Project Gutenberg's The American Country Girl, by Martha Foote Crow This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org Title: The American Country Girl Author: Martha Foote Crow Release Date: June 23, 2010 [EBook #32949] Language: English Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE AMERICAN COUNTRY GIRL *** Produced by Annie McGuire THE AMERICAN COUNTRY GIRL The American Country Girl. An abundance of sunshine, fresh air, good water, and healthful exercise in the open permit wonderful young life to reach its highest development. THE AMERICAN COUNTRY GIRL BY MARTHA FOOTE CROW AUTHOR OF "ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING," "HARRIET BEECHER STOWE," ETC. WITH FIFTEEN ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS NEW YORK FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY PUBLISHERS Copyright, 1915, by Frederick A. Stokes Company TO THE SEVEN MILLION COUNTRY LIFE GIRLS OF AMERICA WITH THE HOPE THAT THEY MAY SEE THEIR GREAT PRIVILEGE AND DO THEIR HONORABLE PART IN THE NEW COUNTRY LIFE ERA CONTENTS Note The Country Girl—Where is She? The Heart of the Problem Is the Country Girl Happy on the Farm? A Calendar of Days What One Country Girl Did Stories of Other Country Girls The Other Side The Inheritance The Daughter's Share of the Work The Homesteader The New Era The Household Laboratory Efficient Administration An Old-fashioned Virtue Health and a Day The Country Girl's Wage The Dress Budget Founding a Home The Farm Partner The Country Girl's Training A Great Opportunity The Ills of Isolation The Solace of Reading The Service of Music to the Countryside The Play in the Home Pageantry as a Community Resource Organizations, especially the Young Women's Christian Association The Camp Fire The Country Girl's Duty to the Country The Country Girl's Score Card Index Bibliography ILLUSTRATIONS The American Country Girl. An abundance of sunshine, fresh air, good water, and healthful exercise in the open permit wonderful young life to reach its highest development The Country Girl is the life of the home. She is a companion for the parents and a playmate for the little brothers and sisters The Country Girl and Her Pets. "The quietness of the country permits a greater spiritual and mental growth, with its abundance of life, plant and animal, which challenges the mind to discover its secrets" The Country Girl takes a pride in her chickens that makes their care a pleasure to her The Inheritance. The Country Girl, working cheerfully beside her mother, will learn much that will be of value to her in her effort to make the housework of to-day a joy and not a burden A happy homesteader in front of her "soddy." The vastness of the country does not daunt her. She learns to love the quiet, broken only by the roar of a river at the bottom of a canyon or the howl of a coyote on the great sandy flats A Knitting Class at an Agricultural School. Note the splendid poise of the Country Girl in the background —how naturally and yet perfectly she is holding herself This Tennessee girl is a member of a Gardening and Canning Club. She won the cow and calves as premiums for having the best exhibit at the State Fair Springtime in the country. City children may well envy their little country cousins the free life in the open and the companionship with animals A lesson in household economics, at Cornell University Children in a country school scoring corn. Everywhere the country is responding to the call of Progress, and these members of a new generation are striving to reach the best The swiftly awakening artistic energies of the Country Girl are finding an outlet in the new national interest in pageantry. The farm, meadow or field makes an ideal stage One of the many Eight Weeks Clubs organized throughout the country by the Y. W. C. A. This photograph of a Camp Fire Girl shows the opportunity country life affords for good sport A school garden where the children are taught to love and understand the growing things as well as to cultivate them NOTE The author acknowledges with gratitude the kindness of her friends among the members of her fraternity, and among the graduates of Wellesley College, of Northwestern, Syracuse, and Chicago Universities, and of Grinnell College, who carefully found Country Girl correspondents for her in all parts of the country; and especially of Professor Martha Van Rensselaer of Cornell University who generously shared with her some of the results of a questionnaire on The Young Woman on the Farm, which was sent out by the Home Economics Department of that University. It would be impossible to name here all the helpers that this book has the honor to claim; the many specialists who have been good enough to advise the author; the enthusiasts whose fire has sustained her courage; and above all the many friends who have entertained her in their country homes and talked over with her their problems. The author would, however, acknowledge her special indebtedness to the Honorable John T. Roberts, the well known lover and sympathetic critic of country life, who gave valuable time to reading her manuscript and made some vital suggestions; and to Miss Mary L. Read, head of the School of Mothercraft, who gave some of the chapters a studious criticism. While acknowledging many sources of inspiration the author alone is responsible for the opinions expressed in the book, opinions sometimes maintained against valued authority. All quotations from Country Girl experiences are made with direct personal permission of the writers; the kindness of the girls, who for the sake of other girls have given these permissions, is here mentioned with special appreciation. For illustrations the author is indebted to the Home Economics and other Departments of the Agricultural College at Cornell University and to the Home Economics Department of the School of Agriculture at Alfred, N. Y.; also to Mr. S. H. Dadisman of the Agricultural College at Ames, Iowa; to Mr. O. H. Benson of the United States Department of Agriculture; to Mr. A. A. Allen of the Cayuga Bird Club, and to Mr. James M. Pierce of the Iowa Homestead of Des Moines, Iowa. The list should also include Mr. R. M. Rosbrugh