represents her example of a genre that seems to have been obligatory for laboring-class and many female poets of the period, the poetical self-authentification statement, and as such it serves as a welcome autobiographical moment in an otherwise self-effacing æuvre. Collier closes this text with a mock admission of female idiocy, from which she hopes the exciseman can protect himself, concluding:

Tho' if we Education had
          Which Justly is our due,
I doubt not, many of our Sex
          Might fairly vie with you.

(41-4)

This challenge combines confidence in her sex with a plea for women's education. It is a challenge that assumes education to be an unbiased equalizer between the sexes, something that women have been unjustly denied, and can safely possess; the question of misogyny within traditional erudition itself is not addressed.

Such an assumption marks a limit to the radical potential of Collier's writing; her utopian impulses tend to manifest themselves in an assumed faith in a higher authority that will be capable of rectifying injustices sometime in the future. Here it is education, elsewhere in her work religion or the monarchy. A certain deferral of desire for radical social transformation can read much like a conservative resignation to the status quo, though such a reading would be neither very historically accurate nor responsive to the sexual and social nuances of Collier's texts. So also with Collier's aesthetic achievement. Her subtle innovations and breaks with convention, her skillful appropriation of stock neoclassicism and occasional verse forms, may not seem very daring to modern readers.

“The Woman's Labour,” like Collier's other poems, challenges our institutionalized critical and aesthetic criteria as working-class poetry is likely to do.⁹ We run up against some hard questions about how we define and allocate “literary value,” about the intractable importance of political criteria in our evaluative judgments, about whether or not the establishment of a female (or feminist?) counter-canon is a sufficient or even desirable project for feminist criticism to pursue.¹⁰ If one project of a feminist literary history might be not only to rediscover women's texts that have been forgotten or devalued by the practices and priorities of canon formation, but also to establish a critical and political feminist discourse within which to reach such texts, then it is necessary continually to historicize our own discourse of feminism by learning to recognize its continuities and discontinuities with earlier instances of resistance to oppression. Collier's writing, particularly “The Woman's Labour,” represents an instance of resistance to oppression both gendered and class-based. If elsewhere in her æuvre we confront discontinuities between the analytical categories of much twentieth-century feminism and Collier's own categories, in this poem the continuities seem more powerful.

READING “THE WOMAN'S LABOUR”

To read “The Woman's Labour” is inevitably to confront what crucial determinants class and gender are in any textual production.

No Learning ever was bestow'd on me;
My Life was always spent in Drudgery:
And not alone; alas! with Grief I find,
It is the Portion of poor Woman-kind.

(7-10)

The weighing of class allegiance and female identity is present early in the poem in that ambiguous phrase “poor Woman-kind.” Worthy of pity as a sex or remarkable for their poverty? Are only impoverished women being addressed, because other women have their marriage “portions” to insulate them from drudgery? We may begin by reading according to the code of “pity,” keeping sexual difference to the fore. But without stating anything polemically, Collier manages to convey as the poem unfolds that this is a class issue rather than simply an issue of sexual difference, as a middle-class woman writer would most probably have expressed it. There is an unbridgeable gap between the women of the landowning and employing classes, “our Ladies” (159), and “ourselves.” The lot of “poor Woman-kind” is her theme, and it is one of the themes given least literary treatment in English up to 1739 and for some time afterwards (Defoe notwithstanding). At a crucial moment slightly more than halfway through the poem, Collier's protest against the laboring man's lack of sympathy with or even comprehension of the nature and extent of “women's work” is supplemented by an equally effective critique of the hard-nosed middle-class mistress for whom poor women “char”—do the laundry, polish the pewter, scour the “Pots, Kettles, Sauce-pans, Skillets … / Skimmers and Ladles, and such Trumpery, / Brought in to make complete our Slavery” (210-12). Like Dryden, at moments of high feeling Collier employs the emphatic triplet, which, given her subject-matter, often has the added effect of a sense of labors prolonged, of the rhythms of work as regulated by the sun's movements being violated, all too regularly.

Over against the undeniable hardships and indignities of laboring men's lives, Collier repeatedly asserts the equally never-ending and futile contribution of working-women's labor:

          So the industrious Bees do hourly strive
To bring their Loads of Honey to the Hive;
Their sordid Owners always reap the Gains,
And poorly recompense their Toil and Pains.

(243-46)

The ambiguity of “sordid Owners” here deserves comment, for it is where Collier's protofeminism coincides with her critique of property and class power. Surely (land) “Owners” ought to spring to mind first, so solidly grounded is the text in class consciousness. But a lingering association of women's lot with thankless drudgery may carry from the poem's opening and come to rest here as well. The laboring-class woman is doubly (dis)possessed, her body and her labor owned, but neither acknowledged nor appreciated, by employer and father or husband. Yet it is the hold of gender oppression within the laboring classes that Collier's text sets out to pry loose. Her poem evidences an implicit optimism about redress and improvement where relations between the sexes are concerned. In this, she may be seen to be participating in the discourses of a wider social context in which the debates about middle- and upper-class gender equality and women's fitness for “public” work seem to have been a keen focus of intellectual energy in 1739.¹¹ Class relations, by contrast, remain insuperably in place in Collier's text, criticized as unjust, but not challenged as historically subject to change through political action.

Collier secures her claim to historical truth by means of an appeal to empirical facts, right down to the crucial matter of women's inadequate wages:

And after all our Toil and Labour past,
Six-pence or Eight-pence pays us off at last;
For all our Pains, no Prospect can we see
Attend us, but Old Age and Poverty.

(198-201)

Subsequent research by social historians confirms Collier's testimony.¹² Collier does not stress the sexual differential signalized by the difference between men's and women's wages, but working men and women would be bound to recognize in her “Six-pence or Eight-pence” an allusion to the higher, though still inadequate, wage of a male laborer. How this difference may have functioned to divide the working class, thus effectively diminishing its revolutionary potential, remains a matter of debate.¹³ But Collier, by quietly reminding us of the material facts of working-women's exploitation, also adds a dimension to our understanding of Stephen Duck's scornful attitude towards women workers in The Thresher's Labour, the text that most immediately provoked her into writing. For the wage differential, as a sign of women's symbolic expendability within the work force, might have varied effects in particular historical circumstances. Yet its general function, symbolically, is always to distinguish men from women as agents of material and social (re)production within a class, thus investing this distinction with those residues of power and antagonism that characterize class relations in the society as a whole.

The articulation of protofeminist and laboring-class consciousness in “The Woman's Labour” is not a matter of ostensible content alone. Collier's textual strategies open up questions of aesthetic criteria in a challenging way. Two features of the poem particularly demand an historically informed and theoretically conscious reading if they are not to be undervalued or inadequately understood: the status of “The Woman's Labour” as an epistolary reply to Duck's version of plebeian georgic, and Collier's use of what may seem like rather hackneyed high literary troping. Is Collier's poem in some sense a mere supplementary appendage to Duck's? Does she fail to invent a suitably oppositional discourse of plebeian female—poor woman's—georgic?

It is true that Collier stakes her text on class solidarity with Duck, despite their differences regarding women's contributions to productive labor. We know from “Some Remarks” that she admired Duck and got his poems by heart, but that she fancied “he had been too Severe on the Female Sex.” Less personal pique than the desire to speak out on behalf of the women of her class, to “call,” as she puts it, “an Army of Amazons to vindicate the injured Sex” (p. iv), generated “The Woman's Labour.” In the annals of English plebeian literature, Duck's trajectory as a farm laborer patronized as a poetical prodigy by royalty, given place and pension, and encouraged to enter the clerisy—a social rise that ends enigmatically in suicide—represents laboring-class deracination in an extreme form. Duck had made his mark on the literary scene by mocking the leisured conventions of English pastoral and georgic verse, while dramatizing the experience of agricultural labor as lived. Scything during the hay harvest becomes an epic competition not entirely innocent of Homeric as well as Virgilian overtones:

And now the Field, design'd to try our Might,
At length appears, and meets our longing Sight.
The Grass and Ground we view with careful Eyes,
To see which way the best Advantage lies;
And, Hero-like, each claims the foremost Place.
At first our Labour seems a sportive Race:
With rapid Force our sharpen'd Blades we drive,
Strain ev'ry Nerve, and Blow for Blow we give.
All strive to vanquish, tho' the Victor gains
No other Glory, but the greatest pains.(14)

(110-19)

As Raymond Williams has shown, the vigorous colloquial triumph of The Thresher's Labour is followed, ironically, by traditional “high-literary” pastoral rhetoric: “When sooty Pease we thresh” becomes “Of blissful Groves I sing, and flow'ry Plains: / Ye Sylvan Nymphs, assist my rural strains.”¹⁵ Nevertheless, in The Thresher's Labour Duck puts the labor “back” into pastoral verse.¹⁶

In addition to celebrating the dignity of male labor, The Thresher's Labour villifies greedy landlords as well as poking fun at talkative female laborers who treat their occasional employment in the fields as a form of recreation:

Our Master comes, and at his Heels a Throng
Of prattling Females, arm'd with Rake and Prong;
Prepar'd, whilst he is here, to make his Hay;
Or, if he turns his Back, prepar'd to play:
But here, or gone, sure of this Comfort still;
Here's Company, so they may chat their Fill.
Ah! were their Hands so active as their Tongues,
How nimbly then would move the Rakes and Prongs!

(162-9)

Indeed, Duck goes so far as to imply that talking is women's chief activity, apart from cooking, child-minding, and keeping hard-working but exhausted husbands on their toes. Structurally, The Thresher's Labour obliges us to spot the analogy between the epic heroism of the men's competitive scything and the bathos of the women's conversation, which Duck strains to make competitive as well as noisy and nonsensical. After dinner, the female hay-makers continue to sit on the ground and “chat.” The traditional tropes of women's irrational, garrulous behavior, and their inability to “talk sense” while trying to outdo one another in “meaningless” gossip, are obvious enough. But Duck takes a further step of interest to post-Lacanian feminism; he represents women as, metaphorically and temporarily at least, outside the symbolic order of language altogether.

All talk at once; but seeming all to fear,
That what they speak, the rest will hardly hear;
Till by degrees so high their Notes they strain,
A Stander by can nought distinguish plain.
So loud's their Speech, and so confus'd their Noise,
Scarce puzzled Echo can return the Voice.
Yet, spite of this, they bravely all go on;
Each scorns to be, or seem to be, outdone.

(176-83)

Echo, an Ovidian figure for the relative speechlessness with which we are confronted in the “ready-madeness” of language, our imprisonment within a language that can only operate through a subject but cannot be operated autonomously by the subject, is significantly female. Thus Duck casually evokes the longstanding classical association of femininity and exclusion from language-as-power. But these women stand outside even Echo's relation to language; so confused and confusing is their loud noise that it is incapable of recuperation even by a sympathetic female ear. The implication is that what Echo cannot reproduce is not language at all. Duck's inability to understand the hay-makers is a declaration of his linguistic and cultural superiority, his belonging to a realm of “sense” and meaning that laboring men inhabit, but from which their women are excluded.

Thus Duck helps perpetuate the ideological exclusion of his fellow countrywomen from both productive labor and language, at the same time as he transforms the bourgeois pastoral prospect into a worked landscape. It is hardly surprising, then, that when the “thresher poet” is answered by the “washer-woman of Petersfield,” she should take Duck's refusal to “see” women's agricultural labor as, in fact, productive, to be a violation of class loyalty rather than chivalry, good manners, or even good sense.¹⁷ One of her characteristic strategies of refutation turns upon quoting Duck's text in the light of previous pastoral refusals to recognize the contributions of labor to the picturesqueness of the countryside. Where Duck had written of the hay harvest, thus cavalierly cancelling the female hay-makers' sweat and toil,

Next Day the Cocks appear in equal Rows

(202)

Collier counters with:

[We] nimbly turn our Hay upon the Plain;
Nay, rake and prow it in, the Case is clear;
Or how should Cocks in equal Rows appear?

(60-62)

By scorning his female fellow workers, Duck has done violence to their shared occlusion from the bourgeois pastoral prospect. By selectively quoting from Duck's poem, Collier hurls Duck's jibes at his female fellow workers back in his face. By apostrophizing Duck in her opening lines, and using the same couplet form and narrative structure as he does, Collier poetically apprentices herself to Duck, whose plebeian verse has inspired as well as provoked her own:

Immortal Bard! thou Fav'rite of the Nine!
Enrich'd by Peers, advanc'd by Caroline!
Deign to look down on One that's poor and low,
Remembring you yourself was lately so;
Accept these Lines: Alas! what can you have
From her, who ever was, and's still a Slave?

(1-6)

Collier makes the couplet form seem flexible and accommodating, not constraining. With Duck, she helps to constitute the discourse of plebeian georgic by incorporating rural idioms and grammar as well as the subject-matter of work experienced, not observed.

Comparable with her use of her immediate male model is Collier's appropriation of such high-literary tropes as the classical allusion. If Duck relies upon the myth of Sisyphus to convey the working man's ceaseless and ultimately futile round of labor, Collier, as if to fix her image as a washer-woman forever in our minds, invokes Danaus's daughters with their bottomless tubs to fill:¹⁸

While you to Sysiphus yourselves compare,
With Danaus' Daughters we may claim a Share;
For while he labours hard against the Hill,
Bottomless Tubs of Water they must fill.

(239-42)

For the eighteenth-century poet, classical allusions are stock-in-trade; always in stock, as it were; the very stuff of which verses are made. One proves one's competence to compose, recite, write, publish, and have read, verses by acquiring this stock of and in popular neoclassicism. Both Duck and Collier understandably appropriate the classical figures most easily allied with labor; it would seem that they perceived there to be a certain useful congruence between the representation of manual and agricultural work as lived experience in the texts of antiquity and their own. We need not dismiss the engagement with high literary culture as evidence of opportunism or of failed aesthetic invention. There is a sense in which the plebeian classical allusion proposes a reinterpretation of the classical source as having provided a more immediate apprehension of agrarian labor than most literate English people of Collier's time routinely experienced themselves, or than could be conveyed by the classical allusions of privileged georgic. Collier appropriates the myth of Danaus's daughters in order to assert laboring-class women's value, in the only literary terms that would carry in this historical moment, within such a marginal text.

The polemical edge of Collier's text depends not so much on our previous knowledge of Duck's poem, but on the ways Collier, as a voleuse de langue, dismantles and reconstitutes Duck's contemptuous dismissal of female labor through selective quotation within her own text. There is no pretense of either solitary individuality or original genius in Collier's aesthetic; she has adopted a form of dialogue in order to engage in combative persuasion, and so her poem discloses what post-Romantic texts so often deliberately mystify, the necessary intertextuality of all literary enterprise.¹⁹ Without “belaboring” the point, we should also recognize that Duck's own poem, like so many eighteenth-century texts from Pope's satires to the rival novels of Richardson and Fielding, was implicitly intertextual as well, engaging the whole leisured pastoral tradition in order to challenge it: “No Fountains murmur here, no Lambkins play, / No Linnets warble, and no Fields look gay; / 'Tis all a gloomy, melancholy Scene, / Fit only to provoke the Muse's Spleen” (58-61). The difference is that Collier's text addresses Duck's poem specifically and explicitly; Collier does not assume a reified tradition of either misogynist satire or patrician georgic. Her text is thus more immediately and polemically intertextual than his.

It might seem that Duck's traditional description of his fellow country-women as incapable of working hard or speaking sense, though more than capable of generating noise, would undermine Collier's project, despite her skillful intertextual maneuvers. But Collier engages in a strategy invaluable for any form of ideology critique; she attempts to account for Duck's prejudices as the products of an historical process that is by no means inevitable. Adapting the neoclassical commonplace of a mythical Golden Age to protofeminist ends, she speculates that there must have been a more just relation between the sexes at an earlier moment in history: the origin of woman, if divine, could not prove an instance of slavery. There must of necessity have been some historical degeneration from that happy state, so justly designed, in order for human society to have arrived at its present arrangement of female slavery and male arrogance and ingratitude:

Our first Extraction from a Mass refin'd,
Could never be for Slavery design'd;
Till Time and Custom by degrees destroy'd
That happy State our Sex at first enjoy'd.

(13-16)

Historically speaking, then, familiarity bred contempt. Men ceased to honor or praise women as these erotically charged relations grew stalely “customary” over time. By degrees women were degraded to their current status as slaves and drudges. Thus men are not the enemies of women, though they may “enslave” them, but fellow subjects in the realm of physical and historical exigency, also subject to the deformations wrought by living-in-time and being bound by social custom. The forces of deformation may be the same for both sexes, but their effects are clearly asymmetrical, affecting men and women differently. Collier's project is one of radical defamiliarization.²⁰

Collier's method for making Duck's assumptions about female unproductiveness and mindless garrulity seem strange is a simple one. She speaks out against them:

For none but Turks, that ever I could find,
Have Mutes to serve them, or did e'er deny
Their Slaves, at Work, to chat it merrily.(21)
Since you have Liberty to speak your mind,
And are to talk, as well as we, inclin'd,
Why should you thus repine, because that we,
Like you, enjoy that pleasing Liberty?
What! would you lord it quite, and take away
The only Privilege our Sex enjoy?

(66-74)

If the politics of a simple “speaking out” on behalf of women's rights seems a little problematical today,²² we must remember that, for Collier, Duck's dismissal of women's work and women's “noise” warranted just such a direct contradiction. Following in the rationalist tradition of earlier feminists like Astell, Collier writes from the following premise: if a woman addresses the public by writing rationally and eloquently, she may be read, and her audience's consciousness altered accordingly. With such a premise in mind, Collier points to an obvious but often “forgotten” detail about our material history as a species:

And as from us their Being they derive,
They back again should all due Homage give.

(23-24)

To claim that all men owe allegiance to women as to their mothers is to gesture towards the deliberately hyperbolical, a gesture that is the rhetorical opposite of the later rationalist appeal to liberty. Thus Collier prepares the ground for her plain speaking by archly reminding us of reproductive history: women give birth to men, not the other way around. Women's “extraction” from some divinely created substance is a myth; there is more than one way to narrate the “beginnings” of human history. Men, invariably indebted to women for their being, should give women their “due Homage,” not implicitly try to claim the power of “extraction” for themselves alone. Men should not claim, against history and biological necessity, their own self-making, but honor women for it. Unfortunately, their reluctance to pay such homage is understandable within patriarchal social relations; to do so would violate the tradition of female subordination. But Collier's calling attention to the empirical evidence of reproduction, the womb-as-workshop, nevertheless requires some recognition of the prejudicial nature of gender ideology. Collier thus sets out to refute Duck's representation of women as outside material and linguistic production through a powerful combination of personal testimony and reportage.

The central historical subtext of “The Woman's Labour,” and the site of its most telling political intervention, is a theme that both feminist activists and feminist scholars have made all too familiar, that of the triple burden of working women—wage labor, housekeeping, and childcare. This is what gives thematic unity to Collier's narrative, whether the central activity of a passage be hay-making, brewing beer, reaping, gleaning, or washing, and it is also what gives nearly unbearable unity to working-class women's experience historically. Collier's case for women's apparently endless duties, so few of which Duck seems to have noticed, hinges on the difficult necessity of combining child-minding with agricultural work for meagre wages or a portion of the gleanings:

To get a Living we so willing are,
Our tender Babes into the Field we bear,
And wrap them in our Cloaths to keep them warm,
While round about we gather up the Corn;
And often unto them our Course do bend,
To keep them safe, that nothing them offend.

(93-98)

This “divided care” during a day of gleaning might provide a significant portion of the family income. Following Arthur Young, Ivy Pinchbeck reports that “In either case, whether a women's time was spent in working for wages [including reaping, in some districts, though it remained “men's work” in others] or in gleaning, it was generally assumed at the end of the eighteenth century, that the yearly rent of the labourer's cottage was paid by the harvest labours of his wife and children.”²³ And this “divided care” during the day is compounded by the evening's cooking, housekeeping, and childcare. Collier's working women belong to cottager families, for whom housekeeping might well include keeping pigs and other livestock as well as working a small garden: “Bacon and Dumpling in the Pot we boil, / Our Beds we make, our Swine we feed the while” (79-80). As Pinchbeck notes, such female contributions to domestic economy were necessary to supplement inadequate wages, but were rapidly disappearing by the later decades of the eighteenth century.²⁴ Duck and his mates may dream of work at night, but their women hardly have time to sleep, it seems:

You sup, and go to Bed without delay,
And rest yourselves till the ensuing Day;
While we, alas! but little Sleep can have,
Because our froward at Children cry and rave;
Yet, without fail, soon as Day-light doth spring,
We in the Field again our Work begin,
And there, with all our Strength, our Toil renew,
Till Titan's golden Rays have dry'd the Dew;
Then home we go unto our Children dear,
Dress, feed and bring them to the Field with care.

(111-20)

So much “care” suggests another way of understanding the female “prattling” to which Duck objects: such gatherings for gossip and other forms of exchange are an expression of community among these rural women, for whom there are so few opportunities for recreation and amusement.²⁵ In a sense these women have become the custodians of the oral tradition to which their relative exclusion from print culture has increasingly relegated them. Could it be that what Duck cannot (bear to) hear in the women's exchanges is the therapeutic venting of suppressed female resentment against a harsh regimen?

It has been traditional to assume that, while the Stephen Ducks apply themselves to books in the hope of “improvement” through education, their wives are stranded in incomprehension and hostility towards what seems like mere self-indulgence and time-wasting. Before the vogue of the thresher-poet, who among the laboring classes could expect to profit from poetry? The anonymous biographer of Duck in an early pirated edition of his poems claims that Duck received little encouragement in his studies from his wife, who could not see their point and scolded him for neglecting his work.²⁶ Duck's “incomprehension” in the face of the hay-makers' chatter could be read as a resentful trace of a conflict over literary and intellectual ambition enacted within marriages like his, in a social context in which the composition of verses seems to promise little material relief, or indeed any compensation of a sort an uneducated wife would be likely to appreciate.²⁷ But, as Morag Shiach has noticed, we have reason to be suspicious of the characterization of Duck's wife handed down uncritically from one (male) commentator to another, and in the face of some contrary testimony: “It may be that his wife is here used as a condensation of the stupidity and lack of education assumed to attach to her class: Stephen's exceptional nature being constructed in opposition to his wife's.”²⁸ The search for an autobiographical trace in Duck's scornful representation of female laborers may be misguided, but the grounding of his representation in gender ideology and in the cultural differences brought about by its perpetuation seems indisputable.

The agricultural year provides another context for Collier's insistence on historical fact. In Stephen Duck's agricultural year, winter can be dismissed with a single line. But Collier saves her best effects of physical sensation and atmosphere for winter, as if to imply that women go men one better even in this: washing, polishing, and brewing provide a seasonless round of work. The vivid simplicity of her evocation also puts certain passages of James Thomson's Winter in a new light by lending them a certain class-specificity.²⁹ Thomson's berating of the rich for their inhumanity to the poor, already clearly readable as the discourse of a disembodied, disinterested observer rather than a participant in the labor and hardships being described, becomes freshly grounded as the production of a privileged, leisured observer, however sympathetic to those whom his writing represents, and who after Duck and Collier can be seen as capable of self-representation. Rising before dawn in winter, regardless of the weather, Collier's women leave their sleeping men and trudge to the house of local gentry:

When to the House we come where we should go,
How to get in, alas! we do not know:
The Maid quite tir'd with Work the Day before,
O'ercome with Sleep; we standing at the Door
Oppress'd with Cold, and often call in vain,
E're to our Work we can Admittance gain:
But when from Wind and Weather we get in,
Briskly with Courage we our Work begin;
Heaps of fine Linen we before us view,
Whereon to lay our Strength and Patience too;
Cambricks and Muslins, which our Ladies wear,
Laces and Edgings, costly, fine, and rare,
Which must be wash'd with utmost Skill and Care;
…
Now we drive on, resolv'd our Strength to try,
And what we can, we do most willingly;
Until with Heat and Work, 'tis often known,
Not only Sweat, but Blood runs trickling down
Our Wrists and Fingers; still our Work demands
The constant Action of our lab'ring Hands.

(149-87)

The extremes of cold and heat, of hostile weather and frantic domestic industry, always working against time, against the sun's rise, because there is always too much to be done, are features that powerfully evoke a winter of labor. The Virgilian topos of “Now we drive on, resolv'd our Strength to try,” addresses the washing as if it were an epic contest, the women's strength against the task at hand, and not, we notice, the women against each other, as in Duck's description of male competition in scything. And it is labor that requires not merely sweat, but blood.

James Thomson's winter is a season of vast and awful extremes that often mark the limit or the end of labor, mankind defeated by the elements, suffering helplessly. The reason “Why the lone widow and her orphans pined / In starving solitude” while luxury strained “her low thought / To form unreal wants” (1056-59), Thomson tells us, is that such class division within seasonality is natural: “The storms of wintry time will quickly pass, / And one unbounded Spring encircle all” (1068-69). Collier's representation of domestic labor radically undermines such religio-political “consolation.” Thomson's olympian pastoralism, his rapid shifting from the social indictment of poverty to the invocation of nature's grand design, time, and eternity, reveals its ideological limits when read with and against Collier's vindication of women's collective industry.

PATRONAGE AND CONSERVATISM

As we have seen, Collier closes “The Woman's Labour” on a note of resignation, not vindication:

          So the industrious Bees do hourly strive
To bring their Loads of Honey to the Hive;
Their sordid Owners always reap the Gains,
And poorly recompense their Toil and Pains.

(243-46)

For the laboring woman, as for bees (another Virgilian gesture), history is already unjustly determined, at the level of class at least. How unjustly determined, within sexual and familial relations, is a question Collier leaves to her audience.

But if Collier offers us no radical program for change in the poem's conclusion, she nevertheless insists on the historical and empirical acknowledgment of what her text has made painfully visible. “The Woman's Labour” is, in part, a demand for a history in which women can be seen to participate. Collier's neoclassicism should be understood as operating similarly in aesthetic terms, a compromise achieved within the literary and social status quo that grants the writer some imaginative compensation while allowing her to articulate some trenchant social criticism.

If this seems a disappointingly conservative conclusion, we should keep in mind that Collier, like Duck and other plebeian poets, had reason to feel resigned to the fact that her talents were not so much rewarded as exploited by patrons and audiences, whose consciences could be soothed by promoting exceptional ability among the industrious poor. There is a conservative function to the patronage by élites of members of the poor, as examples of extraordinary genius. One might speak of this function as a version of Barthes's “inoculation,” in which a small dose of ideological contradiction, in the guise of some localized injustice or form of “unpleasantness” that arouses indignation, is injected into the social body, neutralizing the threat of an epidemic of social change.³⁰ In this sense, the declaration of Collier's generalized patrons, in the “Advertisement” to the “New Edition” of her Poems, “that had her genius been cultivated, she would have ranked with the greatest poets of this kingdom,”³¹ should be read against the material conditions of patronage of “The Woman's Labour” as Collier describes them in “Some Remarks”: “… at length I comply'd to have it done at my own charge, I lost nothing, neither did I gain much, others run away with the profit” (p. iv).

Collier's patrons' declaration, which simultaneously celebrates and regrets the phenomenon of uncultivated genius, evades the question of the conditions of such cultivation. There is no suggestion that talents like Collier's be encouraged or educated in the future. Nor is a revolution in aesthetics, which would acknowledge the value of laboring-class poetry as such, being proposed. Collier is of literary interest, we must assume, precisely because her genius “remains uncultivated”—she represents the undereducated writer as an object of pathos, not an indictment of social injustice or an enticement to social revolution. The pressure of egalitarian impulses in the discourses of revolution and abolitionism of the 1780s strain this precept of permanent pathos and inferiority to its limit in the case of More's patronage of Yearsley. For Collier, it is enough to have one's exceptional status recognized in however limited a way, to be content with “mere” unlettered prodigiousness, itself something of an emancipatory novelty in 1739 or 1762.

Thus Collier's apparent resignation to an unchanging social order, that can at best be modified in local and temporary ways to render the oppressed some compensation, stands as a figure for her own poetical production. Resigned to class oppression, if not to gender oppression within her class, she offers in “The Woman's Labour” a provisional corrective. Such a gesture eases the burden of plebeian history by subjecting its cultural effects to a certain sardonic scrutiny. Her poetry is not without critical social content, as we have seen, but her protests remain carefully circumscribed and localized rather than becoming radically programmatic. Historically, she accepts her lot, though textually she seeks to argue against the conditions of oppression. By publishing verse at all, she addresses primarily an élite readership, but she never offers to confuse their class with hers, or to become one of them through the act of writing. Her stance of uncultivated genius preserves her class-specificity while securing for her an audience.

We have seen in “The Woman's Labour,” then, that though Collier constructs a class-conscious account of an oppressed “poor Woman-kind,” her stance in relation to political and social authority is vexed, both resistant and resigned. This is even more true of her œuvre as a whole.

Whether the topic be education, marriage, royal dynasticism, or Scriptural history, Collier tends to couple moral reformism with a certain amiable accommodationism, or compliance with the will of the fathers. Thus, when men become kind and virtuous husbands, though not before, women will prefer marriage to spinsterhood.³² Kings should be militantly strong, if not explicitly expansionist, in the name of protestant liberty; royal couples should set the pattern of domestic virtue for their peoples.³³ And women's interests can best be served by a humble commitment to fulfilling God's will, for which they will be rewarded.³⁴ In a sense, then, despite the fact that she speaks on behalf of women like herself, Collier usually writes in a way that is rhetorically “male-identified,” written for a projected audience in which men predominate. This orientation is supported by the limited evidence we have of her relations with patrons. The nine Petersfield residents attesting to her authenticity in the signed statement of September 21, 1739 are all men.³⁵ The respective numbers of male (102) and female (62) subscribers listed in her 1762 Poems, on Several Occasions also support this sense of Collier's projected audience. It is as if the fathers' law superseded and circumscribed any feminist speaking, permitting Collier access to the public on the condition that radically different female desires and recommendations not be featured too prominently in her work.

The paradigmatic text for this strategy is “The Three Wise Sentences, from the First Book of Esdras, Chap. III and IV,” published with, and conservative ballast to, “The Woman's Labour,” encoding an insistent subtext of plebeian female consolation in the Word: the displacement of self for the greater good, the displacement of Woman for the glory of the Father, keeper of Truth. Though “The Woman's Labour” may be Collier's most important poem in literary-historical as well as protofeminist terms, “The Three Wise Sentences” is in at least one way more typical of her collected Poems of 1762. In this text, the discourse of “Woman,” historically and philosophically conceived, is examined for its ideological contradictions only to find itself subsumed within metaphysical, and specifically religious, discourse. This textual maneuver characterizes well Collier's frequent retreats from the potentially radical implications of her subject-matter. The poem begins in the court of Darius, King of Persia, where three favorite youths decide to amuse the king by competing with one another in answering the question, “What, in their Judgments, did in Strength excel / All other Things” (17-18). The first offers “wine,” the second, “the king,” and the third—Zorobabel—“women—except that God's truth is stronger.” Zorobabel's is the winning answer, and as a reward, Zorobabel is granted a wish; ever selfless, the youth asks Darius to fulfill his promise to rebuild Jerusalem, which Darius promptly does. Why did Collier choose to versify this apocryphal text? At the request of a gentlewoman whom she was nursing, Collier tells us in “Some Remarks”: “she and her Friends persuaded me to make Verses on the Wise Sentences, which I did on such Nights as I waited on her” (p. iv). A composition to please the ladies, then, Collier's poem discursively elaborates their power and importance—through the “words” of Zorobabel, a handsome young hero of Judaeo-Christian history, we might add—only to displace these topics for a sermon and a vision of a renovated Jerusalem.

This text helps to indicate the possible functions of religious discourse for Collier and her patrons. Collier represents in this piece of writing a social subjectivity most immediately tailored for her employers' consumption, and it is one in which piety is central. Women's strength is no sooner celebrated—in terms of their production and reproduction, their desirability and influence—than divine knowledge and power are invoked as greater through the logics of divine causality and purity. We can see in this reworking of Esdras on the history and theory of gender relations parallels to Collier's similar resort to Golden Age commonplace and Christian myth in the much more purportedly feminist “The Woman's Labour.” Zorobabel's winning answer contains the following shift from women's power in giving birth to men to the imperial sovereignty of divine “Truth”:

The greatest Heroes that the World can know,
To Women their Original must owe;
The Glory and the Praise of Men they are,
And make the Garments which they daily wear:
Nay, without Women, Men can't be at all,
But soon the Species would to Ruin fall.
…
In Toil and Labour hard he spends the Day,
To gather Wealth, that so he may provide
Treasure to bring unto his dearest Bride:
While other boldly, with a Sword in Hand,
Will cross the Seas, and wander on the Land;
…
How great then He, by whose divine Command,
All Things at first were made, Earth, Sea, and Land!
Strong is the Truth, who did create all Things;
…
Not only strong, but good beyond compare;
…
Whatever Thing is virtuous, good, and great,
In Truth we find it perfect and complete:
Then prais'd be Truth to all Eternity,
In whom alone is Strength and Majesty!

(132-235)

This is exultant piety indeed, capable of consoling the convalescent or soothing a solitary sleeper. It is also a displacement of the discourse of “Woman” as agent of both production and reproduction, indeed also as chief subject of history. Displaced first, we notice, by “man” in his accumulative and imperialist mode, industrious at home or “wandering” armed abroad in search of “Booty” (164) to bestow upon the woman at home. “Woman” is thus transposed from material producer to consumer. This shift happens within vaguely historical syntactic progression: woman's power to give birth and make garments within a “primitive” domestic economy is displaced by her implicitly more “modern” ability to influence the worker and the warrior to exert themselves on her behalf. According to the poem's logic, how much stronger, then, must be the divine agent who created woman! Collier's broaching of socio-sexual injustice here is tentative and highly mediated: Zorobabel as “feminist man,” championing women before a male audience; Collier herself “merely” versifying a text from the fathers for a pious female patron. But even this tentative broaching is soon abandoned for conventional pieties about the “strength” of women's influence and the comfort to be had in the Father's One Truth.

E. P. Thompson has described the function of working-class religion, particularly Methodism and evangelicalism, in the latter part of the eighteenth century as “the chiliasm of despair.”³⁶ Against this interpretation of the function of working-class religion in the period as essentially conservative, H. J. Perkin has argued that the structure of Dissenting religious groups provided the working-class movement with valuable strategies for oppositional organization.³⁷ For Collier, neither a Nonconformist nor an enthusiast, not the hope of spectacular salvation but the certainty of divine truth is invested with desire. In her œuvre the radical possibilities of a discourse of “Woman” are occluded, the question of female subjectivity itself displaced in the name of piety. Her resignation here takes the form of self-displacement as well as self-denial. Rather than pitch hopes on a radical transformation of social relations, apparently unthinkable in 1739, Collier defers her expectation of a joyous Jerusalem until eternity.

