There is a doctrine held by some theorists that a people really needs now and then to be plunged into the struggle and stress of actual war in order to become inured to hardship, toughened and strengthened in nerve and fiber. In a memorable essay Professor William James proposed a "moral equivalent" for this discipline that he thought would afford a like toughening training. His suggestion was that there should be a military conscription of the whole youthful population; that they should for a certain number of years form part of an army enlisted in the fight for the conquest of nature, a campaign for compelling the forces of the material world to become subject to the needs of mankind. Definitely, Professor James' suggestion was that "our gilded youths" should be made to go to work in coal mines, on freight-trains, in fishing fleets in December, at dishwashing, clothes-washing, road-building and tunnel-making, in foundries and stoke-holes, and on the frames of skyscrapers, in order that they may get the "childishness knocked out of them" and come back into society with "healthier sympathies and soberer ideas."
When the word "youths" was used in the last sentence it probably was not held to include, as it sometimes does, the young women as well as the young men. But the work of girls and women must have been in the mind of the writer when he said "dishwashing and window-washing," for these have been feminine specialties from time immemorial or at least ever since the days of the Amerinds when women were the bricklayers, builders and architects, and men were the weavers. Therefore by admitting these occupations it is avowed that the women may come in for some of the benefits of discipline that the struggle for the conquest of nature is to bring to those that take part in it. Does it not make the down-trodden woman feel more grand, does she not hold her head higher and stiffen her neck proudly, when she thinks that her melancholy and sickening work of dishwashing will stand for her in the place of that grandeur of the army going out to battle, that her humble employment may be invested with some of the heroism of the flag-bearer for his country's sake, that she may take to herself a little of the glory of the battle-scarred? If this may be so, there will be some comfort for the housekeeper in the farmstead on a rainy day when the wood from the pile outdoors is so wet that it will not burn, and the water is cold, and everybody in the house is cross!
It is not a matter to be treated lightly. Whatever burden there is to be borne falls more heavily upon the wife than upon the husband in the farmstead. If the farm is isolated, she is the loneliest person there. If there is poverty, she has the least to use or to spend. If there is lack of labor-saving devices, she has far fewer than the farmer has. If life there is monotonous, hers is the victim of the greatest sameness, the unending changelessness of three meals a day through planting and harvesting, through week days and Sundays, year in and year out.
Professor Fiske, author of The Challenge of the Country, takes a large view when he touches this phase of the subject. "The annual conquest of farm difficulties," he says, "makes splendid fighting. There are plenty of natural enemies which must be fought to keep a man's fighting-edge keen and to keep him physically and mentally alert. What with the weeds and the weather, the cut-worms, the gypsy, and the coddling moths, the lice, the maggots, the caterpillars, the San Jose scale, and the scurvy, the blight and the gouger, the peach yellows and the deadly curculio, the man behind the bug gun and the sprayer finds plenty of exercise for ingenuity and a royal chance to fight the good fight. Effeminacy is not a farm trait. Country life is great for making men; men of robust health and mental resources well tested by difficulty, men of the open air and the skyward outlook. Country dwellers may well be thankful for the challenge of the difficult. It tends to keep rural life strong."
This was written from the standpoint of the farmer himself and his business. A like account and with quite as much zoology in it could be made for the women that share his problems. Life under farming conditions is as likely to provide opportunity to develop character in the women folks as in the men; and the daughter in the house may receive some of the benefits of this developing discipline.
To have a joyous share in a useful work is one of the most satisfying things in the world. In such a joy as this, the daughter in the farmstead is, within the bounds of her working capacity, invited to partake. She may have the inspiration of work, the exhilaration of struggle, and the keen delight of victory in the solution of farm problems. There is much that she can do without injury, even if she is not very strong, and almost nothing that she cannot do, if she is robust and vigorous. If the housework seems a hardship, the matter must be attacked as a problem and studied into to see what can be devised to lessen the drudgery or re-adapt the burden. Invariably the parents should consider what is good for the girl, not what is good for the farm. Sacrifice the farm, if need be, but save the daughter.
The American Country Girl is doing her full share and often-times more than her share. In the majority of cases "shares" should not be mentioned at all, for each does all that is in her power more for love's sake than because the division has been allotted out by some technical rules of supposed right or law. The Country Girl of to-day can have nothing to blame herself for in the part she takes as first assistant to her mother in the home part of the farmstead. She is the vice-regent in a kingdom where the mother is queen. And if the mother falls behind in the race for the finish the daughter comes in and takes her place. She does this ungrudgingly. The daughter in an American farm home bestows liberally of her strength to make the housekeeping as nearly a success as under the circumstances it can be. Either she shares the work with the mother, or she works under the mother's direction, doing the heaviest parts; or she does all the work while the mother takes care of the chickens or carries on some of the business of the farmstead that presupposes experience.
