The Grain Sifter And The Ironers

“Male and female represent the two sides of the great radical dualism,” wrote American journalist and women’s rights advocate Margaret Fuller in 1843, “there is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman... Nature provides exceptions to every rule.” (((Margaret Fuller, Jeffrey Steele, The Essential Margaret Fuller, Page 310, American Women Writers, 1992))). Her statement during the mid-nineteenth-century was symptomatic of the changing dynamics of the traditional household and workplace in Western Europe and North America as a result of rapid industrialisation, and improvements in education and medical standards. This essay will discuss how women who took part in this transformation and ventured into the workplace – usually in low-skilled

In The Grain Sifter and The Ironers, it’s noticeable how one of the women is seen to be tired and stressed, while the other female is straining as she works – both reflecting the heavy workload for women. In The Gleaners, two of the women are stiffly over towards the ground with one arm behind their back and their heads hanging limply. A third lady is raised slightly above the pair in a forward bent over position. Millet uses block colouring and creates the feeling of the three figures being dense. He uses earthy colours such as brown, stocky thick bodily shapes and composes the figures so that they don’t break into the upper half of the painting to alter the viewer’s perception of gravity. This is results in making the figures seem weighed down, with heaviness perhaps being instigated by the extreme pressure of working women to maintain their home and work lives. The same earth which the female gleaners need to pillage the produce to feed themselves and their families, the Millet painting almost depicts them being sunk in the turf, rooted in an endless cycle of gleaning, as the mass clouds of industrialisation approaches threatening opportunities for gleaners. With increased demand from the urban cities for wheat and coin, the pressure on farmers to improve productivity was immense, sparking the increased prevalence of scythes throughout the nineteenth-century. In 1836, 44% of Doub’s farmland totalled 216,513 hectares was saved for cereals – with nearly half being for wheat – underlining the scale of the demand. [http://www.princeton.edu/rpds/papers/WP_12.pdf]. Therefore with the increased efficiency on plots, there were much less crops available to pick off land for gleaners’ role a hard one. The effect on women is almost doubled, Karen Sayer argued, as gleaning was often one of the number of different unpaid work they would do on the farm, in addition to caring for their