The Woman's Labour: An Epistle to Mr Stephen Duck

Eighteenth-century poetry was dominated by men of education and wealth, and bookcases sagged under the weight of volumes by Swift, Johnson and Pope. When Stephen Duck's The Thresher's Labour was published in 1730, however, it was a sensation – highlighting the plight of the working class in verse was hereto simply unthought of.

Duck's poem came to the attention of Mary Collier, a washerwoman working in Hampshire, who was astounded to read Duck's dismissal of women as work-shy layabouts who ...