THE OTHER SIDE
The experiences related in the last chapters have been purposely laid before the reader with little comment. They make their own impression. They may help to dispel an apprehension lest the girls on the farms should be having too hard a time, or lest when the work in which they are asked to join is closing somewhat too strongly upon their young strength they should be weighed down with the sort of dullness that comes from continued pressure on one nerve. They seem to give an assurance that the country girl's day in many, perhaps the majority, of cases, affords some time for reading and for music; there is a concert in the evening or a spare afternoon hour for the village guest. They encourage us to believe that when the point of joylessness approaches there will be ready a new supply of energy for rejuvenation and refreshment. As long as this state of things exists the case is not so bad.
Into this serene atmosphere a bomb must be thrown; for both sides have a right to be heard. The testimony of the Country Girl when she is speaking in favor of country life has been accepted; the same courtesy must be given her when she tells us more or less frankly—frankly when she can be brought to speak at all—what objections some may have to a life which it seems to many ought to be good for any one, and which, if it is not, surely can very easily be made so.
It is no more than right that a system should be judged not only by the most fortunate example of its working, where factors that have little to do with its essential principles may have crept in to modify the outward appearance, but also by the less known cases, by flagrant examples of what is possible under the existing plan. What wrongs can be found? What sufferings to certain individuals? What must be rectified in order that the machinery may be wholly approved? Is the system, which was evidently designed to foster justice and happiness, accomplishing this end for a reasonable majority? These are very natural questions to those who listen to the testimony of the girl of the rural districts when she discloses her problems almost without knowing that she is doing so. What about exceptional cases? What about a vital minority?
The following description of a Country Girl's working day is taken from the life of a fourteen-year-old girl, who lives on a farm of medium size, so fortunately or so unfortunately placed as to be not very far away from a summer colony. There is no mother in this farmstead.
"Description of my average working day? Here it is. I rise shortly before five o'clock and dress hurriedly. Father is calling me to come and strain the milk and get his breakfast. Go down cellar and strain the milk into pans, set them on a large stone table, and skim the milk for cream for the campers along the lake. Measure out ten to twenty quarts of milk and put them into separate pails to be sent out to customers encamped on the lake. Take cream up stairs and put it in a warm place to ripen for churning. Get breakfast, call the children, and after the others have eaten and the boy has started on his morning delivery, I eat breakfast and clear away the dishes. While sister washes them, I mix bread and set it away to rise. Stir the cream, and then sweep three floors and make five beds. By this time it is nine o'clock. Then there are berries to pick, and vegetables to be got ready for market and I go out to help till about half-past ten, when I come in and make three or four pies and a cake or a pudding. While these are baking I clean the vegetables for dinner and put them on to cook, set the table and put the dinner on, meanwhile watching the baking pies, the rising bread, and the ripening cream. In the course of the morning ten or a dozen persons have come in for milk, eggs, butter, or something else, and I have to wait on them and keep their accounts up in my book. After dinner the bread is ready to make into loaves and is then set to rise again before baking. While the bread is rising I scald out the churn and rinse with cold water and then put in the cream and churn it by hand. After the butter has come and gathered, I remove it from the churn, rinse the buttermilk out and work the butter; salt and work again and set it in the cellar till the next day, when it must be worked again and put into pails or jars. Then I pour the buttermilk from the churn into a jar and set it away for future use, clean and scald the churn, setting it out in the sunshine to dry. By this time the bread is ready to bake and must be watched rather closely and the wood fire also. I begin to get things ready for supper, going out into the garden to pick berries, gather vegetables, dig potatoes, etc. Meantime I wait on more people. After straining milk and skimming other milk, I eat supper and then measure out milk for evening delivery, get vegetables and bread ready to be delivered also and start the boy on delivery. Wash dishes and meanwhile wait on milk customers who are transients. When boy returns from delivery, I wash milk cans and put them out in the air, write up books of accounts, plan out next day's work, make list of groceries, etc., that must be bought to replenish our slender stock. By this time it is ten o'clock; I am weary and my hair is a sight. After taking off a little of the dirt with a sponge in the wash basin I tumble wearily into bed until the next morning."
An account like this arouses a perfect hornets' nest of question-marks. It cannot be well for the nation, and especially for those that are to bear the burden of the day in decades to come that the girls of the present time should in any large numbers be required to endure such strain as this sixteen-hour-day of unremitting, heavy and exacting work imposed upon a young girl between the age of thirteen and seventeen, in one of the largest and most prosperous farming States of this country. Fortunately she has had phenomenal strength and physical persistence, and the baneful conditions have not caused her absolute break-down. But—she has run away! Otherwise she probably would never have gained the development that gave her a voice to speak out for herself as she has spoken in this letter.
More laconic, and yet expressive of a more deadly blight, was the letter from a girl of fifteen in another State. This girl lives on a prosperous seventy-five acre farm, three miles from a good-sized town. There is a public library in that town but she never uses it: and there is no home library to give her any aid. There are no contests, no prizes that are accessible to her to awaken her ambition; and there is no association or society of any kind for girls in her vicinity. There is no music in her family, no games are played, and no magazines are taken; she has no share in any part of the farm business except to work tirelessly as directed; nothing on the farm can she call her own; and no sum of money is set apart for her use. She has no enjoyments, no encouragement; she is hard at work all the time. She neither knows why any one should find the farm attractive nor why one should desire to leave it. Time and interest for her have ceased.
