Woman's Work
MaggieWentworth pulled the heavy iron cart through the packed-dirt tunnel. The cart's rusted wheels whined on the corroded metal track that stretched into darkness before and behind her. She could feel the hard leather strap dig into the flesh of her thighs, and her back ached with the pressure. This was a heavy load, fit more for a hardened man than for a woman not bred for this kind of labor. The overseer at the mine was feeling particularly vindictive that day to have given her a load like this. Maggie had refused his lewd advances the morning before, and so today, the coal in her cart was piled high, and she was pulling it on her hands and knees over the rough dirt through one of the tightest shafts in Crestford Mine.
It had only been a few months since Maggie came to work at Crestford. In that little time, she had managed to alienate herself both from the overseer as well as from the other cart haulers, who were mostly young boys or young women like herself. But Maggie wasn't surprised at her current situation. Having grown up in a rural village quite a distance from Crestford Mine, and spending most of her time outdoors among other healthy, vibrant village girls and boys, she would have thought it unusual if she had made friends here. Fenton, her home village, had avoided some of the worst effects of an industrializing country: factories and mines, and the gaunt, distorted laborers who worked them, were virtually unknown there. Most villagers in her town sharecropped at the local farms, which they had operated for generation upon generation, except of course those that had been forced from such work by the rapidly dwindling communal farmland, another product of the changing economy. Or they labored at a small mill nearby, operated by Mr. Ghent, a kindly old man hardly known for his exploitative labor conditions. For the people of Crestford, though, there was no choice but mine work. To them, Fenton was like an unattainable paradise. And Maggie, with her pious, high-minded manner and soft, pretty country features, struck jarringly on the rough, begrimed characters of Crestford.
From the beginning, she was a target of their jeers and ridicules. She had never heard such language as the men used, and was shocked to hear the young girls and boys following their example. They impugned her virtue. They called her slut and tramp, and took bets on how long her fair features would last down in there in the dark, where most worked as many as 15 or 16 hours a day. And they mocked her when she would express her moral outrage at their behavior, and cite scripture at them or warn them of the danger to their eternal souls. Most of them, though, had hardly heard the words of the Bible. Churchgoing was irregular at best in Crestford, and Sunday Schools for the children were nonexistent. It was a hard fact for Maggie, who had grown up in a staunchly religious environment.
Worst of all, the harassment didn't stop at rough or irreligious talk. As the men grew bolder, especially with the realization that Maggie had no relations to protect her, they began harassing her bodily as well. It was dark in the mine, and quarters were close. The men could well get away with inappropriate contact if they wanted to, and they did more and more these days. The boys, too, seeing their fathers and brothers pinch and squeeze the "country slut" Maggie, soon followed suit. Maggie, in whose mind this sort of immoral abuse was as if she herself was committing immoral acts, sorely felt her precarious position, and prayed to God and her savior Jesus Christ to deliver her from this heathen place.
No, Maggie wasn't brought up for this sort of work or lifestyle. In fact, her father had been a respectable tailor in Fenton. Maggie was likely to be married to a solidly middle-class professional man, and so had not been brought up to any particular trade. Her father had been courting the son of the local banker for Maggie, a young Mr. Dunby, whom Maggie thought so dashing in his riding coat and handsome breeches that she would blush when he came for dinner or met her in the street. But dreams of being Mrs. Dunby dissolved barely six months ago. Her father had died suddenly of a heart ailment, and had left his wife and only daughter only debtors' notes at the bank and unpaid bills. Of course, like any well-bred daughter of a respectable tradesman, Maggie could sing and play piano and knit, but these things didn't translate as easily into ready money as they did into the possibility of future matrimony. Thus, having no income, she and her mother were thrown on the local parish for relief, which in better times would have supplied them with enough money perhaps to set up Maggie as a schoolmaster's apprentice. But times were hard: local magistrates were becoming stingier with parish funds.
Soon after, Maggie and her mother found work at a local dressmaker's, but her mother was not a robust woman, and the long hours and close work inflamed her arthritis until she couldn't use her hands after just a month. Unable to afford both of them on her small income, Maggie's mother was forced to enter the parish workhouse. Mrs. Wentworth toiled there for two months, where the indifferent workhouse Guardian had her pulling oakum. She soon fell ill from the damp, unwholesome conditions. The last Maggie heard was that she lay dying of a fever in the sick ward, and would most likely receive a pauper burial. This was too much to deal with for Maggie, who loved her mother dearly. The final blow, however, came when Maggie's employer suddenly closed her shop, throwing all the girls out of work. Times were tight, and local employment scarce, so Maggie, friendless and penniless, went the only place she could to make a shilling: the Crestford mine. Crestford was always looking for laborers: no one lasted long there.
Maggie had heard tales of mine work, of the hot and close quarters of the shafts, of men working without shirts, and sometimes women, too. She had heard of the immoral practices that sometimes went on in deep in the mines, of men and women forced into close contact, of flesh on flesh, and even of relations between the men and women. Like animals, she had thought: Christian men and women of England forced into slavery and into depraved conditions.
