The American Country Girl

by Martha Foote Crow

Can it be that the Country Girl has in some measure reached this point by doing what Lot's wife did—by simply looking behind her? Casting her eye along back over the generations, did she see anything that appalled her? May it have been something in the experience of her own mother that lent decision to her mind as she considered what she herself would choose for a life-path? Or rather, as she looked over the career that lay nearest to her, the life-struggle that was visible to her in her own homestead, did she see something that held up before her a warning hand?

There still lives many a farm woman who has to walk down a hill and carry up from a spring all the drinking and cooking water for her household and who gets it fresh for every meal. Her round of work may include all the house work with the washing and ironing, the scrubbing and cleaning. She sweeps all the rooms up stairs and down every week, covering all the furniture with sheets to keep off the dust that she flings into space with her besoms and brooms. She picks the berries for the table and they may have them three times a day. She gathers all the vegetables. If she has no cow, she goes for the milk and brings it home. She is an expert cook, serving the meals in courses, carrying in and out the dishes, and providing ample quantities of everything. She may can the fruit and make the pickles, jellies and preserves. She will certainly take care of the chickens. In spite of all this she will never seem tired. She will go to the woods and bring ferns and put them into pots to set about the house. She will bring wild flowers and carry them with all sorts of dainties to neighboring houses where there is illness. Her dress is invariably changed in the afternoon; and she always goes to prayer meeting. She is a great reader and stays up after the family have gone to bed to read the church paper and the farmers' magazine. She is full of life and fun and can talk intelligently on any subject. Every evening after her work is done she may walk to a neighbor's to visit, or if the village is near enough she will go every night to bring the mail.

This woman of the rural realm is a super-woman in the farm environment; her discouraging example cannot be taken as a rule to be followed by others, since few can equal her in strength of body or mind. She is one who has in some way become possessed of a mental training above the average; her intellectual outlook has been brought to such a point that she can take pleasure in many of the resources of culture. She has learned to read,—really read—a thing accomplished by but few of the many who can glibly reel off the words from the printed page. This woman of the farm gathers the ideas and enjoys the fancies that lie behind the mere alphabetical letters. She is one who can gain solace from her hour of reading whenever it is possible to have one; and this keeps her young and buoyant. Then she has also a real interest in everything around her, the garden, the making of the jelly, the missionary cause, all the great wonderful world—everything has attraction for her. Moreover as a result of her mental and inner poise, she has the power to systematize the work of her home and so to get the best results in the shortest time. Does her husband appreciate what a wonderful woman fate has assigned to him? If not, if he never acknowledges the economic value of this woman's courage and gay spirit, as well as of her mere hand-work and its efficient system, then there may be a sore spot underneath that will never be cured in all her life. Many a farmer husband has said affectionately to his wife that he could never have made a financial success of his farm without her help. But it will take more than assurances like that to satisfy the mind and the heart of the Country Girl in the new era.

Going but half a generation farther back into the past one may find the woman who had not only all that has been described to do but the milking and the butter making beside. She worked up the wool and spun, wove, and made full cloth for men's wear, for flannel sheets and for all the flannel dresses, and she knit all the socks and stockings for the big family. She would rise at four, summer and winter. She would build her own fires, milk four to eight cows, and have breakfast at six. There would be a sugar orchard that made many hundred pounds of sugar, and she would make the syrup and care for it. The floors of her rooms would be covered with carpets of her weaving. The table linen and toweling would be both spun and woven by her hands. All the time she had for intellectual employments would be while some labor was going on. It is a tradition from the past in this country that if a woman can work with her hands or her feet and at one and the same time employ the eyes in some studious pursuit, she has a fair right to whatever intellectual attainment she may be able to gain thereby. Roxana Beecher in Guilford, Connecticut, a hundred years ago, had a volume of philosophy fastened to her wheel and read the book while she treadled and spun; and no woman was really accomplished in the old days unless she could knit and read at the same time.

Sometimes—but rarely—the women of past time in this country took some part in the outside farm labor. The author knows of a woman who husked six hundred bushels of corn in one summer. The following season she piled up one hundred cords of wood and did all the housework beside. It would not be possible to speak of some pathetic cases of enforced toil lest some good men should be led thereby to fall from grace and wish they were noncombatants. The truth is that it has never been the custom in this country that the women should enter into the heavier farm work; from the beginning women were held so sacred that nothing must be risked that could injure their permanent strength. The men rolled in the logs of wood for the big fireplaces and did all the heavier work of the place, answering without a moment's demur the request of the women for help. Such a spirit in the men of America has crystallized in many laws more favorable to women than to men, and in many others designed to give special protection to women and to ward off the possibility of a failure in the persistence of their physical soundness. But clever bad men may break laws that clever good men may make; or good men may be confidingly inattentive while valuable laws and customs become obsolete. Yet the fact does stand out that the spirit of the republic does not favor anything that will dull the physical vigor of the women; and those who feel this spirit and are representative of its urgency—and they are, we must believe, the great majority—are the men in most danger of falling from grace in the manner referred to above. Moreover they are also the people, voters and what not, who will make an effective bar against the inroads of a certain disposition on the part of the foreigners who are, in the main beneficently, coming across the wide seas to find homes in our farming regions, namely, to place the women of their tribes in rows along the fields who bend their backs like the picture of "The Gleaners" by Millet, and to produce such descendants as Markham's "Man with the Hoe." A sight like this with promise such as this is abhorrent to the institutions of our country; the men of the republic, not to say the women, will not tolerate it.

But progress is made little by little. There are cases of arrested development and examples of retardation. There are places where backward-drawing influences have kept some groups from making the advance that other groups have made. If we could penetrate still farther into the past, we should find more reason for the drawbacks that we run across here and there in our own time. We have no histories of selected working days that the great mothers of times past wrote—they certainly had no time to count up calories and set down scientific records of their cookery and their collections of simples. There is a Journal extant which was written by one Abigail Foote in 1779. It goes something like this:

September 2. I spun.
" 3. I spun.
" 4. I spun.
" 5. I spun.
" 6. I spun.
" 7. I spun.

And so on, excepting, of course, Sundays.

About November the record is stated in this wise:

November 11. I wove.
" 12. I wove.
" 13. I wove.
" 14. I wove.
" 15. I wove.