It is news from such a girl as this that most startles us. But such a Country Girl exists, hushed, unexpressive, unresponsive, undeveloped. She is the blind gentian in the country garden. Are there many of these? Who can tell? If diligent search is made for them they are found upon the most remote farms where no newspapers ever penetrate, where the roads are bad and the neighbors are far away or are beyond forbidding hills, where the deadly round of dishwashing or the weight of work too heavy for the years of the girl are exhausting her strength, stifling her exuberance, and deadening all the power of expression she may have been capable of having. The least fortunate girl is the one that has her power to express developed to the least extent; she does not now know her own wants; but yet when told she too will begin to live and to do her lovely part in the rooms of life.
One of the group who has thus begun at last to live voices a part at least of the inwardness of the reason why the young women and young men of to-day will not be satisfied with the ways of their farming ancestors. She says: "There exist on many farms conditions which make life there almost unbearable, to young people particularly. One of them is lack of congenial companionship; which may be due to lack of material, or to the thoughtlessness of the parents, which makes it impossible for the young people to have their friends come to their homes. Then in many farm houses there is a woful lack of books, magazines and papers of the best sort; again due to the lack of education or of interest on the part of the parents. So also with pictures, music and recreation. But perhaps greater than any other, excepting perhaps the first named, is the dull weary succession of duties following each other day in and day out without rest or respite, and without any or with few of the modern conveniences to lighten the work. So many farmers, of the old school at least, understand little of the reasons for the why and wherefore of the things they do. They were taught of their fathers who were taught of their fathers and who did things in such a way because they proved expedient. By trial, or accident, one may have discovered something to be more expedient some other way, but the wonderful process and reason back of it, they understood little or not at all. This also is true of the farmer's wife. This blind way of doing things suits the young folks not, for the unrest, that spirit of the times which is forever questioning things, is within them, filling them with nameless longings even though they know it not. In their ignorance they believe they will find something better in the city, something more beautiful, more interesting, more thrilling. Were these young people taught the reason for things and the possibilities of experimentation to find a better way, were they given conveniences with which to work, so that there might be some leisure for books, music and friends, there would be, I believe, little discontent." Again we find our Country Girl closing with a hopeful note.
The gentle critical comments of those that in spite of their love for country life reject its claims as a mode of living favorable to human development and content, are based upon motives that are sometimes vocational and sometimes social in character. When they deny to the country their allegiance it is because they fail to find in rural life as they know it, those boasted possibilities and opportunities. Farming seems to them drudgery, which means labor without inspiration or acknowledgment. They have no interest for the work. They may have taste and fitness for some other occupation; but there is the fact—they do not take to farming. They feel intensely the monotony of farm life, the stagnation of the rural community. The sameness, the humdrum tediousness of the everyday life drives them to the city.
In the work of the farmstead, the Country Girl of this disheartened group plainly sees that the subsidiary, detail work, which has no intellectual and very little social stimulus will be assigned to her. She knows that the monotony of this heterogeneous drudgery will daily leave her too tired to go out, even if she has somewhere to go; and too destitute of initiative to seize upon any form of pleasure unless she has already a mind trained to find delight in books; and she sees no prospect of being able to gain the training that will open fields of intellectual enjoyment to her. She keenly feels the lack of recreation. She comes to believe that if she were in the city she would not have such late hours of labor. She does not see the twelve and fourteen hour days of work in that rosy dream of good wages and leisured evenings in town. On the farm it is from five in the morning till nine at night; the work is not only too heavy for her, but it is closely confining. She has not the strength for it; and the enforced toil exhausts her energy prematurely. She now sees that the methods used in her household workshop are laborious and out of date; her task is unnecessarily difficult; and who can blame her if under such circumstances her enthusiasm for her work fades away? There is resentment in the remark of the young girl who said: "If we always have to work in an awkward kitchen with rusty old pans, if we do not go anywhere and never have any company, we do certainly want to leave the farm." When the blind gentian speaks out like that the emphasis must be multiplied a hundred fold.
From the work of girls like these, incentive has been removed, or else it was never there. This sort of Country Girl may not reason it out to the point of clearness, but the lack of acknowledgment of her labor in the farmstead as an industry, as an essential part of the business, makes her toil seem hopeless; it renders her feeling toward whatever charm the country may have for her permanently callous; and it takes all the vibrancy out of her spirit. All this makes her alert to find deep-seated defects in rural life in conditions that, but for her disaffection would seem but difficulties easily overcome.
The look cityward is not always caused by the incitement of an uneasy, a commercial, or an ignoble impulse. It is sometimes the call of the best and noblest part of the soul. To such as recognize this higher purpose the passion for education, for free access to libraries, for association with intellectual people, form a part of the city's lure. They desire to see more of life, to have more and closer contact with one's fellows, to gain valuable companionship, to get more and broader pleasures, to have greater opportunities to make something of one's self. The young women who are thinking such thoughts as these are full of the energy of youth; they are at the moment of opening ambitions and developing personality; they are making plans for the future. They are not the women who in long years have grown accustomed to their burdens and have either learned how to bear them or have become sodden with the despair of ever finding any relief from their load. The brightness of young hope has not faded out, and the buoyant spirit still stands up underneath whatever is to be done or borne. Youth feels equal to anything. Therefore the slightest deflection of their courage from the norm should have the closest attention.