For Mary Collier, then, compliance with paternalist authority is legitimated by patriarchal “Truth.” Men as individuals may be queried and challenged, but the Father's Word and the fathers' laws demand submission. Religious discourse subsumes further potentially radical investigation of woman, or women, or plebeian female subjectivity. Collier's resignation of her critical tune for the harmonies of metaphysical truth may represent a form of chiliastic impulse in Thompson's sense. But hers is not the chiliasm of despair; it is, rather, the cautious displacement of utopian impulses onto a desirous metaphysics, if not quite a metaphysics of desire.

When, late in her career, Collier comes to pay homage to Stephen Duck in an elegy, faith in religious authority implicitly sustains her in continued poverty, in the social difference of her fate from Duck's. She mourns her male predecessor as a social wonder—“That wond'rous Man in whom alone did join / A Thresher, Poet, Courtier, and Divine” (5-6).³⁸ The price of his poetic success and consequent social rise, however, is his peace of mind, that possession so celebrated by Collier in “Some Remarks” as attainable in a pious and impoverished single life:

How doubly Blest couldst thou have kept with thee,
The sweet companion of thy Poverty?
That true content and inward peace of mind,
Which in thy humble Cottage thou didst find.
Which oft doth to the poor and mean retreat
But seldom dwells among the Rich, or Great.
The want of wit thy pleasure turnd to pain,
Thy Life a Burthen, and thy Death a Stain.

(19-26)

Collier equates Duck's suicide directly if ambiguously with his social trajectory. In straining after “wit,” Duck turned his poetic labors and his life from pleasures into pain. But was this elusive wit a literary quality, the class-specific requirement of his new discursive situation as a clergyman, a middle-class professional? Or was it rather the practical “mother-wit” that would have enabled him to keep his poor man's peace of mind in spite of his social rise? Collier remains oblique; “wit” here serves as a stress-point in her critique of Duck's career. It is not entirely clear from her poem how she thought Duck came to fail and fall into melancholy, but somewhere we must posit a loss of faith that resulted in a death that is a “Stain,” a wounding of his reputation, a sin, a blot upon the historical record. And it is not apparent what Collier makes of the possibility of any laboring poet surviving a deracination like Duck's, but for her there is no hope of happiness imaginable without religious faith of the sort that enables those who live in “humble Cottages” to maintain that “true content and inward peace of mind” so rare among the privileged, and so crucial to the social incorporation of the disenfranchised.

In Collier's œuvre, questions of class and gender are so strikingly articulated, shown to be working both with and against one another, that even in this act of elegiac homage Collier would seem to remember at some level her original quarrel with Duck. The final lines of “An Elegy Upon Stephen Duck” consist of an ironical reworking of Duck's own simile of female hay-makers reacting to a storm like a flock of birds in The Thresher's Labour. Duck's melancholy comes upon him, in Collier's text, as “naturally” as the women hush up and take cover from the rain in Duck's poem. This intertext from The Thresher's Labour follows immediately upon the Echo passage previously quoted:

Meanwhile the changing Sky begins to lour,
And hollow Winds proclaim a sudden Show'r:
The tattling Crowd can scarce their Garments gain,
Before descends the thick impetuous Rain;
Their noisy Prattle all at once is done,
And to the Hedge they soon for Shelter run.
          Thus have I seen, on a bright Summer's Day,
On some green Brake, a Flock of Sparrows play;
From Twig to Twig, from Bush to Bush they fly;
And with continu'd Chirping fill the Sky:
But, on a sudden, if a Storm appears,
Their chirping Noise no longer dins your Ears:
They fly for Shelter to the thickest Bush;
There silent sit, and All at once is hush.

(184-97)

Collier revises Duck as follows:

So have I Seen in a fair Summers Morn,
Bright Phoebus's Beams the Hills and Dales adorn,
With Flow'rs and Shrubs their fragrant Sweets display,
And Warbling Birds foretell a Chearfull Day:
When on a Sudden some dark Clouds arise,
Obscures the Sun and overspreads the Skies;
The Birds are Silent, plants contract their bloom,
The Glorious Day ends in a dismal gloom.

(27-34)

What are we to make of this ambiguous homage, partly irreverent, partly impertinent, partly obsessive? Duck's “Glorious Day” of literary success and upward social mobility is here neatly “clouded” in the very terms Duck had used to poke fun at and abruptly dismiss his female fellow workers as garrulous, idle, and silly. Even late in her career, Collier continues to be mindful of the example of Duck, who so far as we know never replied to her epistle, though he did subscribe to Mary Leapor's poems. Her text of elegiac homage to him represents a complex configuration of admiration for his success, a desire for class solidarity, and feminist indignation at his prejudices against her sex. Like her contemporaries who pay homage to Pope, Collier praises Duck outright as her single most important poetic influence, while cleverly turning his gender prejudices against him in a gesture which only those readers who know Duck's work as well as she does will recognize. For only they will be fit to judge his achievement fairly, without the class prejudice that Collier understands all too well.

To rise socially by means of the pen, as Duck did, is to embrace deracination, with all of its ambiguous and sometimes destructive consequences. And in the absence of a working-class movement (though the presence of one offers no guarantee of opportunities for intellectual work), the prospect of education or a literary livelihood without a radical deracination like Duck's remains unthinkable. Thus Collier's texts reproduce the ideological contradictions of her situation. Her position on the margins of a literary establishment that can tolerate unlettered genius as a novel commodity permits considerable textual resistance but not open rebellion.

We have seen how skillfully Collier situates her poetry within available genres and conventions while transforming these materials in the interests of a protofeminist and laboring-class social critique: “speaking out” in combative dialogue, making use of female ventriloquism and intertextuality, investing a religiously informed, prophetic future with desire, insisting upon the historical and empirical details of plebeian Englishwomen's experience as a class and as a sex. Coming to terms with Mary Collier's achievement requires a thorough reassessment of our own historically constructed conceptions of literary history, poetic value, and agency. That Collier was able to combine resignation to continued servitude with sufficient literary ambition to reformulate the plebeian georgic mode in the service of laboring women may strike us as paradoxical, but that sense of paradox marks the difference of our historical moment from hers. In the vigor and wit and forceful arguments of Collier's verse lies strong evidence for reconstructing, from the available traces, a plebeian female subjectivity and sense of historical agency in this period that are socially subject and politically subjugated, but by no means incapable of resistance. As Collier's Hannah says of her God in “First Samuel Versified”:

From abject State can raise unto a Throne,
The Earth with all its Kingdoms are his own;

so might we say of Collier's poetry, its reclamation of the handmaid's voice for eighteenth-century print culture.

Notes

1. Johanna Brenner and Maria Ramas, “Rethinking Women's Oppression,” New Left Review 144 (March/April 1984), p. 47, n. 37. This distinction holds so far as landed property or capital is concerned. But there remains a sense in which male control of property in women links the working class with the feudal and bourgeois social formations from which it can otherwise be distinguished. As Keith Thomas puts it, “Fundamentally, female chastity has been seen as a matter of property; not, however, the property of legitimate heirs, but the property of men in women,” “The Double Standard,” Journal of the History of Ideas 20 (1959), pp. 209-10.

