It is especially important that whatever will prepare country children for life on the farm, and whatever will brighten home life in the country and make it richer and more attractive for the mothers, wives and daughters of farmers should be done promptly, thoroughly and gladly. There is no more important person, measured in influence upon the life of the nation, than the farmer's wife, no more important home than the country home, and it is of national importance to do the best we can for both.
CHAPTER XI
THE NEW ERA
The mother of to-day is a bridge between two eras. Her mother had a wooden spoon and a skillet; her daughter has a dynamo. As for herself, she hardly knows which way to turn—whether to be loyal to the wooden spoon or to enlist her sympathies with the dynamo.
This is, by the way, the reason for many of her troubles, though she may not assign them to this cause. For the utensil is the symbol of a psychology, of a rationale of living, of an esthetic ideal, of a spiritual recognition. When the soap-kettle was carried for the last time into the backyard to rust away forever in the weeds behind the barn, the New Era believed itself safe in the dining-room and made up its mind to stay there. Science riding on a gang-plow and scattering bulletins along the way, was making happy inroads on the farm; and the electric motor in the kitchen became inevitable. All that remained for us was to adapt ourselves to it, and that is what we have been doing ever since.
It was a revolution—this introduction of machinery; and it was none the less so because it came so gradually and with so little show of intention. No one noticed when Hannah found it no longer possible to sit by her window binding shoes. She then, however, ceased to look through the pane for her unreturning lover, but sorrowfully rose from her chair and walking out of the low door, she passed over to the factory across the street and there went on as before, binding shoes—but in another way. She simply became one of a hundred who gave their whole attention to one single element among the forty-nine different elements now made possible in the process of making a pair of shoes, and left the other forty-eight elements to be done by other industrious women working in groups of one hundred. The women were not driven out of their work; they did not crowd into the places of men in the manufacturing field. They simply took their long-accustomed work in hand and went into the factory to do it. So with weaving and many other kinds of industry. So is it now with canning. Women are the prehistoric caretakers of our foodstuffs. They still are this when in the factory they are canning pickles and green corn and tomatoes.
Strangely enough the same influence that took the industrial woman out of the home is to conduct her back again. It was Power embodied in the steam engine that wooed her away from the home; it will be Power expressed in the marvelous dynamo that will set her again by the hearthside. It will be a regenerated home, one in which the regenerated woman will be able to live, the woman that can think in terms of calories, who will act as quickly as the new mechanical force will demand, and who after a little will find the far more exact methods no strain upon her powers of adaptation and execution.
In the present era of transition loyalty leads her to make the best of her surroundings and to do all that she can to-day to ameliorate the difficulties for herself and her family; sometimes she does not know that a better lot should be hers; sometimes she is dulled by the care and the burden she bears. But the great upward pressing tide will reach every one in time—soon, yes, very soon!—and she will see that the new way is going to set her free for a better and a higher service to those she loves. The wonderful element of mechanical power embodied in the dynamo or in some kindred form, is to contract her working hours, as it has the stint of men, from ten hours to one, and will leave her with lightened hands to do other and more valuable things for family and community. Of course the old era and the new era are now seen standing side by side and will be for a long time yet. There are ardent unenlightened women who stand for old ways as if the new must have a sort of wickedness about them because they are expected to lessen the work. There are by this time also many who have experimented with the use of mechanical power in the household and have found this newly adopted servant of the Lord in that great laboratory of the Lord, the human house and home, to be a comfortable and loving companion; as at the beginning, this application of divine force to human happiness has been pronounced good.