The Employments of Women: A Cyclopædia of Woman's WorkPenny, Virginia
General
The Employments of Women: A Cyclopædia of Woman's Work
Penny, Virginia
Women -- Employment
in the grinding, as the stones are kept wet all the time. But the dust
used in nipping glass and stones is injurious to the lungs. When a man
has been nipping all day, his nostrils are nearly closed. The amount of
work depends on fashion. There are seven establishments in Providence,
and the work is done by steam. Some stones cannot be cut by steam
machinery, as the wheel must every few seconds be graduated in motion.
In hard times, the jewelry business and employments connected therewith
are dull, as people dispense with superfluities. Southerners buy most
jewelry, but now they do not indulge in such purchases.
=56. Landscape Gardeners.= Mrs. R. often goes and looks at gardens,
directs how to lay them out, and what to buy for them. She then orders
the plants of others, and sells on commission, having them arranged
according to her own taste, influenced by that of the purchaser. Her
purchases are made of a German, living some distance from town, who can
raise them cheaper than she could in the city. Her compensation, of
course, varies greatly. A landscape gardener writes: "What a lady could
do as landscape gardener at the West, I do not know. I am rather
inclined to doubt her success at the East. It would require too much
time and space to enter here into the details of what are required to
constitute a landscape gardener: First, one must have a decided love for
it, and a willingness to sacrifice much to the pleasure of the
occupation. Nor can I say a great deal in favor of the profits. I have
never been able to make a living by the profession, although I have
often thought if I had gone to New York, or farther West, the case might
have been different. In pages 381 and 382 of 'Country Life,' and in many
other parts of the book, you will see what I consider essential to the
making up and preparation of a landscape gardener, and better expressed
than I can condense into a letter." Mr. C., of Massachusetts, writes: "I
have never known a lady to undertake the profession of landscape
gardening; and much of the labor which I find it necessary to perform,
would be impossible for a lady. Still, there is much in which female
taste would find abundant field for exertion, if the labor could be so
divided as to make it profitable. My first work on any estate is to make
an accurate topographical survey of the ground, and draw a plan of it in
its natural state, and then proceed to make my designs for its
arrangement; and when that is done, if required, I undertake the
superintendence of the work at the ground. A lady would have to employ a
surveyor, in the first place, and would labor under many disadvantages
in directing the operations upon grounds; and, to judge from my own
experience, the business could not be made profitable under such
circumstances. Loudon's 'Encyclopædia of Gardening' will give the best
directions I know of for the necessary operations of designing and
executing plans, and Downing's work, with Sargent's appendix, comprises
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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