For instance, a twenty-two year old girl who is a good helper in a house where the work is not overwhelmingly heavy may have for her "share" to do all the chamber-work, wash the dishes, do the sweeping, the dusting, and all the ironing; to rinse, starch, and hang out all the clothes; to bake all the cakes, the pies, the cookies; to help also with the mopping and scrubbing, and to have the loathsome duty of taking care of the kerosene lamps. And she may add the churning and much outdoor work beside.
Such a girl as this does not consider her work a stint; she does not say that she will do so much and no more: she helps till all is done. She is the crack-filler.
The Country Girl and her mother make some attempt to organize their work and to introduce some little system into the program of the day. Sometimes they will arrange for the daughter to be housekeeper one week and assistant cook the next. Sometimes they divide the work equally between mother and daughter; or two sisters take turns about doing the entire housework.
An arrangement like this affords to both mothers and daughters a rich opportunity. But a strange little paradox comes in here. If the daughters wish to give the greatest degree of reverence and protection to their mothers they should not pay too much attention to what the mothers tell them to do. In other words if they will follow the beckoning hand of progress and take up with the suggestions of modern invention in their further housekeeping, they must depart from their parents' advice and from the ways of the old folks. The oft repeated saying, "what was good enough for my father is good enough for me," should never again be heard without protest by any member of the younger generation—at least an inward protest that will rob it of its depressing influence. It is not a want of reverence toward the memory of our forefathers that makes us wish other and different conditions from what they had. It is not a disloyalty to the living mother for the daughter to say that she will not follow in her footsteps if she now sees better ways of doing things. Shall not the large-hearted mother wish that her child may have better and improved ways, greater conveniences, lighter burdens, machinery for making work less burdensome, more leisure for the higher life? She should—but does she? She often does not see the use for the new-fangled appliances. She is too stiff to change her ways, even when she sees that the new methods are an economy of time, labor and nervous force. As to such a farm woman as that, one who is so fixed in her ways that she will not listen even for her children's sake, to the voice of progress: why, there remains nothing for her to do but to pass on. Peace be to her! She has stood there for a life-time and drudged and submitted and has done nothing for household or community advancement. Some among the older women may awake to a new life; here and there one will step over the abyss that separates her from her daughter, will pass down and stand side by side with the younger woman. But as a general thing the abyss is too fearful and she lacks the energy for the leap. There remains for her only a martyr's crown and a harp.
The most isolated farm woman in the country of half a century old must have been touched by the edges at least of the wave of progress in social and home-making conditions that has swept through our life in late decades. Most of the dwellers on farms as well as townspeople have been profoundly moved thereby. Some strange new kind of utensil drifting to the remotest mountain valley and appearing in some neglected despairing kitchen, like a bit of flotsam floating across seas from richer lands, was a symbol of a reorganization as undreamed of as heaven will be found to our awakening eyes. That utensil was the call of a new era. The isolated farm wife may not have had her ears opened to know the sound, but that was what it was, for all that. It represented a new life, the making over of a whole generation.
Naturally the younger people are a part of this new life; naturally the difference between the wants of the older people and the wants of the younger makes a cleavage between them. The more swift the change, the greater the difference between the people of the two ranges of family relationship. This is the all-sufficient reason for the frequency of differences between the young men and young women of this period and their parents. In the country these differences have appeared with less frequency because the progress in those parts has been less spasmodic, more normal, more natural. This has been at least one good effect of the slowness of the countryside to take up with the new ideas. But the progress there has been fully swift enough to make a distinct division between old and young, and this division, the result of perfectly natural influences that do not by any means belong to the country alone, has been one of the causes why the young men and the young women have drifted away to the city.
A better way would be to stay and work out the problem. It would be wiser for the older and younger to attack it together as one. As for the Country Girl, we are far from suggesting a separation between the motherly and the daughterly ideals. We would wish rather to pour greater tenderness into the relationship, already one of the dearest of human ties. Said one noble-hearted man, after giving a full description of the work of his mother under the old régime with soap-making, dyeing, spinning, and candle-making, "Do we want to return to those good old times? Not by any means! My greatest regret is that my mother could not have lived to have some of the luxuries of the present era." This is the right spirit. And the young woman who brings her thoughts to her mother with the brand of the later era upon them, must remember that she is carrying out the spirit, if not the letter, of her mother's life and character, her cleverness and her patience, her adaptation to circumstances and her tact and perseverance, when she takes the result of her mother's work and carries it a step farther, adapting her hands to the use of the tools that her time provides, even as her mother did in using the tools of her own time and station a half-century ago, when she exchanged her tallow dip for the kerosene lamp, her fireplace and crane for the cast-iron stove.
What man would live coffined with brick and stone,
Imprisoned from the influences of air
And cramped with selfish landmarks everywhere,
When all before him stretches, furrowless and lone,
The unmapped prairie none can fence or own?
