THE WOMAN ON THE FARM.

Dominion, Volume 2, Issue 467, 27 March 1909, Page 11

THE WOMAN ON THE FARM.

An American paper tolls of a Bachelor Girls' Club, formed of country girls, who sent out 1100 letters to the girls and women of marriageable ago and over, single and married, practically all the women in the county asking them among other things: 1. Were you brought up on the farm? 2. If you are not married would yon prefer a farmer to a man of any other occupation, all else being equal? 3. What is the hardest part of a woman's work on the farm ?

4. What do you think would greatly help a woman's work on the farm? Out of the 1100 letters 956 answers were received. They were very direct, not evasive. Of the 956 answers, 684, or more than two-thirds, answered that they had been brought up on the farm, so that the constituency .was a fairly representative one of farm-bred women. Three-fourths of the girls said that they did not want a farmer for a husband, because —and this answer was general—they had seen how their mothers slaved from dawn, and before dawn, to night; and they had seen—and this was significant—they had seen all too plainly how their fathers think of nothing but their cattle and crops, to the sacrifice of their wives. "Tho cattle must have everything: mother A positive dread of the farm, "farmophobia," possessed these farmers' daughte-s of a marriageable age to an alarming extent. ' , All this from the daughters! And the overworked wives said the same thing. In nearly every letter from a fanner's wife was the cry raised of lack of consideration on the part of the "men-folks." One tired little woman —you could toll she was tired by the way Bhe wrote—told of ber six small' childrei: of a farm of 360 acres entirely paid for, with sixty cows and three hired men, and money in the bank. No hired girl, although she had asked for ono over and over again. She had no washing-ma-chine, no sewing-machine, no facilities for baking and doing things, a wretched old cook-stove, and not enough pans or dishes. She had been saving her "egg-money" for five years to buy a nice rug for the sittingroom, which needed it greatly, and her husband had taken the money to buy him a now gasoline engino for the barn! There was a dangerous note; struck in the letters, too, these farmers' wives were almost, to a woman, urging their daughters not to marry farmers and repeat what they frankly called "their own mistake." They were "praying," they said, that their daughters would marry away from the farm.

It was all so pathetic, so pitiful to read: the hard, uncompromising picture that these letters presented of men s absolute indifference to the women of their homes. It

wasnH all bo, of course: here and there was a happy, almost jocular, gleam, but oh, so fearfully rare. The farmer was making a living, but out of the lives of his womankind—careful to the last degree of his cattl and his swine, but utterly careless of the human beings of his home.