of Syracuse, N. Y., and Mrs. Mabel Stuart Lewis, efficient homesteader, of Fladmoe, South Dakota. Other names are mentioned in the text and need not be repeated here. To these and other helpers, great thanks are due. This book has been written about the Country Girl and for the Country Girl; for her mother and father, and for everybody else as well; but especially for the Country Girl herself. It will reach its aim if some father says, "Why, here now, somebody has written a book about my little gal there. I should not have thought it was worth while to make a book about her. Well, now, perhaps she is of some account. Guess I'll give her a little more schooling; guess I'll let her go to that institute she was asking to go to; guess I'll let her have some music lessons, or buy her a piano, or send her to college." Or if some mother says wistfully, "My daughter is going to have a better chance than I had!" Or if the Country Girl herself should say, "I see my opportunity and I will arise and fulfil my mission." The book will reach its aim, too, if another thing should happen. This is the first book about the Country Girl. There have been tons of paper devoted to the farmer; reams filled on the farm woman; not a line for the girl. May this first book be followed by many, correcting its misconceptions, rectifying its mistakes, directing its enthusiasms into the best channels for the welfare of the six and three-quarters millions of Country Girls of this land! By that time there will be seven millions—unless in fact these six millions shall have run away to build their homes and rear their children in the hot, stuffy, unsocialized atmosphere of the town, leaving the happy gardens without the joyous voices of children, the fields without sturdy boys to work them, the farm homes without capable young women to—shall I say, to man them? No, let us say to woman them, to lady them, to mother them, and so to make them centers of wholesome interesting life that, if the girls do their part, shall be the very heart and fiber of the nation. The author is sorry that she cannot write to all the Country Girls who have written her either through the questionnaire or through other means of communication in the groups with which she has been so happily associated; but she wishes that every Country Girl who reads this book would write to her (using the address below) and tell her where she thinks the book has spoken truly and where mistakenly. She trusts the judgment of the Country Girls of America absolutely, if they can but be induced to speak in unison and after careful thought. Martha Foote Crow. Tuckahoe, New York City August, 1915. CHAPTER I THE COUNTRY GIRL—WHERE IS SHE? Woman will bless and brighten every place she enters, and she will enter every place on this round earth. Frances E. Willard. O Woman, what is the thing you do, and what is the thing you cry? Is your house not warm and enclosed from harm, that you thrust the curtain by? And have we not toiled to build for you a peace from the winds outside, That you seek to know how the battles go and ride where the fighters ride? You have taken my spindle away from me, you have taken away my loom; You bid me sit in the dust of it, at peace without cloth or broom; [Pg 2] You have shut me still with a sleepy will, with nor evil nor good to do, While our house the World that we keep for God should be garnished and swept anew. The evil things that have waxed and grown while I sat with my white hands still, They have meshed our world till they twined and curled through my verywindow sill; Shall I sit and smile at my ease the while that my house is wrongly kept? It is mine to see that the house of me is straightened and cleansed and swept! Margaret Widdemer. CHAPTER I THE COUNTRY GIRL—WHERE IS SHE? The clarion of the country life movement has by this time been blown with such loudness and insistence that no hearing ear in our land can have escaped its announcement. The distant echoes of brutal warfare have not drowned it: above all possible rude and cruel sounds this peaceful piping still makes itself heard. It has reached the ears of the farmer and has stirred his mind and heart to look his problems in the face, to realize their gigantic implications, and to shoulder the responsibility of their solution. It has penetrated to the thoughts of teachers and educators everywhere and awakened them to the necessities of the minute, so that they have declared that the countryside must have educational schemes adapted to the needs of the countryside people, and that they must have teachers whose heads are not in the clouds. It has aroused easy-going preachers in the midst of their comfortable dreams and has caused here and there one among them to bestir himself and to make hitherto unheard-of claims as to what the church might do—if it would—for the betterment of country life. And all of these have given hints to philanthropists and reformers, and these to organizations and societies; these again have suggested theories and projects to legislators, senators, and presidents; the snowball has been rolled larger and larger; commissions have sat, investigations have been made, documents have been attested, reports handed in, bills drafted and, what is better, passed by courageous legislation; so that now great schemes are being not only dreamed of but put into actual fulfilment. Moreover, lecturers have talked and writers have issued bulletins and books, until there has accumulated a library of vast proportions on the many phases of duty, activity, and outlook that may be included under the title, "A Country Life Movement." In all this stirring field of new interest, the farmer and his business hold the center of attention. Beside him, however, stands a dim little figure hitherto kept much in the background, the farmer's wife, who at last seems to be on the point of finding a voice also; for a chapter is now assigned to her in every book on rural conditions and a little corner under a scroll work design is given to her tatting and her chickens in the weekly farm paper. Cuddled about her are the children, and they, the little farm boys and girls, have now a book that has been