THE KITCHEN
O little room, wherein my days go by
Each like to each, yet each one set apart
For special duties ... nearest to my heart
Art thou of all the house ... in thee I try
New issues when the old ones go awry,
And with new victories allay the smart
Of dismal failures; and afresh I start
With courage new to conquer or to die.
O simple walls, no pictures break thy calm!
O simple floor uncarpeted below!
The inward eye has visions for its balm,
And duty done is solace for each woe,
And every modest tool that hangs in view
Is fitted for the work it has to do.
Helen Coale Crew.
CHAPTER IX
THE DAUGHTER'S SHARE OF THE WORK
There is a doctrine held by some theorists that a people really needs now and then to be plunged into the struggle and stress of actual war in order to become inured to hardship, toughened and strengthened in nerve and fiber. In a memorable essay Professor William James proposed a "moral equivalent" for this discipline that he thought would afford a like toughening training. His suggestion was that there should be a military conscription of the whole youthful population; that they should for a certain number of years form part of an army enlisted in the fight for the conquest of nature, a campaign for compelling the forces of the material world to become subject to the needs of mankind. Definitely, Professor James' suggestion was that "our gilded youths" should be made to go to work in coal mines, on freight-trains, in fishing fleets in December, at dishwashing, clothes-washing, road-building and tunnel-making, in foundries and stoke-holes, and on the frames of skyscrapers, in order that they may get the "childishness knocked out of them" and come back into society with "healthier sympathies and soberer ideas."
When the word "youths" was used in the last sentence it probably was not held to include, as it sometimes does, the young women as well as the young men. But the work of girls and women must have been in the mind of the writer when he said "dishwashing and window-washing," for these have been feminine specialties from time immemorial or at least ever since the days of the Amerinds when women were the bricklayers, builders and architects, and men were the weavers. Therefore by admitting these occupations it is avowed that the women may come in for some of the benefits of discipline that the struggle for the conquest of nature is to bring to those that take part in it. Does it not make the down-trodden woman feel more grand, does she not hold her head higher and stiffen her neck proudly, when she thinks that her melancholy and sickening work of dishwashing will stand for her in the place of that grandeur of the army going out to battle, that her humble employment may be invested with some of the heroism of the flag-bearer for his country's sake, that she may take to herself a little of the glory of the battle-scarred? If this may be so, there will be some comfort for the housekeeper in the farmstead on a rainy day when the wood from the pile outdoors is so wet that it will not burn, and the water is cold, and everybody in the house is cross!
It is not a matter to be treated lightly. Whatever burden there is to be borne falls more heavily upon the wife than upon the husband in the farmstead. If the farm is isolated, she is the loneliest person there. If there is poverty, she has the least to use or to spend. If there is lack of labor-saving devices, she has far fewer than the farmer has. If life there is monotonous, hers is the victim of the greatest sameness, the unending changelessness of three meals a day through planting and harvesting, through week days and Sundays, year in and year out.
Professor Fiske, author of The Challenge of the Country, takes a large view when he touches this phase of the subject. "The annual conquest of farm difficulties," he says, "makes splendid fighting. There are plenty of natural enemies which must be fought to keep a man's fighting-edge keen and to keep him physically and mentally alert. What with the weeds and the weather, the cut-worms, the gypsy, and the coddling moths, the lice, the maggots, the caterpillars, the San Jose scale, and the scurvy, the blight and the gouger, the peach yellows and the deadly curculio, the man behind the bug gun and the sprayer finds plenty of exercise for ingenuity and a royal chance to fight the good fight. Effeminacy is not a farm trait. Country life is great for making men; men of robust health and mental resources well tested by difficulty, men of the open air and the skyward outlook. Country dwellers may well be thankful for the challenge of the difficult. It tends to keep rural life strong."