Saturday, May 10, 2008

Women In Italy

1895

In Italy, writes a correspondent, we have seen women not only working in the fields, but carrying bricks and stone and mortar up ladders for the construction of buildings. On the railroad from Brindisi to Naples, in southern Italy, where a tunnel was being repaired, we saw some 40 girls carrying on their heads bushel baskets of mortar and stone from a valley on one side of the track up a steep stairway above the tunnel on the other side. The baskets were filled by men and lifted upon the heads of the girls, who thus had by far the heavier task of carrying the loads up an ascent of 60 feet. Their feet and arms were bare, their faces brown, but they looked cheerful, at least those did who paused in their work to stare at the passing train. Near Paestum "gangs of women were at field work, with a man to oversee them, cracking a long hunting whip."

At Amalfi we saw old women carrying on their backs loads of wood up the long, rocky stairways leading to the Cappuccini Monastery hotel. The wood was 4 feet long, and to all appearances there was nearly a quarter of a cord on each woman's back. In several places in southern Italy we witnessed this almost brutal scene of women bent and staggering beneath loads of wood which they were carrying up the hills. The first feeling one has on seeing women thus employed is of resentment against some one who has forced them to it, but evidently the rough out of door toil is voluntarily assumed, or at least accepted as inevitable.

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