written just about them alone—their psychology and their needs. Also, the tall strong youth, her grown-up son, has his own paper as an acknowledged citizen of the rural commonwealth. But where is the tall young daughter, and where are the papers for her and the books about her needs? It seems that she has not as yet found a voice. She has failed to impress the makers of books as a subject for description and investigation. In the nation-wide effort to find a solution to the great rural problems, the farmer is working heroically; the son is putting his shoulder to the wheel; the wife and mother is in sympathy with their efforts. Is the daughter not doing her share? Where is the Country Girl and what is happening in her department? It is easier on the whole to discover the rural young man than to find the typical Country Girl. Since the days of Mother Eve the woman young and old has been adapting herself and readapting herself, until, after all these centuries of constant practise, she has become a past master in the art of adaptation. Like the cat in the story of Alice, she disappears in the intricacy of the wilderness about her and nothing remains of her but a smile. There are some perfectly sound reasons why American country girls as a class cannot be distinguished from other girls. Chief among these is the fact that no group of people in this country is to be distinguished as a class from any other group. It is one of the charms of life in this country that you never can place anybody. No one can distinguish between a shop girl and a lady of fashion; nor is any school teacher known by her poise, primness, or imperative gesture. The fashion paper, penetrating to the remotest dug-out, and the railway engine indulging us in our national passion for travel see to these things. Moreover, the pioneering period is still with us and the western nephews must visit the cousins in the old home in New Hampshire, while the aunts and uncles left behind must go out to see the new Nebraska or Wyoming lands on which the young folks have settled. We do not stay still long enough anywhere in the republic for a class of any sort to harden into recognizable form. New inhabitants may come here already hardened into the mold of some class; but they or their children usually soften soon into the quicksilver-like consistency of their surroundings. There is also no subdividing of notions on the basis of residence, whether as townsman or as rural citizen. The wind [Pg 3] [Pg 4] [Pg 5] bloweth where it listeth in this land. It whispers its free secrets into the ears of the city dweller in the flat and of the rural worker of the cornfield or the vine-screened kitchen. The rain also falls on the just and the unjust whether suburbanated or countrified. There is no rural mind in America. There has indeed been a great deal of pother of late over the virtue and temper of "rural-minded people." This debate has been conscientiously made in the effort to discern reasons why commissions should sit on a rural problem. Reasons enough are discernible why commissions should sit, but they lie rather in the unrural mind of the rural people, as the words are generally understood, than in some supposed qualities imposed or produced in the life of sun and rain, in that vocation that is nearest to the creative activities of the Divine. And if there is no rural mind, there is no distinctive rural personality. If the man that ought to exemplify it is found walking up Fifth Avenue or on Halstead Street or along El Camino Real, he cannot be discovered as a farmer. He may be discovered as an ignorant person, or he may be found to be a college-bred man; but in neither case would the fact be logically inclusive or uninclusive of his function as farmer. The same is almost as exactly true for his wife and his daughter. If one should ask in any group of average people whether the farmer's daughter as they have known her is a poor little undeveloped child, silent and shy, or a hearty buxom lass, healthy and strong and up to date, some in the group would say the latter and some the former. Both varieties exist and can by searching be found along the countryside. But it is nothing essentially rural that has developed either the one set of characteristics or the other. To be convinced of this, one who knows this country well has but to read a book like "Folk of the Furrow," by Christopher Holdenby, a picture of rural life in England. In such a book as that one realizes the full meaning of the phrase, "the rural mind," and one sees how far the men and women that live on the farms in the United States have yet to go, how much they will have to coagulate, how many centuries they will have to sit still in their places with wax in their ears and weights on their eyelids, before they will have acquired psychological features such as Mr. Holdenby gives to the folk of the English furrow. A traveler in the Old World frequently sees illustrations of this. For instance, in passing through some European picture gallery, he may meet a woman of extraordinary strength and beauty, dressed in a style representing the rural life in that vicinity. She will wear the peasant skirt and bodice, and will be without gloves or hat. A second look will reveal that the skirt is made of satin so stiff that it could stand alone; the velvet bodice will be covered with rich embroidery; and heavy chains of silver of quaint workmanship will be suspended around the neck. On inquiry one may learn that this stately woman was of what would be called in this country a farmer family, that had now become very wealthy; that she did not consider herself above her "class"—so they would describe it—no, that she gloried in it instead. It was from preference only that she dressed in the fashion of that "class." Now, whether desirable or not, such a thing as this would never be seen in America. No woman (unless it were a deaconess or a Salvation Army lassie or a nun) would pass through the general crowd showing her rank or profession in life by her style of dress. And that is how it happens that neither by hat nor by hatlessness would the country woman here make known her pride in the possession of