2. See Roger Lonsdale's The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth Century Verse (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 325-26, and his Eighteenth Century Women Poets: An Oxford Anthology (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 171-73; and Moira Ferguson's Augustan Reprint 230, The Thresher's Labour (Stephen Duck) and The Woman's Labour (Mary Collier) (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1985) and her First Feminists: British Women Writers 1578-1799 (Bloominton and Old Westbury: Indiana University Press and The Feminist Press, 1985), pp. 257-65. Sheila Rowbotham includes short excerpts from “The Woman's Labour” in Hidden From History: Rediscovering Women In History from the 17th Century to the Present (New York: Pantheon, 1974), pp. 25-26.

3. A point made by Klaus, The Literature of Labour: Two Hundred Years of Working-Class Writing (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985), p. 14. See, for example, Louise A. Tilly and Joan W. Scott, Women, Work, and Family (New York: Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1978).

4. Collier, The Woman's Labour: An Epistle To Mr. Stephen Duck; In Answer to his late Poem, called The Thresher's Labour. To which are added, The Three Wise Sentences, Taken From The First Book of Esdras, Ch. III. and IV (London: Printed for the Author; and Sold by J. Roberts, 1739). I have quoted throughout from the British Library copy (shelfmark 1346.f.17).

5. “Piety, Purity, Peace, and an Old Maid” are the concluding words of Collier's brief autobiography; see “Some Remarks of the Author's Life drawn by herself,” in Poems, on Several Occasions (title-page missing; spine reads: Winchester, 1762), p. v. (British Library shelfmark 11632.f.12.) On the 10 percent of the population who remained single, see Keith Wrightson, English Society 1580-1680 (London: Hutchinson, 1982), pp. 67-68 and Stone, The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England 1500–1800 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1977), p. 652. Single women and widows were the groups most likely to require relief from their parishes. According to Ivy Pinchbeck, “The anxiety shown in some districts [including Sussex, where Collier lived for a number of years] to get single women employed, actually led to the pauperizing of domestic service,” Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution 1750-1850 (1930; London: Virago, 1981), p. 80. See also Pinchbeck, pp. 79-86 and Bridget Hill, Eighteenth-Century Women: An Anthology (London: Allen and Unwin, 1984), pp. 123-34, pp. 156-72.

6. Huntington Library manuscript mo 3986, p. 2, mentions six children, but Mary Waldron in “Ann Yearsley and the Clifton Records” provides evidence for a seventh, Yearsley's first-born son who died in 1779 at the age of four.

7. In “The Sexual Division of Labour in Feudal England,” New Left Review 113-14 (January/April 1979), pp. 147-68, Christopher Middleton has argued, persuasively, that the subordination of women in social formations like that of feudal England did not depend on their biological capacity to reproduce it was “rather the direct, personal servicing of men by women that was the fulcrum of domestic labour—both in and out of marriage,” p. 164. More recently, he has tried to link these insights with evidence from the early modern period in “Women's Labour and the Transition to Pre-Industrial Capitalism,” in Women and Work in Pre-Industrial England, ed. Lindsey Charles and Lorna Duffin (London: Croom Helm, 1985), pp. 181-206.

8. Collier, Poems on Several Occasions, pp. 30-32.

9. See Martha Vicinus, The Industrial Muse: A Study of Nineteenth Century British Working-Class Literature (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1974) for a discussion of how working-class literature is excluded from scholarly “canons of taste,” pp. 1-2, pp. 140-84.

10. For these and related debates, see Michèle Barrett, “Feminism and the Definition of Cultural Politics” in Feminism, Culture and Politics, ed. Rosalind Brunt and Caroline Rowan (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1982), pp. 37-58; and Lillian Robinson, “Treason Our Text: Feminist Challenges to the Literary Canon,” pp. 105-21, and Rosalind Coward, “Are Women's Novels Feminist Novels?” pp. 225-39, both in The New Feminist Criticism, ed. Elaine Showalter (New York: Pantheon, 1985).

11. Relevant texts include: Common Sense: Or, The Englishman's Journal 135 (September 1, 1739); “A new Method for making Women as useful and as capable of maintaining themselves, as the Men are; and consequently preventing their becoming old Maids, or taking ill Courses. By a Lady,” in The Gentleman's Magazine 9 (October 1739), pp. 525-26; and the “Sophia” pamphlets, of disputed authorship, esp. Woman Not Inferior to Man: Or, A short and modest Vindication of the natural Right of the Fair-Sex to a perfect Equality of Power, Dignity, and Esteem, with the Men (1739), collected and republished with two others under the title Beauty's Triumph: Or, The Superiority of the Fair Sex invincibly proved in 1751. Ferguson provides excerpts from the first and third pamphlets in First Feminists, pp. 266-83. See Gerald M. MacLean's introduction to The Woman as Good as The Man, the 1677 English translation of Poullain de la Barre's De l'égalité des deux sexes (1673) (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987), pp. 26-29, for a useful discussion of the “Sophia” controversy. If we go back some months to January 24, 1738, we can include in this debate Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's The Nonsense of Common Sense 6, reprinted in Essays and Poems and Simplicity, a Comedy, ed. Robert Halsband and Isobel Grundy (Oxford: Clarendon), pp. 130-34.

12. What is most remarkable is how little rural women's wages seem to have changed between 1739 and the nineteenth century, given the rise in prices; see Pinchbeck, Women Workers, p. 16, p. 19, p. 24, pp. 53-66, pp. 94-99. As late as 1843, in Wiltshire, Dorset, Devon, and Somerset, the average women's wage remained “six-pence or eight-pence” a day in winter, p. 95.

13. Pinchbeck describes this differential in some detail, especially in relation to amendments in the Poor Laws, without pronouncing on its psychological or political effects in Women Workers, pp. 84-102. More recent feminist accounts, making use of twentieth- as well as nineteenth-century data, admit certain social, political, and psycho-sexual effects of this gender-based competition into their analyses, but do not necessarily agree about their specificity. See, for example, Michèle Barrett, Women's Oppression Today: Problems in Marxist Feminist Analysis (London: Verso, 1980), pp. 152-86; Brenner and Ramas, “Rethinking Women's Oppression,” p. 47; Barrett's reply in New Left Review 146 (July/August 1984), pp. 123-28; Angela Weir and Elizabeth Wilson, “The British Women's Movement,” New Left Review 148 (November/December 1984), p. 95.

14. Stephen Duck, The Thresher's Labour, in the first authorized edition of Poems On Several Occasions (London: Printed for the Author, 1736). On the gendered division of labor in agricultural work (and the symbolically masculine significance of the scythe), see Michael Roberts, “Sickles and Scythes: Women's Work and Men's Work at Harvest Time,” History Workshop Journal 7 (Spring 1979), pp. 3-28; and his “‘Words They Are Women, And Deeds They Are Men’: Images of Work and Gender in Early Modern England” in Charles and Duffin (eds.), Women and Work in Pre-Industrial England, pp. 122-80.

15. See Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), pp. 88-89.

16. Not that it had ever really “been” there in the first place, as James G. Turner has amply demonstrated in The Politics of Landscape: Rural Scenery and Society in English Poetry 1630–1660 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979); see esp. his chapter on “The Vanishing Swain,” pp. 173-85.

