Mary Collier (1688–1762) was an English poet, perhaps best known for The Woman's Labour, a poem described by one commentator as a "plebeian female georgic that is also a protofeminist polemic.
"[5] As she recounts in the preface to her 1762 collection, she was outraged when she read Stephen Duck's The Thresher's Labour (1730) and in response to his apparent disdain for labouring-class women, wrote the 246-line "powerful modern georgic"[2] for which she is best remembered, The Woman's Labour: an Epistle to Mr Stephen Duck.
Landry (1990) asserts that Collier "tends to couple moral reformism with a certain amiable accommodationism, or compliance with the will of fathers.
"[7]: 71 Keegan claims this poem "suggests yet denies feminist and democratizing class politics.
Collier, Duck, and other working-class poets from rural Great Britain were responding in part to the economic upheavals in the countryside brought about by the enclosures of agricultural land and the consequent unemployment.