acres or in her relation to that profession that forms the real basis of national prosperity. Hence no country girl counts such a pride among her inheritances. Therefore if it is not easy to find and understand the country girl as a type, it is not because she is consciously or unconsciously hiding herself away from us; she is not even sufficiently conscious of herself as a member of a social group to pose in the attitude of an interesting mystery. She is just a human being happening to live in the country (not always finding it the best place for her proper welfare), just a single one in the great shifting mass. Although it may be difficult to find what we may think are typical examples of the Country Girl as a social group, yet certain it is that she exists. Of young women between the ages of fifteen and twenty-nine, there are in the United States six and a half million (6,694,184, to be exact) who reside in the open country or in small villages. This we are assured is so by the latest Census Report. By starting a little further down in the scale of girlhood and advancing a trifle further into maturity this number could be doubled. It would be quite justifiable to do this, because some farmers' daughters become responsible for a considerable amount of labor value well before the age of fifteen; and on the other hand the energy of these young rural women is abundantly extended beyond the gateway of womanhood, far indeed into the period that used to be called old-maidism, but which is to be so designated no more; the breezy, executive, free-handed period when the country girl is of greatest use as a labor unit and gives herself without stint (and often without pay) to the welfare of the whole farmstead. The American Country Girl is not by any means behind her city sister in her ability to make the bounds of her youth elastic, though the girl on the farm may go at it in a somewhat different way. Then, perhaps, too, the word "youth" may, alas! have another connotation in the mind of one from what it has in the dreams of the other. If we should, however, thus enlarge the scope of our inquiry, we should increase but not clarify our problems. Moreover it is the Country Girl that interests us, the promise and hope of her dawn, the delicate swiftly changing years of her growth, the miracle of her blossoming. There is something about the kaleidoscope of her moods and the inconsistencies of her biography that fascinates us. The moment when she awakes, when the sparkle begins to show in her eyes, when we know that a conception of her mission and of her supreme value to life is beginning to glow before her imagination—that is the crisis to work for and to be happy over when it comes. As for us, we ask no greater happiness than once or twice to catch a glimpse of that. That great host of six million country girls is scattered far and wide; they are everywhere present. A certain number of millions of them are working industriously in myriads of unabandoned farms all over the Appalachian plateau, and on the [Pg 6] [Pg 7] [Pg 8] [Pg 9] wide prairies to the Rockies, and beyond. In thousands of farmsteads they are helping their mothers wash dishes three times a day three hundred and sixty-five days in the year, not counting the steps as they go back and forth between dining-room and kitchen. They are carrying heavy pails of spring water into the house and throwing out big dishpanfuls of waste water, regardless of the strain in the small of the back. They are picking berries and canning them for the home table in the winter; they are raising tomatoes and canning them for the market; they are managing the younger children; they are baking and sewing and reading and singing; they are caring for chickens and for bees and for orphan lambs; they ride the rake and the disc-plow and sometimes join the round-up on the range. Moreover they go to church and they go to town and they look forward to an ideal future just as other girls do. The Country Girl is a human being also. It has been intimated that young women living on remote secluded farms have not, with all their singing, been always able to dispel the monotony of a thousand inevitable dishwashings a year; they are said nowadays to have opened their ear to the lure of the town and to have started out, keeping step with their brothers, to join what some one has called, "the funeral procession of the nation" cityward. If we could, in fact, get them to confide in us, we should find that they have longings and aspirations, many of which are unsatisfied; and that is the reason why it seems to be high time for their voice to be heard. Some of the younger farm women are showing themselves equal to the larger burdens in the business of agriculture. They are running their own farms in Michigan and their own automobiles in Kansas. They are taking up claims. They are developing them and proving up in the Dakotas and through Montana and Wyoming. From four to six in the morning they till an acre; then they ride twenty miles to the school and teach from nine to four; after that they ride back and work in their cornfields till the stars twinkle out. They stay alone in their shack and are happy and fearless and safe. Moreover some thousands of the girls are laboriously teaching schools in thousands of one-room schoolhouses, where they provide almost one hundred per cent. of the common instruction for fifty per cent. of the population. Besides this, there is no one of all the gainful occupations in which young women of this country engage which has not drawn upon the reservoir of country strength for supplies. Among those women blacksmiths and engineers, those clerks, secretaries, librarians and administrators, those lawyers, doctors, professors, writers, those nurses, settlement workers, investigators and other servants of the people in widely diverse fields, there are many whose clearness of eye and reserve of force have been developed in the wholesome conditions of the open country. The Country Girl has no reason to be ashamed of the part she has borne in the non-rural world. It has been said that about eighty per cent. of the names found in "Who's Who in America" represent an