A German Pastoral Scene.
By J. K. McLean
We entered the district on a lovely June afternoon from the railway village of Offenburg, not far from Strasburg. We had been for days upon the broad and fertile Rhine plain. Now, through a narrow but cultivated and beautiful valley, we turned squarely away from the plain, and made a steep railway ascent into the heart of the Black Forest. The valley traversed by our train was inclosed by gently-sloping mountains, forest-capped at top, but vine-clad on the slopes, and with rich intervale meadows lying between. It was just in the full tide of hay harvest. The meadows fairly swarmed with men, women, children, and cows, with here and there a bullock or a horse, engaged in securing the precious crop. We were interested to observe the proportion of women among the laborers. More than half were of the gentler sex. By actual count for an hour, where the meadows were most populous, there were five women to four men at work in the hay fields, and about seven cows to two oxen or bullocks. Horses were very few. These women were doing not only the lighter, but all kinds of heavy work, mowing, raking, pitching, and particularly carrying the gathered hay on their heads and backs in huge bundles to the distant barns. I am sure I have seen five hundred women this summer, many more than that, in fact, gathering up immense burdens of hay and grain, posing them upon their neck, shoulders and back, and trudging away with them, often up the steepest of hillsides, toward a barn a half mile or a mile away. Wherever we were in Belgium, Holland, Germany, Switzerland and France, women engage in equal numbers with men in all forms of outdoor labor. The cows also take their full share with oxen in field and furrow. We have seen cows drawing the plow, hauling hay, and harnessed in with mules, donkeys or horses as regular draft beasts upon the highways. In some instances we have seen a cow and a man harnessed in as a pair; a mule and a woman; a steer and a horse; a boy or girl and a dog. Equal rights as between the sexes, and as between the species also, seem to have attained full swing in those parts, so far at least as the right to labor is concerned. Nowhere have we seen any labor-saving farm machinery. In ten thousand acres of hay and grain field not one single mowing machine or harvester, and not even a horse hay rake nor a cradle. The scythes are rude and clumsy affairs, both as to blade and snath. The same apparently in make which were used five hundred years ago. Most of the women were spreading and turning hay with a forked stick instead of a steel fork. The plows—well they were of the same pattern presumably which Noah had in the ark, at least they looked so. Of course there is reason for this lack of progress in farming utensils. Most of these hay and grain fields are not fields at all, only patches. When a family raises six kinds of growth on a half or third of an acre of land, there is neither call nor room for much labor-saving machinery. Most of these fields would lack room for turning a four-horse reaper round upon. Labor is the one cheap thing in all these lands, and the laborer is a beast of burden. These field-working women are stiff, stubbed,589bent, and calloused. They clump along in wooden clogs, are stunted in size, sallow and wrinkled in face, awkward in movement, and are not very prepossessing in appearance anyhow. They may be good. I think they are. But they are not graceful.—Rev. J. K. McLean, in Oakland Tribune.