The American Country Girl

by Martha Foote Crow

Food (including meat, groceries, milk and eggs, green vegetables, and fruit, ice, and fuel for cooking).

Shelter (including rent or purchase money, taxes, insurance, interest, repairs, fuel for heating, furnishing).

Clothing.

Education (including papers, books, school, lectures, concerts, art).

Benevolence (including church and charity).

Recreation.

Transportation (including expenses of travel).

Health (including doctor's bills, and medicine).

Savings.

Labor.

Sundries.

This scheme is designed to be used for the budget of a family; but it is most important that every young girl, whether in city or country, and whether her purse be a long one or a short one, should know each year whether the demands upon her cash account are exceeding those of the year before, and that she should make up her mind whether there shall be any change in that regard during the year to come. This is a training that every girl should insist upon giving to herself constantly. If she finds herself called "oldmaidish" therefor, she will know that she cannot have earned the name, since there are no old maids any more! The same sort of person must now be called "efficiency administrator."

In suggesting this form of self-discipline to the Country Girl, we know very well that the girl that determines to keep accurate records of her expenses has a good fight before her. Women seem at present to have a preternatural disinclination toward keeping their own accounts, and nearly every girl inherits this bent. In canning clubs for women it is found that the members will do all the delicate measuring accurately; their sense of taste is unerring; their judgment of results is perfect; but they just will not render an account of their work!

That women are not by right of their sex incapable of mathematical processes is shown by the fact that so large a number of women attain distinction in the higher fields of that study, becoming astronomers, computing eclipses and ranging the outer realms of the sky with great telescopes. The rather general dislike of women for the simpler forms of computing probably has grown up in the financially irresponsible state that has become a part of woman's very bone and marrow during late centuries. But it must not be so any longer. Too much depends upon orderliness in finances, for the Country Girl to neglect this means of becoming efficient in her life-work.

All of these card-catalog and other "devices" are a part of a great movement to put efficiency into every human industry. And this movement, again, is a part of the upward striving of mankind. The "industry" that is to be the life-work of the Country Girl must not be behind.

It is claimed that the average farmer puts more thought into his work than the average woman in a farm home puts into hers. This is partly because the seasons make less change in her work than they do in his. But they do make a very great change in her work; and the difference between her work and his in this respect ought not to make the great difference that exists between the amount of foresight he shows in his planning and the dim irresolute bungling that is so often the characteristic of hers. We cannot say that we have an ideal unless we contrive a plan to express that ideal. Something luminous and startling may glow before our eyes and flatter our self-conceit with a hope that seems like a resolution. But without a definite plan, the glow soon vanishes and we are no better for having had it. In fact we are worse. It is a real injury to our soul development to entertain an unfounded ideal and then allow it to fade away before we concentrate it into purpose; for we have deceived ourselves and we have weakened our will.

Now and then we read of some woman of olden time who thought out her plan for the next day after she went to bed at night. She was a prophecy of the present; or rather, of the time to come. Too much cannot be said to the young women of to-day about the necessity of foresight. Foresight is the great bulwark of efficiency. Hurry, they say, is only poor planning; and we know what depredations hurry is making upon our fields of life. The Country Girl, if she wishes to help in the upbuilding of national character, must drive hurry from her field, and this she can do by efficient planning. She must now adopt the systematic spirit in order that when she has a farm home upon her hands she will be ready for the simplification that alone will make her work under the new complications endurable and easy. It will be necessary for her to reduce all to a definite scheme. She must then plan her work by seasons; she must plan it by days, and by hours in the day. She must make records of the time it takes for each part of the work, and she must think out a way to do it in less time. It will be well if she can arrange it so that different kinds of work will overlap, in order that one thing may be preparing while she is doing something else. And if she finds it a weight upon the mind to keep track of so many things at once, she must yield herself to this discipline, knowing that she is thus training her mind for better service and that she will be more fitted to use to good advantage the extra hours that she will thus gain. She will come to the new cultural duty of the hour she has thus wrung from the working period with increased joy and with new powers gained by the strenuousness of the hour's work that went before.

The administration of a house is to call for a higher training in mechanics. Education is giving much more of this now than formerly and will answer the demand for still more. The girls of the country, where this education is needed far more even than in the city, must be prepared to answer this need.

We cannot be expert in the new housekeeping unless we have some comprehension of the chemical processes that constantly go on under our hands. One young woman took for her master's degree a study of the bacterial flora found in spoiled canned peas and string beans. She found that there are some organisms that only grow all the better after they have been boiled one hour. She found that the strongest acids do not inhibit the growth of some other kinds. She has been a good year working on that theme. If she should include one or two other kinds of spoiled foods her work would extend over another year.