Rensselaer Union, Volume 7, Number 33, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 May 1875 — Women as Laborers. [ARTICLE]

Women as Laborers.

Ik Russia to-day, outof an .agricultural population of 26,312,435, 98 per cent, are women; in Prussia from a population of 3,286,954 employed in agriculture the percentage is 47. You cannot travel anywhere .upon the continent of Europe without beholding in the fields sights which would bring a blush upon the cheeks of American manhood. In the beautiful lands -where nature has shed her fairest blessings you can see the women, coarsehanded and large-boned, turned to men, toilirtg.from early sun to nightfall, enduring exposure and hardship which soon rob them of all charm, turningthem into ugly, coarse, repulsive beings, whose only thought is how to live, whose only hope to die. \- > . We are supposed in the United States to treat our women too much as dolls, and are constantly being reminded by the robust school of moralists of the hardy women of Europe and the healthy nature of their children. Mr. .Alexander Delmar has taken some trouble to reach the truth of this matter, and liis conclusions, as expressed in the current number of Lippincott's Magazine , very clearly prove that, instead of these women being the models we are led to suppose, they are the most -wretched, pitiable beings on the face of the earth, far greater objects of pity than the poorest negro that ever worked on a plantation. Mr. Delmar confines Ids observations to Russia and Prussia; had lie extended his travels through the agricultural districts of England, Ireland and Scotland he might have seen the same thing, only intensified by the fact that these countries are supposed to possess superior benefits in the way of enlightenment and cultivation. The most melancholy pictures of female abasement are of course to be found in Russia, where the serfs, ever since their emancipation, are in some districts little better off than dogs. The principal object of the Russian is to pay off his quit rent and taxes. To do this.lie has sometimes to sell his daughter to ruin, and to send his wife, ill or well, into the fields. She will leave her child, with a vessel full of milk attached touts mouth, travel mdes to reach the ground, set to work with the energy of .despair, toil until her hands have become hard as iron, her face coarse and masculine, all the woman unsexed within her, and she has learned to drink and swear with the best of them. Upon one side there .is presented labor from which the strongest man might shrink, on the other starvation, or the sale of all the hard-earned little household gods. It is scarcely to be wondered that these amazons, ground down, unsexed, reduced to the condition of feasts of burden, should become ignorant, licentious, even vicious. Children in Russia die in hundreds from sheer want of nutriment; infanticide is only too common, and large numbers of the men are afflicted with disease or deformity, entirely the result of early neglect. Out of 10,000 children born, 5,537 die during their first month. So much for the robust theory. While exercise in the open air, and plenty of it, is necessary for woman as well as man, her employments should he in-doors, and of the lightest character. Great, muscular, stupid, coarse-looking women mas suit the tastes of European ignorance; we are iiappy to think that a freer and more enlightened policy has given ustjbe feminine graces of form ana the higher intellectual culture of the women of the United States. —Chicago Inter-Ocean.