In all these wage-earning endeavors there is but one caution to be thought of beforehand. We should remember that when a young woman is working in the kitchen of the farm home, she is doing a wage-worthy work fully as much as when she is offering to some outside market. Now if she undertakes to make use of some by-product of the farm, if she cans the waste vegetables, reclaims them to common use, and standardizes the product, will not this new industry march into the factory as the others have, and will not the woman in the home be left without her wage as before? Unless the right principle underlies the business of canning, this will surely come to pass. There is no reason why the housework should not be standardized and brought under the law of economic production; there is no reason why a new sort of canning should be left in the unregulated realm for the benefit of the woman's whim for a work of her own. It shall surely not escape commercialization. The rag carpet, now a cheapened factory product, should be a warning to women. What we should work for is not the enclosing of a certain piece of work with bars that we may get our hands upon it, but the establishment of economic laws that shall make women free to work wherever their taste and abilities incline them.
For the Country Girl in her plans for a future life of healthful, satisfying labor, the pathway to this better order lies over the rocky pavement of household systemization and scientific budget-making.
CHAPTER XVII
THE DRESS BUDGET
There is that scattereth and yet increaseth; and there is that withholdeth more than is meet and it tendeth to poverty.
Proverbs.
Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.
St Paul.