SOURCE: Christmas, William J. “An Emendation to Mary Collier's ‘The Woman's Labour.’” Notes and Queries 48, no. 1 (March 2001): 35-38.

In the following essay, Christmas suggests a correction to a misprint in Collier's best-known poem, basing his arguments in part on the poem's themes.

Since 1985, five full-text, modern-type editions of Mary Collier's important poem, ‘The Woman's Labour: An Epistle to Mr. Stephen Duck,’ have been published, largely in revisionist anthologies of eighteenth-century literature.¹ With the exception of Ferguson, Collier's editors appear to agree that the 1739 text, the first edition of the poem, should be considered as the copy-text.² However, there has been a great deal of confusion over the treatment of the one significant accidental that occurs in this text. Line 61 of the 1739 text reads, ‘Nay, rake and prow it in, the Case is clear;’.³ As every conscientious editor of the poem has noted, ‘prow’ does not appear in the...