Dr. Johnson's London: Coffee-Houses and Climbing Boys, Medicine, Toothpaste and Gin, Poverty and Press-Gangs, Freakshows and Female Education by Liza Picard

Author:Liza Picard [Picard, Liza]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2014-01-28T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 18

A Woman’s World

‘Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasures’: Dr Johnson.1

Emigration

There have nearly always been surplus women. In some societies, the problem is solved by marrying them. Henry VIII went in for serial marriage, but not every man has his capacity to dispose of unwanted wives. Another expedient is to export them. Out of sight, out of mind. In 1746 ‘a great number of women have enlisted on board the fleet bound for Cape Breton [now Halifax, Nova Scotia, in Canada], and continue to enter daily. They are given £10 each and their provision during the passage, and when they arrive are to receive further encouragement.’2 By July of that year, 6,000 had already gone, and another 10,000 were going in the next sailing.3 If they missed that boat, they could always realise their own capital worth. In 1752, twenty women sold themselves for four years to a captain bound for Philadelphia. ‘As women are wanted in our colonies, and we abound with them here, it is thought that none of them will come back.’4 If they could raise £1,000 – an impossibly large sum in those days – they should try America,

there existing scarcely any employment to which they can now turn themselves, the very few that decency and policy had set aside for their sex being usurped by a flight of commercial hermaphrodites [this does seem unfair, hermaphrodites having the best of both worlds] … It is incontestable that about £1,000 industriously employed in America on the quantity of land that the Provincial Governor is instructed to give to a settler so qualified will ensure an immediate subsistence and lay the foundation of wealth.5

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