What man would read and read the selfsame faces,
And, like the marbles which the wind-mill grinds,
Rub smooth forever with the same smooth minds,
This year retracing last year's, every year's, dull traces,
When there are woods and un-man-stifled places?
Lowell.
In 1777 the famous ladies of Litchfield molded delicately the leaden statue of King George into bullets that their husbands might have the wherewithal to fight King George's men. To this day there stands along the edges of the West many a shack with chunks of lead imbedded in its walls where women still live who defended themselves there using bullets they also molded, not a century, but just a few decades ago. The pioneering era is with us still.
"Over vast expanses of America," says Dr. Albert Shaw, "the log-cabin period still continues." And if the log-cabin is found—or the tar-paper shack, or the sod-wall house, or the dug-out, or whatever device stands as an apology for a dwelling place while the claim is being "proved up"—then also the dolorous conditions of isolation and struggle, of overwork and wearing out and all that follows as a reprisal by fate for the inroad into a new world, are matters of present day experience.
There are unirrigated deserts where women wear out their lives in despairing labor. The unwatered soil laughs at the puny human beings, and human need and human desire do not easily learn the lesson that only by united effort, by community union on a grand scale, can conquest be made against that array of nature's inexorable forces.
Across prairie uplands on the slopes of the Rockies are vast stretches of level yellow soil where not a green speck is in sight in any direction. The gray-hued buffalo grass spreads everywhere and not a tree, rock or stone can be seen. In the widely separated farmsteads most of the houses are of sod. The men are sheep herders: they start out with a collie and supplies for a three months' trip. When they come back they are startled at the sound of a human voice. Often on their return they are disturbed in their mental balance. The solitude has not been good for them. Many go insane.
The women remain in the sod house and work. In illness they have only the midwife to rely upon. As a result they suffer from the effects of unskilful treatment. They are all Eastern women, all homesteading; but they never can save money enough to go back East. Hopeless of that, they lose impetus and all life descends to a lower key.
In this dark picture, from which some of the deepest shadows have been intentionally omitted, a definite region has been kept in view; but there are other places out on the edge of things that are like or similar to this. Such conditions require the heroism of martyrs. Noble martyrdoms pay well but reckless waste of life does not. It cannot be said that any daughters born under these conditions have one-tenth of their rightful chance in life.
In other portions of the vast and but partially subdued West, conditions may be trying but they are not hopeless. Here, as we have seen in former chapters, life to the Country Girl may be buoyant and inspiring even though the eight hour day of hard labor may stretch out to ten or twelve or even fourteen hours. The rest is sweet, conscience is crystal-clear, and "what one does is of consequence."
It is that ultimate possibility that lends zest to effort, the "consequence" that inheres in the task. While the registry of cattle brands in the local western newspaper always includes among its symbols some three-ply hook or decimal fraction or swastika design that stands for the ranch of an enterprising and successful woman, there is always a suggested possibility to the mind of the young girl that lends fervor to her efforts. It is not forbidden that she should excel and even have a ranch of her own.
The author knows of an efficient woman who owned and ran for twenty-five years a ranch of fifty thousand acres in the midst of the southern Rockies. The place produced annually twenty thousand tons of hay; they had about ten thousand head of cattle, three thousand head of horses, two hundred angora goats, selling the wool for sixty cents a pound; there were two thousand chickens, three hundred head of hogs, and two thousand doves. A stream ran near the house from which a five-pound trout could be taken at any minute. In summer some fifty men were employed. The owner had a son and a foreman with whom she advised, but she managed things herself. There was also a daughter, she sometimes put on a sombrero and drove one of the two-furrow disk plows when ten in a line worked over a field one mile wide by four miles long, following the big irrigation ditch that ran along the side of the field.
Of course the woman's opportunity and will to own a farm are not confined to the Western country. Many a girl in New Hampshire, Michigan or Alabama has saved the old home for her disabled parents by putting her shoulder to the wheel, bearing the disaster of the near-cyclone and the barn-burning, the desertion of renegade "help," and the distrust of old fogy neighbors. A girl graduate of Wellesley has hastened to acquire a farm in a lovely river bend in Central New York before the price goes higher still, and one has doubts of her success until one hears her at the telephone arguing with a man who thinks he can go back on his bargain about her wind-fall apples. Stories like these would take us trailing across the country from Maine to California and would leave us bewildered before the upspringing of new life everywhere in the energies of the young women of America.
To many of these younger women, the fact that in America a woman does not have to be head of a family in order to take up a claim seems a golden opportunity; the struggle and privation inevitable in the years of proving up, are not sufficiently appalling to prevent their attempt. The number is swelled by recruits from among the straight college girls, the agricultural graduates, those who have had business training, some of the writing clan, some artists, and some who are moved by a clear spirit of adventure. Nothing daunts them.
