It is not the mark of a fine woman to be careless in spending; quite the contrary. The young woman who has intellectuality and training and taste to compute her expenses carefully, to use the money to good advantage and to the best purpose, is the young woman of higher grade, not the one who wastes, who scatters carelessly and purposelessly, and who indulges in things costing much and affording no permanent good. Our ideal in these respects needs some right-about-face orders from our conscience. "Saving," says Professor Martha Van Rensselaer at Cornell University, "cultivates self-control, imagination, resourcefulness, character." She continues: "It is quite right to economize on some standbys and then spend more for some esthetic object, if the esthetic better satisfies a real craving connected with the higher life.... It is not meanness to study economy; it is not 'near' to avoid waste. To work out new uses that may be made of every particle of food, to get the full food-value out of every bit of it, is scientific exactness instead."
It is possible that all the skill of the woman in the farm home will be needed as time goes on to keep the financial foundations of the farmstead firm. A long look forward seems to discern on the horizon a rising necessity for greater care, and perhaps for all the skill that the farm women and other women of the next generation can master. Why should Nature go on interminably caring for a people who indulge themselves so heedlessly, so criminally in waste, cutting away their forests, throwing away good food, refusing to use the supplies of electric power in their rivers? Of course she will not. Disciplines are before us. It is the part of wisdom to use greater stringency and more scientific exactness in our household systems, that disaster may not come upon us unprepared.
Some prevision of this may be in the minds of women when they endeavor to give themselves a bit of training for direct money-earning business. For them, and especially the younger women, openings are being made in almost every direction. A woman is no longer to be accused of a tastelessly commercial spirit if she desires to know through actual experiment the value of her labor in the commercial rating of the community. It is only by trying that she can thus standardize her labor. If she offers cabbage plants from her growing patch, honey from her bee-colonies, wild fruit that she has gathered from God's free gardens, if she takes boarders, weaves hair, embroiders, or mends, if she takes advantage of postal service and builds up a business in fine lace-laundering, or silk and lingerie waist cleansing, whatever she takes in hand, she is not only earning a little money, but she has gained skill in manipulation, developed taste, compelled herself to seek excellence, and strengthened her character by putting her work—and that means herself—to the test of comparison with the work of others to stand or fall by the decision. If she has failed in this test, she has the chance to try harder and gain more character in further struggle.
All this should be looked upon as a part of the girl's training for life. When parents have presented to the human family a highly developed and trained young woman as their contribution, they should expect her to desire to be a worker and to take up some form of activity as the beginning, in turn, of her personal contribution. Professor Nearing says that every girl should occupy the years between the latest school days and her marriage in some wage-earning pursuit. There should be two or three years there that she could spend in this part of her education. She should thus learn business law, the stringency of markets, the balance of purchase and sale, the interchange of commercial motive, and the art of salesmanship. Here will be a great field of training for her, and every part of it will be useful to her when she enters upon the duties of her own house and home.
The best way for any girl to start upon this means of discipline, is to think over what she can already do well. What have you been praised for doing? Take that and try to do it still better. What you best like to do will be the easiest to start with. Do this so well that people will desire the product. People buy what they think is most excellent: therefore make something so excellent that people will want to buy it. And remember this principle: the appearance of anything offered for sale has a great deal to do with whether people will take a liking to it or not. Do up all things nicely; make all packages neat and shipshape; use color if possible; have the box and the cord match in tint; humor the fancy of the buyer. At a certain country fair the girls in one particular booth had great success. Why? Their voices were sweet and they themselves were neatly dressed. But above all, the packages were done up so deftly and looked so beautiful when they were handed out that it was not difficult to understand the success of this booth. Buyers want a good product, but they do like it in a fine package.
This Tennessee girl is a member of a Gardening and Canning Club. She won the cow and calves as premiums for having the best exhibit at the State Fair.
A beautiful enthusiasm for Canning Club work comes from the South. Joined with many other good things that come inevitably with the organization of young life, it has enriched and blest the girls incalculably. Writing to me of this, one woman said: "It has done more to stir the Southern girls from the lethargy into which so many of them had fallen than anything else I can think of." In reply to an inquiry, Mr. O. H. Benson, in charge of Canning Club Work for the U. S. Department of Agriculture, I wrote: "During the present year there are about 250,000 boys and girls enrolled in club projects in the United States who are receiving special follow-up instruction and who are organized on the federated basis, making them members not only of their own local community but of the State and national movement. About half of these are girls who are doing work with poultry, home gardening or the canning club project work." Mr. Benson was kind enough to lend me the photograph of the young lady with the two Jersey calves. She is Miss Myrtle Hardin, of Camden, Tennessee, a girl fifteen years of age, who has been a member of the Gardening and Canning Club of the State for four years. The two Jersey calves were won as premiums for having the best records for Club Work in the State Fair for 1912 and 1913. Mr. Benson gives a list of the prizes she won, and of the educational trips she has taken, and adds: "Besides this, she has earned from her work several hundred dollars which she deposited in the bank and will use to pay her expenses to attend college and take a domestic science course."
This efficient girl so interested me that I wrote her and asked her to tell me herself something about her achievements that I might hand it on as an inspiration to other girls. She wrote me this delightful account: