Village women
The women play a great part in village politics. They do a lot of the organizing and if their men hold trade-union offices or party positions, they will do all the writing for them. The women are political because it is they who spend the wages. A man will take his wage and think it fair enough but his wife will have a weekly experience of how inadequate it is. She soon comes to understand that it is this constant just-too-little money which must always keep the family static. The Women’s Institute has educated the village women. Women like organizations. They like committees for this and sub-committees for that. They don’t care what they say to each other when they are on a committee and when they come to a unanimous resolution about something – it has to be done! The women never lost their independence during the bad days as the men did. The men were beaten because the farms took every ounce of their physical strength and, as they had no great mental strength because of lack of education, they were left with nothing. Their physical strength was their pride and as soon as it was gone they became timid. It was the farm versus their bodies, and the farm always won. The farms used to swallow up men as they swallowed up muck and the men realized this quite early on in their lives. Things are different now, of course, but there is a legacy of beaten men in the Suffolk villages. Some of these men are surprisingly young. You don’t find women in this condition, no matter how hard their lives have been.
Akenfield by Ronald Blythe (BrE)
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