To this energetic girl the business part is a mere detail. She writes to the Department of the Interior at Washington, asking for full information about the method of taking up land, about the unappropriated lands and instructions for homesteaders. These pamphlets are promptly received. Or she applies to the Chamber of Commerce of the biggest city in the State to which she wishes to go. She carefully regards the warnings set up along the path of the would-be homesteader, which are these: see the land itself before deciding; decide that the home you are seeking is to be a permanent one; be sure that you are adapted for silence and solitariness; and finally, this all-important rule—have enough capital for buildings, for cattle and horses, for machinery, wells, cisterns and seed, and enough more to carry you over a bad year or two, before you undertake the great task.
Having met these requirements, she gaily packs her carefully selected goods on a gigantic prairie barge and convoyed by an efficient freighter (a freighter is a human being), she rides the fifty miles from the last station out to her claim, paying the freighter twenty dollars for his service.
She is very busy, that instinct for the practical that has been developed in the ingenious American through centuries of pioneering comes to her rescue now. She resorts to all manner of tasteful makeshifts; she works miracles with hammer and saw; she makes easy chairs out of barrels and dressing tables out of packing boxes. As soon as possible a piano is installed in the soddy. The tiny shack becomes an orderly little combination of laboratory, boudoir, and study. The little house acquires a charm of its own. Wherever the American girl is, it is a home. She sits at the door of her soddy with her faithful tabby in her lap and is content.
She loves it all. The wild surroundings have a charm for her. Said one: "I certainly fell in love with life on the ranch. I still have my place and have bought more land adjoining it. I guess I am a sort of Indian myself. I love the big outdoors and I love every rock in our mountains. There is something in the somber green of the pines that creeps into one's heart and I am lonesome away from them."
A young woman in Wyoming writes: "This country is so different, so big, that the horizon alone seems to set the limit. I visited on one ranch that is fourteen miles from one end to the other. There are no green wooded hills here, but great rocky slopes and rushing water and great sandy flats with wonderful changing colors.... I do not think we miss the outside world as there is something about this country that, after a time, fills one's whole thoughts and it is hard to remember that there is any other world than this."
But do they not mind the deep changeless silence in those distant solitary places? "But there is no silence here," she answers, "except on the high places of the mountain tops. Here there is always the roar of the river at the bottom of the canyon and the wind in the cedars all about me."
But the Indians? Do you not fear that war-whoop? "It used to alarm me to meet an Indian out on the big flats, but I soon discovered that they will not even look at you as they pass."
But how about rattlesnakes? In answer came this: "I never had any rattlesnakes in my bed, though I fancied I had one night. I got up, carefully lifted off the sheets, and found—the comfortable under me wrinkled up! There are not many rattlesnakes now—you see, we kill them."
Another girl who taught in a sod schoolhouse told how one day she discovered a large snake coiled around the rafters of the little room. She and the larger pupils got sticks and drove it out. She then modestly added, "We certainly would have killed it had it not been a bull snake, but bull snakes kill the deadly rattlers, you know, so we let it live."
But are you not afraid to stay in your cabin alone on your lofty butte? "No, I do not believe that I am afraid. When I first came here the bigness of the hills frightened me, but now some of the best times I have are when I am walking over the hills and through the trees at night. I have a bull terrier and a collie that are always with me so I am not so much alone as it might seem. I have also a beautiful big Morgan saddle horse; I ride over the country alone and I have never been frightened."
Another homesteader girl has learned how to overcome fear. She says: "It takes some courage to stay alone on one's claim night after night. But perhaps that is a foolish fear, for there is really nothing to be afraid of. I positively love to hear the coyotes howling and barking among the hills as I lie on my little bed in my little house. One night last winter I heard the creaking and groaning of heavy wagons laboring through the snow. I had been in bed for some time and the noise of the wagons mingled with the voices of the men awakened me. I rose, threw on a cloak, and opening the door a few inches, I looked out. The foremost wagon had stopped just in front of the door. 'What is it?' I called. 'Which way do you go to get to Grassville?' I told him, he thanked me, and I shut the door. The wagons creaked and moved away. I had not been afraid. Perhaps it is faith in God which keeps us out here. If that is so, then this life is favorable to moral development, is it not?"
"Homesteading," says one college girl and successful homesteader, "is not simply one means for leisure, outdoor life and freedom from conventionality—it is an opportunity to test one's caliber in withstanding privations, in braving blizzards, in conquering the fear of rattlers and that greater fear of being alone on a seemingly limitless prairie. It is also a chance to recognize in those sturdy men and women of the West their big heartedness and clean mindedness. A girl too timid to stay alone over night in a city apartment may feel a sense of safety alone in her shack in the West that the civilized East would not understand. It does not take long to realize that the old cow-boy courtesy of protecting women holds good still. As a result of it all we might say that besides gaining a new view point on life, besides the moral strength attained in conquering that desire to return to the ease of civilization, comes that mental and physical vigor which seems to be inherent in the girl who has held down a claim for fourteen months and who has successfully proved it up."
To take a place like this in the community such as homesteading involves, requires the assumption of responsibility, and responsibility always develops. Cases are mentioned where a young woman has been strengthened morally by the evident necessity for rectitude. Young women who have not before been interested in church work have been drawn into it, for they saw that somebody must do this between the times when the circuit preacher could come around.
A well-balanced judgment comes from Elinore Rupert Stewart, whose homesteading experience has been detailed in a delightful book and whose record of a working day has been shared with us in an earlier chapter.
To her homesteading offers one solution of poverty's problem; but she adds, if the would-be homesteader is afraid of coyotes and work and loneliness, she had better let ranching alone. Nevertheless, any woman who can endure her own company, who can see the beauty in a sunset, who loves growing things, and is willing to put in as much time at hard outdoor labor as she has done over the washtub, will certainly succeed. Her reward will be in independence, enough to eat all the time, and a home of her own in the end.
This homesteader with her power of literary expression has given us vivid pictures of the possibilities in the cabin life of the new country. Her claim lies sixty miles from a railroad. There is no rural delivery of mails, no doctor, no preacher. To the west the Rocky Mountains lift great gorge-scarred masses of rock and to the east stretch bad lands and desert and interminable uninhabited space. Her "community" includes all the ranches for fifty miles around. And how interesting are those neighbors! So good, so queer, so like folks! She has brought Christmas cheer into every camp of sheep-herders within reach. She is nurse and doctor to every sick woman. She has been guardian angel to the lone rancher, Zebulun, finding his friends for him "back home," and to a pair of abused young lovers, for whom she gave a wedding dinner, providing the elegance of drawn-work paper napkins and inviting the guests to wash dishes—a compliment that they did not in the least consider a breach of decorum. She is community companion to her neighbors in hours of joy and in hours of sorrow. A missionary could scarcely ask for a more needy, a more vital or a more responsive "field."
In the circle of her ministrations was found a young girl whom she calls Cora Belle. This little person, half child, half grown woman, so unconsciously brave, so pathetically buoyant, asking little of Fate and receiving so little from the hand of that close-fisted autocrat—forms an appealing figure and may be thought of as the typical young Country Girl in the realm of the ranch and the cabin.
Cora Belle lived with her grandparents, two useless old people who drank up each other's medicines just to save them, and frightfully neglected the poor little granddaughter. The description of the child brings her vividly before us. "She was a stout, square-built little figure with long flaxen braids, a pair of beautiful brown eyes, and the longest and whitest lashes you ever saw, a straight nose, a short upper lip, a broad full forehead,—the whole face, neither pretty nor ugly, plentifully sown with the brownest freckles."
The child did all the housework for her rheumatic and ignorant grandparents and took care of the stock. From the big sheep men that passed their way, she begged the "dogie" lambs which they were glad to give away, and by tender care she preserved their lives. Soon she had a flock of forty in good condition and preserved from attacks by the wolves. The next step in her progress was that she began to help cook for the sheep-shearer's men in order that her sheep might be sheared along with theirs. The one to whom she appealed was kindly disposed and he hauled her wool to town, bringing back to her the magnificent sum of sixty dollars, all of which she soon had the hard luck to see paid out for more quack medicines. And Cora Belle went on wearing the poor gingham skirt that was so unskilfully cut that it sagged in the back almost to the ground. No wonder that this unselfish, hapless little girl touched the heart of the capable young woman homesteader so that she made a party all for her, giving her a few simple presents, some underclothes made of flour bags that she had carefully preserved, a skirt of outing flannel and a white sun-bonnet built from a precious bit of lawn and trimmed with an embroidered edging.
Cora Belle came to the party driving her lanky old mare, Sheba, hitched up with the strong little donkey, Balaam, who balked every three miles and had to be waited for. The grandparents were in behind all wrapped in quilts, and they were as astonished as modest Cora Belle herself to find that it could enter anybody's head to appreciate and honor that small child. Now—good luck to all the Cora Belles! And may every one of them find such a friend as this girl has found!
While the brave people that have adventured into a new country will invariably be interesting to the seeing eye, it is the experience of many homesteaders to find in their expansive communities many who will surprise them by their ability and attainments. This is not strange for a new country always beckons to the strong, the intelligent, the highly individual. In one region the forest ranger had been a newspaper editor in Dublin; one of the hired men had been a photographer artist in Detroit; another had been a wireless operator in Alaska; another was educated in a German university, and an Oxford man drove the stage. "Our neighborhood," says a college girl homesteader, who herself wears a Phi Beta Kappa key, "is as cosmopolitan as Ellis Island itself. One family of three from Illinois are good neighbors and law-abiding citizens. Another neighbor is a Mexican freighter. Another is a Norwegian whose sole delight is to poison other people's stock and dogs and to read the Appeal to Reason, which he calls 'The Apple.' Another lawless one hails from Denmark. Would that he and his tribe had never left the Fatherland, if they will not become Americanized! Another is a half-witted Bosco. Another is a woman who has trodden the historic Appian Way and journeyed to world capitols. Another is a sweet-faced teacher who is much in demand in higher circles of learning than we have here. So there are Italians, Scotch, French, Germans, Swedes, and many Finlanders,—making up the good and the bad, the strong and helpful as well as the opposite."
