The Women Who Make Our Novels

by Grant M. Overton

The following further account of these people is taken from a talk Joseph Gollomb had with Mrs. Martin while she was in New York to see the opening of Mrs. Fiske in Erstwhile Susan. The interview, printed in the New York Evening Post of January 22, 1916, provoked Mr. Pennypacker’s blanket indictment which we have already recapitulated:

“You can tell the Pennsylvania Dutchman by his speech, even after he sheds his queer clothes and barbering and takes on the guise of the average American,” explained Mrs. Martin. “A bellboy in Allentown once disarmed my wrath with, ‘Was you bellin’ for me? I didn’t hear it make.’ I knew him then as coming from my people. His father probably would say, cocking his weather eye, ‘It looks for rain. I’m sure it’s going to make something down.’ Or his mother, pricing at market, would ask, ‘For what do you sell your chickens at? I want to wonder. I feel for getting that fat one.’ Your washerwoman, with all the deference in the world, will refer to your husband and hers: ‘Does your Charlie like his shirt ironed? My mister don’t.’

“Enter Cashtown, Virginsville, or Bird-In-The-Hand (these are actual towns). You’ll see houses painted flagrant red or yellow or pink; flower gardens gorgeous with color. And there all the display, or even trace of love of physical beauty, stops. The homes are immaculate but ugly. The parlor is furnished at marriage, then shut up for years.

“Most of the living is in the kitchen. The barn is bigger than the house and is more modern than the kitchen. That is because the Pennsylvania Dutchman is parsimonious with everything but the labor of his women. He’ll buy modern plows, an automobile to take his products to market, modern harness to save his horse. Up-to-dateness in the barn means more money in his pocket. But he won’t spend a cent to save his wife or his daughter a bit of work. That is what they are for—to work for the men folks in the kitchen or near it.

“When a young man goes courting, his eyes are not blinded with Cupid’s bandage. They are wide open to note how the prospective bride qualifies as a frugal, hardworking housewife. I watched a young man studying three girls, his object matrimony. They were sewing and he made a test of their frugality by the way they tore off their threads. The girl who tore off her thread closest to the stitch appealed to him most. Later he watched them at pie making. With another test in mind he asked each of them for the waste dough scraps. One of the girls, wanting to make a hit, gave him generously. The girl who had won in the first test scrimped a few crumbs for him—and won his hand and heart. Soon after, his foot was seen on the rocker of her chair as they talked—which is Pennsylvania Dutch for ‘I mean to marry this girl!’ ...

“What has given them the passion for pinching their souls I don’t know. It may be a narrow and too literal interpretation of the Bible—for they are intensely religious in the orthodox sense. The great majority of them sooner or later join one of the several religious sects—Mennonites, Dunkards, Amish, or some other. ‘I feel to be plain,’ they say, and join one of these sects.

“Their word is as good as gold—but they’ll quibble with their word. A grower will get his wife to water the tobacco leaf, to make it weigh more. ‘Did you water this tobacco?’ the intending buyer asks the farmer. ‘No,’ the farmer answers with literal truth. But once he gives his literal word it is good to the last penny.”

These people are without the sense of citizenship. “They don’t think about it at all,” said Mrs. Martin to an interviewer whose report of her was printed in the Evening Sun, New York, April 7, 1915. “They have no problems and therefore they are contented with their lot. They are wary of education; they think it makes rogues. ‘Look at those grafters in Harrisburg!’ they will say.”

Mrs. Martin once told a capital story of the Amish. This sect has a rule that any one who breaks a law of the meeting shall be penalized by living apart from his wife or, in the case of a woman, her husband; denied even the solace of recrimination. The wife of a particularly stingy member of the sect devised a cunning punishment for him by herself breaking one of the laws of the meeting. “I don’t know what rule she broke,” Mrs. Martin said. “It may have been sewing a button on her dress instead of a hook and eye, or she may have advocated painting the house. In any event her husband became an outcast, unable even to speak to his wife.

“I used the instance, somewhat colored, in a story. The result was that I got a letter from an Amish preacher informing me that if I would give him the name of the man who was so stingy to his wife the church would punish him properly. Of course I replied that the instance was purely fictitious. To which the reply of the minister was that he could not understand why I wrote such lies about the sect!”