upbringing in the rural atmosphere. The proportion of women in this number or the special proportion of grown-up farm girls to be found among those women cannot be stated; but the number must be large enough to justify a belief that to spend a childhood in the open country or in the rural village will not, in the case of women any more than in the case of men, form an impassable barrier to eminence. From this great rural reserve of initiating force, sane judgment, and spiritual drive have come, in fact, some of the most valued names in philanthropy and literature. Among them we find the leader of a great reform, Frances Willard; the inaugurator of a world-wide work of mercy, Clara Barton; the president of a great college, Alice E. Freeman; the wise helper of all who suffer under unjust conditions in city life, Jane Addams; and the writer of a book that has had a national and world-wide influence, Harriet Beecher Stowe. It heartens us up a bit to name over examples like these. They give us a vista and a hope. But now and then there is a Country Girl who would rather have, say, a better pair of stilts over the morass or a stronger rope thrown to her across the quicksand, than a volume of "Who's Who" tossed carelessly to her in her difficulties. For all the Country Girls on their farms do not sing at their work. They are not idle, heaven knows!—but their work does not invariably inspire the appreciation it deserves. CHAPTER II THE HEART OF THE PROBLEM New times demand new measures and new men; The world advances and in time outgrows The laws that in our fathers' day were best; And, doubtless, after us some purer scheme Will be shaped out by wiser men than we, Made wiser by the steady growth of truth. Lowell. CHAPTER II [Pg 10] [Pg 11] [Pg 12] [Pg 13] [Pg 14] [Pg 15] THE HEART OF THE PROBLEM The reason why the American people care so much for the ideals that are presented to us in the Country Life Movement is that there is something very deep-seated and permanent within us to which these motives can appeal. We are a country-life people. The bogy of the overshadowing city, threatening to spread and spread until, like a great octopus, it should suck all the sweet fields into its tentacles and cover the green areas with a compact blackness, has given us a definite fright. The result of our terror is the "Country Life Movement." It is not that we were actually approaching an imagined danger-point; it was only that a vision of life constantly fed and inspired by the pure unadulterated influences of the country was before the eyes of a country-bred people, and was of so great preciousness that we must guard it at the first hint of peril. There are indeed grave dangers threatening some fundamental interests in the agricultural realm; to these the nation is now well awake. The republic has many problems but on the whole it is prospering, and perhaps one reason why this is so lies in the fact that the profession of agriculture is still the backbone of our national life. The so-called Country Life Movement, then, is not a sudden onslaught upon our consciousness by an alien influence, as if we were fish suddenly commanded to go and live on the land. It is more as if a band of mountaineers with lungs adjusted to a height of several thousand feet, had been trying to breathe the air in a close and stuffy valley far below their proper levels, but who had now returned to their native height and were feeling the glow and triumph of their original energy; or who perhaps, being frightened lest they should be imprisoned in that low valley, were making frantic efforts to escape this doom and to reach their mountain homes where they could breathe freely and grow normally again. The Country Life Movement is not the despairing gasp of expiring effeteness; it is an exclamation of robust joy in the possession of a life healthily adapted to our needs. At present there are well-nigh six million farmsteads in this country. They form what we may untechnically call the agricultural group, and represent roughly, but of course vitally, the great business of farming. In our consideration we have to include also the small rural villages, because the United States Census Reports include under the word "rural" both people living in the open country and those living in villages up to twenty-five hundred inhabitants in size. In the agricultural group the unit is the farmstead. By that term is meant the whole complex organization of the farm, including the land and its products, the stock, the barns and the sheds, the whole family together with whatever houses it, the corps of workers, farmer, farmer's wife, sons, daughters, maiden aunts, working people unhired and hired—in fact, everything "animal, vegetable or mineral," as the children say when they play "Forty Questions," that ministers in any way to the success of the farm as a business and to its ultimate object, the happiness of the family living thereon. So when we say "farmstead" we mean not only fodder for beasts but also food for the human beings; but inasmuch as the human being is soul-endowed and has imperative appetites in the æsthetic and spiritual realm as well as in the physical, the farmstead covers the matter of the piano as well as of the hoe. A wealthy farmstead is indeed one that has cattle upon many hills, or that sends many carloads of milk to the city; but it can scarcely be called a wholly prosperous farmstead unless it has an unrestricted view of the scenery from its living-room windows, a public reading room within reach of its buggy's wheels—that means, say, within twelve or fifteen miles at most—or of its automobile—which may mean within forty or one hundred miles according to the roads and the car; and, we may add, unless it takes advantage of this and other cultural privileges. It may be said that the ultimate end of the whole farm business is the happiness of the family; yet the minds of many do not travel to the ultimate—they pause at some one of the possible stopping places along the way and fashion that subsidiary idea into the fiction of an ultimate end. For instance, one may make the fattening of stock or the purchase of a certain additional strip of land