Sociability and a community spirit of a kind adapted to the conditions are possible under such circumstances. And there is probably no better field for the weekly paper, the woman's magazine and all the monthlies than in the dug-out and the soddy. "Any pleasures? Heaps of them!" cried one of the homesteader girls. "Visiting, horseback riding, parties, socials, dancing, camping, hunting,—all kinds for all tastes." To be sure, when the ranches are ten to twenty miles apart, it is difficult for the people to get together very often. But when they do have a dance they come from fifty miles around. They come for supper, dance all night, and have breakfast together the next morning.
To a lonely girl on her claim it is an event if another girl becomes her next door neighbor fifteen miles away. Hence the newcomer no sooner arrives than an eager neighbor comes to call, and the call lasts the whole afternoon. They talk about the cabin and its fixtures, cooking and recipes, dress and styles, the family and the crops—and the neighbors. If the circle includes foreigners then the question of being neighborly is more difficult. It is also a problem when one finds one's self near a group who spend the whole time in playing bridge, for there is nothing more certain to asphyxiate intellectual intercourse or human exchanges of any kind. If the leader of the Four Hundred in a one-hundred-mile-square community cannot read or write but plays cards like a gambler, it is impossible to entertain a hope that true community spirit will flourish there and good works will be furthered. But the Country Girl who finds herself in such a place as that may reflect that perhaps her very reason for being is to provide from her abundant resources some offset of joy and entertainment and good will that will plant good community spirit and unharmful pleasure where evil things had sway.
Both the gay bravura and the sound judgment of the American college girl are shown in this picturing bit from Mabel Stewart Lewis, a successful homesteader of South Dakota. "It is such fun to go visiting the other girls, to taste their goodies, to sleep four in a bed, toast marshmallows, and make fudge. But these things are mere trivialities. The great and glorious fact of being it and doing it is the pleasure! What could be more delightful than owning one's own land, having one's own house, digging in one's own soil, and being one's own and only boss?
"Looking down deeper than the surface and out beyond my quarter section, I see that our life here is another part of the great feminist movement of the world, a real and very vital part for the young women who are fortunate enough to be classed among the homesteaders. And fortunate not only are they, but the country, a part of which they are building."
Pioneering life is a passing phase; the girl homesteader is exceptional. But transitory periods may teach great lessons as they glide along before the glass of history. And if the girls that brave the danger, endure the solitude, become angels of mercy in their communities, survive the bad years, and master the situation commercially, show that they can do this when the incentive that is rightfully theirs is given to them, they have performed a service worthy of their strenuous labor, their suffering, and even perhaps of their martyrdoms.
This chapter has spoken of an exceptional group; the following chapters return to the average Country Girl and her general problems.
It is especially important that whatever will prepare country children for life on the farm, and whatever will brighten home life in the country and make it richer and more attractive for the mothers, wives and daughters of farmers should be done promptly, thoroughly and gladly. There is no more important person, measured in influence upon the life of the nation, than the farmer's wife, no more important home than the country home, and it is of national importance to do the best we can for both.
The mother of to-day is a bridge between two eras. Her mother had a wooden spoon and a skillet; her daughter has a dynamo. As for herself, she hardly knows which way to turn—whether to be loyal to the wooden spoon or to enlist her sympathies with the dynamo.
This is, by the way, the reason for many of her troubles, though she may not assign them to this cause. For the utensil is the symbol of a psychology, of a rationale of living, of an esthetic ideal, of a spiritual recognition. When the soap-kettle was carried for the last time into the backyard to rust away forever in the weeds behind the barn, the New Era believed itself safe in the dining-room and made up its mind to stay there. Science riding on a gang-plow and scattering bulletins along the way, was making happy inroads on the farm; and the electric motor in the kitchen became inevitable. All that remained for us was to adapt ourselves to it, and that is what we have been doing ever since.
It was a revolution—this introduction of machinery; and it was none the less so because it came so gradually and with so little show of intention. No one noticed when Hannah found it no longer possible to sit by her window binding shoes. She then, however, ceased to look through the pane for her unreturning lover, but sorrowfully rose from her chair and walking out of the low door, she passed over to the factory across the street and there went on as before, binding shoes—but in another way. She simply became one of a hundred who gave their whole attention to one single element among the forty-nine different elements now made possible in the process of making a pair of shoes, and left the other forty-eight elements to be done by other industrious women working in groups of one hundred. The women were not driven out of their work; they did not crowd into the places of men in the manufacturing field. They simply took their long-accustomed work in hand and went into the factory to do it. So with weaving and many other kinds of industry. So is it now with canning. Women are the prehistoric caretakers of our foodstuffs. They still are this when in the factory they are canning pickles and green corn and tomatoes.
