WOMAN'S WORLD.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LII, Issue 70, 19 April 1909, Page 4

WOMAN'S WORLD.

THE WOMAN ON THE FARM. An American paper tells of a Bachelor Gill's Club, formed of country girls, who send out HOD loiter, to the girls ami women of marriageable age and over, single and married, practically nil Hie women in the country, asking, among other tilings : 1. Where you brought up on a farm '! 2. If yon are not married would yon prefer a farmer to a man of any other occupation, all else being equal *' .'I. What is the hardest part of a woman's work on a farm 1 4. What would you think would greatly help a woman's work on the farm ?

Out of 1100 letters 0.511 answers were received. They were very direct, not evasive. Of the 0,5(i answers, (IH4, or more than two-thirds, answered that they had been brought up on the farm, so that the constituency was a fairlv r - prcscntal.ivc one of farm-bred women. Three-fourths of the girls said they did not want a fanner for a husband, because—and this answer was general—they had seen how their mothers had slaved from dawn, before dawn, and 1.0 nighl : and they had seen—and this was significant-they had seen all too plainly how their fathers think of nothing but their cattle anil crops, to Hie sacrifice of their wives. '•The eat tie must have everything : mother nothing.'' ,\ positive dread of the farm, '• fimuop'nobia," possessed these fanners' (laughters of a marriageable age to an alarming extent.

All this from I lie (laughters! And the overworked wives said the same thing. In nearly every letter from a farmers' wife was the cry raised on the lack of consideration on the part of the menfolks. One tired little woman—you could lell she was tired bv the wav'she wrote-told of her six small children : of a farm of Slttl acres, entirely paid for, with sixty cows and three hired men,' and money in the bank. No hired girl, although she had asked for one over and over again. She had no machine, no facilities for baking and doing things, a wretched old cook-stove, and not even pans io'dishes. She had been saving her egg-money for five years to buy a nice rug for the sitting-mom, which needed it greatly, and her husband had taken the money to buy him a new gasoline engine for the barn ! There was a dangerous note struck in the letters, 100, these fanners' wives were almost, to a woman, urging their daughters not to marry farmers and repeat, what tiiey franklv called, "their own mistake." They were praying, they said, that their daughters would marry away from the farm.

It was all sn pathetic, so pitiful to read : the hard uncompromising picture that these letters presented of men's absolute indifference lo the women of their homes. It wasn't all so, of course, hero and there was a nappr, almost jocular, gleam, but oh, so fearfully rare. The farmer was making a living, but out of the lives of his wonienkind—careful to the last degree of his cattle and his swine, but utterly careless of the human beings of his home.