children, as well as herself, should be even more severely
pinched by famine. No wonder that they knock at every door where a
little money may be had for a great amount of labor.

But it must be granted, that, if the employments to which American women
are compelled to resort are often severe, and less remunerative than
they ought to be, they are by no means so unsuited to the sex as some
which women are forced into in other countries. Only a few years ago
many thousands of females were working under-ground in the English
coal-mines. When laws were enacted to abolish this unsuitable
employment, they still continued to work at the mouth of the mine, and
are thus employed at this moment. They labor in the coke-works and
coal-pits; they receive the ores at the pit's mouth, and dress and sort
them. The hard nature of the employment may not be actually injurious to
health, yet it quite unsexes them. Their whole demeanor becomes as
coarse and rude as their degrading occupation. As they labor at men's
work, so they wear men's clothing. A stranger would feel sure that they
were men, and it would be by their conversation alone that he could
identify them as women. He would think it strange to hear persons
dressed like men conversing together about their husbands, unless he had
been informed who they were.

A celebrated English author speaks thus particularly of these unhappy
women:--"Some few months since, happening to be in Wigan, my attention
was directed to the, to me, unwonted spectacle of one of those female
colliers returning homewards from her daily labor. It was difficult to
believe that the unwomanly-looking being who passed before me was
actually a female; yet such was the case. Clad in coarse, greasy, and
patched fustian unmentionables and jacket, thick canvas shirt, great
heavy hob-nailed boots, her features completely begrimed with coal-dust,
her hard and horny hands carrying the spade, pick, drinking-tin, sieve,
and other paraphernalia of her occupation, her not irregular features
wearing a bold, defiant expression, and nothing womanly about her except
two or three latent evidences of feminine weakness, in the shape of a
coral necklace, a pair of glittering ear-rings, and a bonnet, which, as
regards shape, size, and color, strongly resembled the fan-tail hat of a
London coal-heaver,--she proceeded unabashed through the crowded
streets, no one appearing to regard the degrading spectacle as being
anything unusual."