Strangely enough the same influence that took the industrial woman out of the home is to conduct her back again. It was Power embodied in the steam engine that wooed her away from the home; it will be Power expressed in the marvelous dynamo that will set her again by the hearthside. It will be a regenerated home, one in which the regenerated woman will be able to live, the woman that can think in terms of calories, who will act as quickly as the new mechanical force will demand, and who after a little will find the far more exact methods no strain upon her powers of adaptation and execution.
In the present era of transition loyalty leads her to make the best of her surroundings and to do all that she can to-day to ameliorate the difficulties for herself and her family; sometimes she does not know that a better lot should be hers; sometimes she is dulled by the care and the burden she bears. But the great upward pressing tide will reach every one in time—soon, yes, very soon!—and she will see that the new way is going to set her free for a better and a higher service to those she loves. The wonderful element of mechanical power embodied in the dynamo or in some kindred form, is to contract her working hours, as it has the stint of men, from ten hours to one, and will leave her with lightened hands to do other and more valuable things for family and community. Of course the old era and the new era are now seen standing side by side and will be for a long time yet. There are ardent unenlightened women who stand for old ways as if the new must have a sort of wickedness about them because they are expected to lessen the work. There are by this time also many who have experimented with the use of mechanical power in the household and have found this newly adopted servant of the Lord in that great laboratory of the Lord, the human house and home, to be a comfortable and loving companion; as at the beginning, this application of divine force to human happiness has been pronounced good.
As the old and the new stand side by side, they will be sure to clash to some extent. Every detail must be studied out and applied to various needs as they come up. Progress is being very swiftly made just now and every one must get in step as soon as possible.
The awakening that is proceeding along all the great channels of thought meets, however, at certain points a very definite obstacle. For instance, if one of those famous self-sacrificing housewives who survive from past times, should be asked why she did not have a certain convenience that would lessen her labor, she would say: "Well, I thought that over and decided that I could possibly get along without it." The answer would be typical. Whatever she could possibly get along without she ought not to have. Unconsciously the woman makes all things a matter of conscience. But the conscience is a creature capable of education as well as of ethical impulse and determination. The conscience should be more highly educated. The question should not be, can I possibly get along without that?—but, can I bring myself and my family to a higher degree of efficiency, to a state of more robust vigor, of more intense and joyous activity, by having the conserving appliances, by cooking more sustaining meals, by inducing them to wear shoes with thicker soles and coats of rubber, or to stop work sooner? Can I get a little more efficiency out of myself and of my family and out of the workers in barn and kitchen by adopting these new-fangled ideas or devices? The new era woman will always give the new-fangled idea a chance.
A noble joke was played upon a woman of this kind by her modern young niece when she took an old barrel from the woodshed and with the aid of two old kettles and an armful of hay turned it into a fireless cooker—or rather into a "hay-box" cooker, for it hardly deserved the better name though it was built on the same principle. The girl had been bragging that she could cook potatoes for dinner in an old box out in the woodshed. The aunt, of course, thought her niece was joking. But she assured her aunt that she was in earnest and would show her. So she peeled the potatoes and bringing them to a boil on the stove at eight o'clock in the morning and whisking them, piping hot into the hay-box, she left them there till exactly twelve, the dinner hour, and then brought them triumphantly forth, still piping hot, perfectly cooked, perfectly mealy and delicious. The happiness point was reached for her when her aunt sank down in a chair absolutely nonplussed with this miracle that she had seen with her own eyes!— Or, better still, when the potatoes the aunt had surreptitiously prepared by her accustomed methods were refused by everybody, while the family partook of those that were cooked by the miracle. Triumph could no further go! It cannot be said that old is old and new is new and never the twain shall meet, for old and new met here at that moment and old was demolished! The next thing would be for that identical very capable housewife to buy a good, first-class, durable and sanitary fireless cooker and use it habitually. But, alas! the prejudices of her husband prevented that desirable consummation. Progress was therefore stalled in that particular spot. But the valley where she lived had had one ray of light let into it; the thought of a possible relief had come. Let us hope that this may soon happen to every vale and corner, and kindle a hope in the heart of all farm women everywhere!
The light of this hope may not shine very brightly in the hearts of many women of the earlier training and habits. But for the young women, for the six million between the age of fifteen and twenty-nine, it is radiant and alluring. The present-day mother may still say that her mother's ways are good enough for her; but the daughter—as between the wooden spoon and the motor, what will she be likely to choose? Can any one ask the question?