into an ultimate end, and work for that, sacrificing much that is of immediate happiness value, or perhaps even of supreme happiness value, to gain that minor object. Meantime the real end, the one that if we should penetrate to the heart of our ideals, we should find seated in the most sacred place: namely, the welfare and happiness of the family group for which we live and labor, has been neglected, and nearer, more direct means to attain it have been overlooked. This, then, is the heart of the matter. The farmstead is an intricate organism with many parts working wonderfully together. The object, the reason for the existence of every item and strain of it and for the thing as a whole, is that there should be at the center of it a radiant core of joy in which every human member of the little cosmos may have a share and so reflect back to the others a still greater brightness. In this farmstead world, each individual member must therefore be made happy. A tricky word—that word "happiness!" Perhaps it cannot be defined, but Americans are entitled to pursue it, whatever it may mean! The wise ones, however, say that the one condition that can and will set alight a vigorous flame of happiness at the heart of any human farmstead is that there should be found there the opportunity for growth for every individual in the circle, for the development of his or her latent powers, so that each life may find that whatever it was intended to be, it has been fully able to become; that none of its God-given abilities have gone to waste for want of notice, furtherance, food, or inspiration. It would be a pity to find that there was one social structure among the devices of our high civilization that was stubbornly inhospitable to the entrance of that messenger, "Growth," who precedes and announces the heavenly visitant, "Happiness." The farmstead must not be accused of being such a structure as that unless it is absolutely necessary. To what extent, then, does the farmstead offer opportunity for such growth? Is it too much to ask that the ultimate joy [Pg 16] [Pg 17] [Pg 18] The Country Girl is the life of the home. She is a companion for the parents and a playmate for the little brothers and sisters. of living, the joy of growth, should be brought very near to the eyes of the people living on the farmsteads, that their imaginations should be touched even more keenly than they now are to a consciousness of the real possibilities in their environment? What can we do to create an atmosphere that will give its own enthusiasm to the people, that will bind each member of the farmstead indissolubly to the place; one in which there shall be so swift a certainty that it will seem like magic; that must so charm the mind and the heart of each one that the tie will hold against any kind of onslaught? But the claim is being made in some quarters that the countryside home does not live up to its possibilities in this respect, and if not in this respect then the country life movement has a real pang behind it as well as an uprising of renewed life. If the father in the home, who is the farmer and head of the homestead, does not find happiness according to his needs, it may from all the signs be concluded that the government and the universities and the newspapers and the legislators are busying themselves to the greatest possible extent to relieve his disabilities; he may be left in their care for the present. Of the farmer's wife, who is the head of the home and the partner with her husband in the farm business, the government has lately in a group of letters addressed to fifty-five thousand farm-woman correspondents, asked the question, What do you wish to have done that your life may be more filled with content and that your disabilities may be relieved? It is safe to presume that the longings of their hearts will be by some means satisfied in longer or shorter meter. The sons are sharing the fortunes of the fathers, but if they are not, numbers of them may go out from the home valley and easily seek what they believe will be a better fortune along the outer avenues of a man's activities. And the daughter? While that ship comes slowly in that is to bring something comforting to her mother, while her father is giving the farm the benefit of his fast accumulating scientific information and lessening the daily labor by up-to-date machinery, what is happening to her? Is she having her share of content? Has she the chance to grow and fill full the possible round of her own personal development? Is the Country Girl happy on the farm? Or is she in her heart dissatisfied and glowering? Is she suppressed and sodden in mood? Is her face expressionless and too old for her years? Is she round- shouldered and heavy of step? Is she listless and suspicious and sensitive? Or is she full of spirit and enthusiasm, a perfect dynamo of energy? Is she the life of the home, with a word and a joke for everybody and is she a perfect mischief among the other children? Is her face full of expression, with smiles and dimples all the time? Is she full of love and affection toward each member of the family, and endless in her devices for their comfort and entertainment? Is she a veritable steam engine to get the work done and equally a master hand at all kinds of games and plays, able to get up something in no time and carry out any kind of a scheme with nothing to do with? Does she sleep the very sleep of the dead the whole night long, and is she all day the widest awake being that can be found for miles around? Has she an appetite to startle one fully three times a day and even more often, if something good to eat is being made? In fine, is she receiving her share of possible growth? Is she having her chance to show all that she is able to become? And thus is she being happy? And also thus is she making the rest of the circle in the home that is at the center of the farmstead, happier than it could ever have been if she had not been there and had not been the fully developed girl that she is? This is the question that seems most important at just this time. This is the problem on which light must be thrown. It seems to be an important question