tions. They
might buy at a shop many things which their mothers had had to make; but
there was no going to a shop to get the washing and scrubbing done, the
beds made, the food cooked, the clothes mended. All this remained to the
women as before. When they came home from the fields--at first it was
principally by field-work that they earned wages--it was not to be at
leisure, but to fall-to again on these domestic doings, just as if there
had been no change, just as if they were peasant women still.

And yet, though this work had not changed, there was henceforth a vast
difference in its meaning to the women. To approach it in the true
peasant or cottage woman's temper was impossible; nor in doing it might
the labourer's wife enjoy half the satisfaction that had rewarded the
fatigue of her mother and grandmother. Something dropped away from it
that could not be replaced when the old conditions died out.

To discover what the "something" was, one need not idealize those old
conditions. It would be a mistake to suppose that the peasant economy,
as practised in this valley, was nearly so good a thing for women as it
was for the other sex; a mistake to think that their life was all honey,
all simple sweetness and light, all an idyll of samplers and geraniums
in cottage windows. On the contrary, I believe that very often it grew
intensely ugly, and was as narrowing as it was ugly. The women saw
nothing, and learnt nothing, of the outer world; and, in their own
world, they saw and learnt much that was ill. All the brutalities
connected with getting a living on peasant terms tended to coarsen
them--the cruelties of men to one another, the horrors that had to be
inflicted on animals, the miseries of disease suffered by ignorant human
beings. Their perpetual attention to material cares tended to make them
materialized and sordid; they grew callous; there was no room to
cultivate delicacy of imagination. All this you must admit into the
picture of the peasant woman's life, if you would try to see it fairly
on the bad side as well as on the good side. Still, a good side there
was, and that it was far oftener in evidence than the other I am well
persuaded, when I remember the older village women who are dead now.
They, so masculine in their outlook, yet so true-hearted and, now and
then, so full of womanly tenderness and high feeling, could not have
been the product of conditions that were often evil. And one merit in
particular m