She will ask that when her new house is built she shall have ample accommodation of cisterns full of soft water together with pipes to carry it to every part of the house where water is needed and an adequate accompaniment of drain pipes and plumbing. She will ask for an electric motor or a power-engine to run the washing-machine, to pump the water into the attic cistern, and to be the avenue of force to every activity, including the dishwashing.
She will plan to give thirty minutes every other day to that dreaded work that now takes an hour three times a day. She will make no provisions for carrying in coal and carrying out ashes, for her electric stove will not use that kind of fuel and will not produce that kind of waste.
There will never be a fly in her kitchen; the household laboratory will be as clean and glowing as the parlor. The floor will be as artistic as the tessellated pavement of a palace. The aluminum utensils will be always shining, for the material of which they are made will not tarnish. They will be light as feathers and never be a trouble to lift. Her hands will be neat and exquisite; her dress for the laboratory of the house will be tasteful and tidy and becoming, for there will be no reason why it should not be. She will be a joy to look at because she will be happy and because she will be adapted to her work.
If the Country Girl of the New Era is asked to go and begin her own home-making in the old homestead, she will ask to have the walls perforated and a large-sized vacuum cleaner installed in the cellar with hose connections on all the floors. There must be slides and pulleys to let heavy things down to the lower floors, and to draw them up to bedrooms or storerooms above. Room must be made for dust chutes from all floors above the cellar and heating pipes to every room. One may think that the House in the New Era is to be all pipes, but this is the laboratory installation idea; this is simply applying the same principle to the house that men are applying to the office. The telephone, the private wire, the repeating phonograph, the card system, the calculating machine and all the different kinds of recording and stamping machines—these are what the mechanical age provides for the workshop of the man. Well may we repeat what has been said: "The workshop of the woman is the worst workshop in the world." But it is not to be so very much longer.
The scheme above described is not by any means a dream of the far distant future. No: here and there it is now being realized. In many a kitchen in small villages and along the countryside where the distance is not too great to make electric connections from central plants, we may find installed the electric stove which with fireless cooker and scientific manipulation is found to be no more costly after the initial expense of installation than other forms of heating, and the dishwashing machine which reduces that part of the labor from three separate hours each day to forty solid minutes of one single morning. We may find also the inlet of power by which many other household processes as well as such branches of the farming business as are carried on in the house, are turned from unbearable drudgery almost into play. In such a kitchen the fittings will be exquisite; to work there a delight. The housewife who has devoted so much money to mere machinery may have resigned the addition of a wing or a porch and devoted the two thousand dollars the enlargement of the house would have cost to the installation of these expensive fittings. But it has richly paid her. The whole field of family welfare has been lifted to a higher plane and the happiness and health of all indefinitely increased. And the same fine experience will be within the reach of all farm and village women soon. Those that live in villages and closely inhabited country districts will get their electric power from streams and waterfalls, utilized for community service; those that live on remote farms on the prairies and mountain-sides will have their individual resources for power. For the most part these are financially able to gain this, for if they were not they could not remain in the regions where they dwell. A comparatively small proportion of the population could not, if they would, make use of some source of mechanical power. If they would! What prevents them? It is this—only this: the lack of community spirit! And since this desirable spirit is constantly increasing, since recruits are coming to this new army almost daily, since students, teachers, ministers, philosophers, one after another are putting shoulder to this wheel, and farm men, farm women, and farm sons and daughters are coming forward with the new light in their eyes to ask and expect the aid of machinery to make their work more effective, it is not unwise to hope that the people of the countryside are not going to be made to wait many years more for the fulfilment of their dream.
The Country Girl of the New Era will ask to have a new house, built to the highest ideals of sanitary living, and of release from unnecessary, uncalled-for toil, or else she will require that the old house be made over to the new mechanism. Which will be the most economical? Sometimes that old place has advantages in the lines of its roof, the store of its traditions, the love laid up in its cubby-holes; but then—it will have to be torn out somewhere for the entrance of labor-saving devices. Science will insist on some surgery for cleanliness and deftness and the wisdom of the future to enter in.
Whatever plan is made for the house of the future that its household laboratory may have the attention it deserves, the life of the Country Girl therein is to be set to a new rhythm, or she will be hopelessly left behind. Can any one doubt that she will ask for such things as she believes are necessary to her highest efficiency, and insist upon having them?
Various lists of essential labor-saving devices have been suggested. The one that follows was taken for the most part from an agricultural paper and includes most of the things now recommended by specialists in household economics. But it must be noted that the progress in the application of forces to needs is now very swift, and any day these devices may be superseded by more expediting appliances. It is the duty of every young woman to keep track of these additions to her repertory of activities. The various journals of mechanics constantly report them, and the wild frenzy of the advertisers may be turned into righteousness by watching what they have that will be of use to us.