for several reasons. It is said that the young men are showing their dissatisfaction with farm life by going away in large numbers to find occupation in the city; that the best and most energetic of the young men, those who would have been leaders for betterment in the general countryside, are found among those who desert the countryside, and that thus the farm community is depleted and deprived of good elements that it cannot well spare. The wind of destiny for woman that has swept through the country and the world during the last two decades or so, has penetrated the valleys where in seclusion the Country Girls have grown up, and has now whispered inspiration and courage into their ears, so that if they are dissatisfied with the conditions of their lives they will have the daring to go forth also, following their brothers, and to take up some industrial fortune in the city whither the bright star of independence beckons them. They are doing this already; and the news of it should make thoughtful people bestir themselves. There seems to be a great problem here, and the Country Girl seems to be at the heart of it. For if the rural question is the central question of the world, and if the social problem is the heart of the rural problem, and if the failure of the daughter's joy and usefulness threatens the farmstead,—then once more in the history of the world has the hour struck for woman; then does the welfare of the world depend upon her as much as did the life of the bleak New England shore depend on the health and survival of the Pilgrim Mothers? Of course no one would wish to claim that the young woman in the farmstead is of more importance than other [Pg 19] [Pg 20] [Pg 21] members of the home; but as a chain will break if one link fails, so the farmstead will be ruined if it lacks the cooperation of the daughter. She has, at least, a function all her own; and the happiness that comes through normal growth must be hers in order that she may fulfil her mission. The farmstead girl must take her place in the farmstead or the farmstead unit will lack one of its component parts and fall to pieces. It is her patriotic duty; it is her home and family duty; and it is her greatest happiness. The young woman on the farm must grow up with the idea that she is essential to the progress of country life and therefore of the national life, and that a career is before her just as much as if she were aiming to be an artist or a writer or a missionary. This purpose makes her life worth while. She must conserve her health for this; she must develop her powers for this; she must train herself heroically for this. We are, then, face to face with the question, so important to us at the present moment, whether the daughter in the farmstead family is having her own full meed of happiness in her farm home or not. Has she the opportunity that is her right to grow and develop all her latent powers and to become the person that by all the gifts of nature she is capable of becoming? CHAPTER III IS THE COUNTRY GIRL HAPPY ON THE FARM? Let the mighty and great Roll in splendor and state! I envy them not, I declare it. I eat my own lamb, My own chicken and ham, I shear my own sheep and I wear it. I have lawns, I have bowers, I have fruits, I have flowers. My lark is my morning's charmer; So you jolly dogs now Here's God bless the plow— Long life and content to the farmer. Inscription on an old English pitcher. CHAPTER III IS THE COUNTRY GIRL HAPPY ON THE FARM? The young women who read this book will surely believe that no mere curiosity inspires the question at the head of this chapter, but a fully fixed idea that much depends on the answer. If it is not to be possible for the young women to be made happy in the rural environment, they surely are going to turn in great numbers and follow the beckoning finger of industries and engagements townward. And if multitudes of them do this, it will be increasingly difficult to keep that composite thing, the farmstead, in perfect balance; and in that balance the daughters have every year a more important part. Their share, in fact, is constantly growing more vital, more indispensable to the welfare of the whole. There is also an even more important consideration. It is this. The daughters in the homes of to-day are the home- makers of to-morrow; if they are estranged irrecoverably from the countryside, what is to become of the countryside in the days that are to come? Can we entertain the hope that the city cousins will come to the rescue? Can we reply upon the inrush of new families from across the seas to enter our widespread fields and valleys and support for us the burden of scientific housekeeping, and high-minded home making, and modern education in the spirit of American institutions? These are some of the thoughts and some of the fears that students of the situation entertain. The result is that a strong interest is felt to know if possible exactly how the country girl herself does feel about her life on the farm, whether she is dissatisfied with the conditions that surround her, whether she suffers from a deep-seated sense of neglect and suppression, and whether she is attentive to some distant call of the metropolitan lure. Many conversations and a wide and representative correspondence leave the impression upon the author that the Country Girls of America, however far apart in geography and condition, are alike in one characteristic—the sincerity and soberness of their testimony. The young woman on the American farm is thoughtful, well balanced, dignified. She takes herself seriously, and she is developing powers that promise well for the future of American life. [Pg 22] [Pg 23] [Pg 24] [Pg 25] [Pg 26] The Country Girl and Her Pets. "The quietness of the country permits a greater spiritual and mental growth, with its abundance of life, plant and animal, which challenges the mind to discover its secrets." The first unthinking impulse of many country girls is their love for their country homes. Some are optimistic enough to claim that the farmer's family can enjoy all the advantages of village or city life without any of the disadvantages, and with the added enjoyment of