17. In The Literature of Labour, Klaus suggests that in addressing Duck, “who quite obviously did not include the female agricultural workers in his ‘we’, Collier tentatively approaches another form of solidarity: a sisterhood of the poor, of working women,” p. 15. In “Stephen Duck and Mary Collier: Plebejische Kontro-Verse über Frauenarbeit vor 250 Jahren,” Gulliver 10 (1981), p. 121, Klaus claims that Collier's use of “we” is inconsistent, but it seems to me that in every case she uses it to refer quite precisely to working-class women; I am indebted to Jerold C. Frakes for help with translation here.

18. Similarly, Yearsley closes the “Prologue” to Earl Goodwin, An Historical Play (London: G. G. J. and J. Robinson, 1791) with a reminder of her former, non-literary source of income, to which she can return if the play fails: “That voice, ye patrons of the Muse, is yours / But if e'en there, her airy visions fail, / Her last best refuge is her—milking pail.”

19. See Julia Kristeva's Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon S. Roudiez, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), p. 15 and passim. The radical possibilities of the “dialogic” mode have entered critical discourse primarily by way of Mikhail Bakhtin's The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981).

20. This concept of “defamiliarization” or ostraneniye (making strange) is elaborated by the Russian formalist Victor Shklovsky in “Art as Technique” in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), pp. 3-24.

21. Collier's reliance here upon the racist trope of the liberty denying “otherness” of the Turks is typical of British assumptions in the period, with the notable exception of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Turkish Embassy Letters. For more on the “Turkish prejudice,” see chapter 7.

22. The feminist critique of the politics of “the authentic voice” is indebted to the work of Foucault. In a culture in which sexuality, far from being silenced, has been enjoined to speak, to speak “as a woman” is to risk playing into the oppressive forces of power one wishes to challenge. See in Feminism & Foucault: Reflections on Resistance, ed. Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988) the essays by Mary Lydon, “Foucault and Feminism: A Romance of Many Dimensions,” pp. 135-47, Winifred Woodhull, “Sexuality, Power, and the Question of Rape,” pp. 167-76, and Biddy Martin, “Feminism, Criticism, and Foucault,” pp. 3-19.

23. See Pinchbeck, Women Workers, pp. 56-57. Interestingly, regarding the “divided care” necessitated by bringing infants to the fields, Pinchbeck cites a Sussex example: according to a Poor Law Commissioners' report of 1835, “‘the custom of the mother of a family carrying her infant with her in its cradle into the field, rather than lose the opportunity of adding her earnings to the general stock, though partially practised before, is becoming very much more general now,’” p. 85.

24. See Pinchbeck, Women Workers, pp. 19-26.

25. As Barry Reay argues, “Much of women's labour was domestic, and collective, so presumably the entry points for this almost invisible cultural world are the places where, or the times when, women gathered,” “Introduction” to Popular Culture in Seventeenth-Century England (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985), p. 12. See also Peter Burke, in Popular Culture, p. 50 and Alice Clark, Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (1919; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), p. xxxiv (“Introduction” by Miranda Chaytor and Jane Lewis), p. 51.

26. See “Some Account Of The Author's Life,” in Poems on Several Subjects: Written by Stephen Duck, Lately a poor Thresher in a Barn in the County of Wilts, at the Wages of Four Shillings and Six Pence per Week (London: Printed for J. Roberts, 1730), pp. iv-v, in which it is insinuated that male working-class literary constitutes a kind of sexual impotence: “The courteous Reader must be inform'd, that our Poet is to be unhappily number'd amongst those Men, whose Learning and fine Parts are not able to give their Yoke-mates that Satisfaction and Content, which a weak Mind with a vigorous Constitution is generally apt to do. … [Duck went on writing and burning his work] and his Wife continually scolding, because he neglected his Labour: And when he was Scanning his Lines, she would oftentimes run out and raise the whole Neighbourhood, telling the People, That Her Husband dealt with the Devil, and was going mad because he did nothing all day but talk to himself, and tell his Fingers.” Duck himself refers to this biographical sketch as “a very false Account” in the preface to Poems on Several Occasions, p. ix, without specifying any particular inaccuracies.

27. In The Lives Of Our Uneducated Poets, Southey comments as follows on Duck's marriage, presumably with reference to the account of Duck in the pirated edition: “It appears that he met with little encouragement for his intellectual ambition from his wife, nor was it likely that he should. … It was his lot at this time to be duck-peck'd by his lawful wife, who held herself to be lawful mistress also, and told all the neighbourhood that her husband dealt with the devil, or was going mad, for he did nothing but talk to himself and tell his fingers. Probably she acquitted the devil of any share in her husband's aberrations, and became reconciled to his conduct when she found that he began to be favourably noticed by persons in a higher station,” p. 89, p. 93.

28. Morag Shiach, Discourse on Popular Culture: Class, Gender, and History in the Analysis of Popular Culture (Oxford: Polity Press, 1989) p. 50. There is no evidence for these hostile gender stereotypes except for the “Life” which was published in the pirated editions of Duck's poems. Shiach cites Dr. Alured Clarke, one of Duck's patrons, to the contrary: “‘He speaks so well of his wife, that I believe it would give him pain to see so indifferent a character of her in writing,’” p. 50.

29. The contrast with Thomson seems almost obligatory; Klaus contrasts Duck and Thomson in The Literature of Labour, p. 13. Quotations from Thomson's The Seasons are taken from J. Logie Robertson's edition (London: Oxford University Press, 1908).

30. See Roland Barthes, “Operation Margarine,” in Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), pp. 41-42.

31. Collier, The Poems of Mary Collier, the Washerwoman of Petersfield; To which is prefixed her Life, Drawn By Herself. A New Edition (Petersfield: W. Minchin, n.d.), “Advertisement,” p. iii. (British Library shelfmark 11657.de.53.)

32. As in Collier, Poems, on Several Occasions, The Happy Husband, And The Old Batchelor. A Dialogue, pp. 33-40; “A Gentleman's Request to the Author on Reading The Happy Husband and the Old Batchelor,” p. 41; and Spectator Vol. the Fifth. Numb. 375. Versified, pp. 54-59.

33. As in Collier, Poems, on Several Occasions, “On The Marriage of George the Third. Wrote in the Seventy-Second year of her Age,” pp. 60-62.

34. As in Collier, Poems, on Several Occasions, The First and Second Chapters of the First Book of Samuel Versified, pp. 42-49.

35. Appended to the third edition of Collier, The Woman's Labour and The Three Wise Sentences (London: Printed for the Author; and Sold by J. Roberts, 1740), as the final page—p. 32. (British Library shelfmark 1509 / 4592.) Also reprinted, as an appendage to the “Advertisement To The First Edition” in The Poems of Mary Collier … A New Edition, p. vi. (British Library shelfmark 11657.de.53.)

36. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, (London: Gollancz, 1963), pp. 419-27.

37. H. J. Perkin, The Origins of Modern British Society, 1780-1880 (London and Toronto: Routledge & Kegan Paul and University of Toronto Press, 1969), p. 196, pp. 247-64. For a brief airing of the arguments on both sides, see Edward Royle and James Walvin, English Radicals and Reformers 1760-1848 (Lexington, Ky.: The University Press of Kentucky, 1982), pp. 183-85.

38. Collier, “An Elegy Upon Stephen Duck,” Poems on Several Occasions, pp. 50-51.