One hundred years ago
The right of the 'pit-girls' of Lan- cashire to work for their living, which is just coming up before Parliament, in- volves a great many more fates than their own. It is the test-case by which, in all human probability, the right of women to perform rough manual labour for wages and out of doors, will for a long period be decided. . . . There is no reason whatever in nature or in civilisa- tion why women should not do dirty work as well as men. Their health is not injured by dirt any more than that of men; they can clean themselves when work is over just as easily; and they are, from natural human instinct, about three times as likely to do it. As all outdoor labour is dirty, this objection is fatal to all such work for women; and as a matter of fact, screening coal with light picks, and pushing it down from platforms into trucks, which is substan- tially what the pit-girls do, is not espe- cially dirty work. It looks dirty from the colour of the coal-powder; but coal is only fossil wood, and the dust does not stick half so long as the wet clay of the brick-yards, or the damp mould of the ploughed fields when women are weed- ing. The coal-dust does not poison them, as the dust from filings does; nor does it give them rheumatism, as the brick-clay does; nor does it 'break their backs,' like weeding in the furrows. Women must face dirt like men.
Spectator, 27 March 1886
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