the country itself. Now that books, pictures, and music are so easily accessible to the farm, now that the telephone puts one into communication with friends in city or country, and modern traveling conveniences make it possible to secure such urban benefits as lectures, church, lodge, post office, etc., they feel that they have all grievances done away with. Girls in thickly-populated New York and in wide-awake, modern Idaho give the same testimony. There is a large group who will even exclaim as one Missouri girl did that she never had had a single reason for wishing to leave the farm; that she knew of no other place which offered so much help in physical, mental, and spiritual growth and development. A young woman with an ear to economic values suggests that on the farm a great part of the food can be produced at home and can thus be kept free from adulteration. This is not by any means a minor consideration. Another who perhaps has at some time known stringency in the city and can look at the problem from another angle, thinks that in the country it is rather a relief not to have to count the cost of each separate meal. The opportunities on the farm sometimes appeal to the fun loving propensities of the young girl. One has, or nearly always can have, they say, space for games, such as tennis, basket ball, etc. Many think that there is more real fun in the distinctive exercises of the farm than in those of the town; for there they have nutting, riding down hill, going berrying, riding on loads of hay;—all these are thoroughly appreciated. In the varied business of the farmstead the daughter may see her love of animals gratified. On the big Iowa farm where one Country Girl lives the farm stock is to her the chief attraction. They make pets of nearly all their creatures, and she herself assigns the fanciful and literary pet names. Some times the more mature country girl has reached the height where she finds the good of country life to consist in its liberty, its leisure, its varied interests, its fresh air and nearness to nature, and its distance from the pettiness of the towns people and their limited outlook. On the farm time may be devoted to the really big things of life without petty distractions. One gains there a wholesome, sane view of life. There may be plenty to do on the farm but what you do is of consequence. Some of the more spiritual aspects are gathered together in this transcript of a Country Girl's thoughts and dreams. In trying to describe the charm that the country has for her, she mentions "the quietness and peace which permit of one's greater spiritual and mental growth, the abundance of life, plant and animal, which challenges the mind to discover its secrets; the rocks and streams which call out to one for study and discovery, the beauties of the sunrise, the clouds, the sunset, the moonlight, and the far off stars,—these call to our spirits to penetrate their mystery and lift up our souls to those levels above the commonplace where we commune with the Maker; the hills and the wide expanses make us reverent and teach us to walk humbly and patiently; the clean sweet air gives us health and strength of body and soul; and the freedom from restraint by formalities and conventionalities permits the development of the person in a sane and natural way." Another thoughtful mind writes this: "Farming is creative; being experimental, it is interesting. On the farm both body and mind are exercised, therefore both are kept nearer a normal level. We have fresher, purer food and air; freedom from foolish forms and ceremony. We are nearer to God." An aspect that many country girls have keenly felt is shown in this passage from the letter of a loyal girl of the countryside: "I fail to find the hardships of farm life, and it always makes me indignant to hear about them. Save as all life has its hardships, these special hardships are a bugaboo that does not exist. A few weeks ago I was hostess to fourteen of the girls from a large drygoods store in the city. I was grieved to see what undersized, ill-nourished little people they were. They ranged in age from sixteen to twenty, and every one was prepared to despise the country and to look upon it with contempt and the people with pity because they do not live in the city. Their prevailing idea seemed to be that they had come to another race of people whom they regarded with a tolerant pity and contempt. I heard them telling my cousins, honest manly fellows, how very different they were from boys in the city. Ah me! the simplest things about nature which they did not know would fill many a book." [Pg 27] [Pg 28] This delightfully peppery communication may be followed by one that gives that feeling of joyousness that we believe should always be found in real country life, and at the end strikes clearly the most important note of all: "The attractiveness of farm life lies in as many, diverse, and wonderful things as the breadth of the individual girl's mind can comprehend and enjoy. To some the sense of freedom in country life is a large means of happiness. The feeling of exultation in the far sweep of vision, the glorious sunsets, and the movements of the clouds in the wind and the coming storm. Then there is the pleasure in seeing and helping things grow, in the frolic of the lambs in the spring, of the colts at play, and in the young plants sprouting and growing in the summer showers and sunshine; especially if you have pulled the weeds and hoed about them yourself. Frequent outings to the lake or river for an afternoon or evening holiday with bathing and canoeing in the afternoon and a bonfire in the evening with a group of friends to toast marshmallows or roast corn, and later with stories and songs, add much to the pleasure of farm life. Then there is the quiet and peace of the country where one may be alone at times and think. In the country there is a more compact home life than anywhere else, for each member of the family is working together for the home." This most important point might receive further emphasis. The young women in our farm homes, are, with true American spirit, appreciating the possible play in rural life of freedo...