I love to sing a lot of occupational songs, both from men's and women's perspectives, and am enjoying the "Work Songs" thread a lot. Suzanne Mrozak has organized a workshop for the NOMAD Festival(and possibly NEFFA, too) that I'm singing in, featuring "women's" work songs. I thought it might be fun to start a parallel thread to collect suggestions for songs appropriate for this subtopic.

Fellow feminists, PLEASE don't jump in and say "A woman can do any of the jobs described in any of those songs..."; I'm interested in collecting songs featuring women singing about their work, or songs they'd sing while doing a particular type of work. I can think of a lot of recently written songs, so I'm particularly interested in suggestions for more traditional ones.

Some songs sung to accompany work include Scottish waulking songs and lullabies (anyone who doesn't think getting a baby to sleep isn't work better not have kids!). Anyone have more suggestions of this type of song? Know any floor-scrubbing shanties?

I roughly lump occupational descriptive songs together in categories, so I'm looking for women's songs in these areas:
1. Textile work - The Sheep-to-Shawl sequence:shepherdesses, sheep shearing songs featuring women (are there any?), carding, spinning, weaving, waulking, sewing/knitting and textile mill songs
2. Home-making work - the unpaid labor of cooking, cleaning, and raising children
3. Agricultural work - animal husbandry (keep it clean, now), migrant farm workers, sowing and reaping, etc.
4. Non-textile factory work - Rosie the Riveter et al.
5. Songs about women in traditionally masculine manual labor professions: mining, lumbering, fishing, cowboy(girl)
6. Professional jobs - medicine/nursing, lawyers/policewomen (Lovely Rita, Meter Maid?) 7. Service jobs - maids, waitresses, barmaids and yes, the "oldest" profession

Some songs already on my list (not that I know them all to sing, mind you):

Fisher Lassies (or The Herring Gutter's Song) - Ewan MacColl; I usually pair this with "Pittenweem Jo", a love song to a herring gutter...
The Jute Mill Song, The Spinners' Wedding and others - Mary Brooksbank
Me and My Machine - James Taylor (a lovely mill-worker's song)
The Hand Weaver and the Factory Maid - trad. Poverty Knock - trad.
Serving Girls' Holiday - trad; see earlier thread for this
Housewife's Lament - trad.
All for a Piece of Yarn - J. Kirkpatrick, see earlier thread; I want to learn this one if I can find the tune again...
John Grumlie/Equinoctial and Phoebe/other titles - the trad. ballad of the foolish husband who insists "he can do more work in a day than his wife can do in 3"...with disastrous consequences
Leaboy's Lassie - an itinerant farm girl's lovesong, trad. I'm Gonna Be an Engineer - Peggy Seeger

I haven't been following any of the Fantasy Song Circle threads, (they're waayyy too long and load too slow) so I don't know what's already been mentioned there. Hope other folks out there will find this fun, too!