This statement of opinion aroused a storm of comments in other books, chiefly by American gentlemen, claiming that the farm woman lacks the training for keeping accounts and the large comprehension needed for that part of the business. But this training is now accessible to the Country Girl, and we believe the "large comprehension" will come with experience. At any rate this will come to her as easily as to the unwilling agriculturalist himself, and the leisure (in a new era) and the faculty for detail will remain her valued assets. It is idle to say in this day and age of the world that the woman has no mind for the keeping of accounts when women are bankers and millionaires and managers of large business enterprises by myriads.
It is a simple matter for the girl to take charge of the butter and egg accounts, and also of the bookkeeping for the whole farmstead: she will be all the better mentally and morally for attending to this duty. Mentally she will improve under the discipline of exactness and promptness; morally she will improve under the discipline of the strictness and definiteness required by the responsibility. The reason why so many women have been so irresponsible in money matters is because they have been treated as children and therefore have adopted the habits of children in their buying and selling.
There is a telephone girl who can tell the 'phone number of nearly all the houses in three large cities where she has worked in the hotel 'phone booths. There are a good many things she cannot do but she can do that. The person at the head of the department for receiving payments at one of the largest department stores in New York City is a woman. She takes in all the bills and makes change on the charge slips and the checks, and estimates all the details of the accounts. She puts her mind completely upon the papers in hand, so that while a set of these are before her she is so absorbed in them that no question put to her by any one standing at the door of the cage would any more reach her mind than if she were dead. In a moment she hands the papers to the proper person with the correct statement; then that is over and she is ready for the next. She has done this work every day for sixteen years, and she looks young and blooming. This woman is working for herself; but she is doing her work so excellently that it becomes a universal benefit, inspiring us to imitate her efficiency.
As the home is the reason for being of the farmstead, the woman therein is making good her partnership if she is taking care of her housekeeping and family duties. Her contribution is being made. But the farm and the home are so closely interwoven that she is of far greater importance than this shows. She is a true partner and is worthy of all the rights and duties that this indicates. If the woman is not the keeper of books for the farm business, it is at least her right as a partner to have the books of the business always open to her. To see the books would be the first request of any partner.
One of the best farmers, who was also one of the best of men, affirmed that he was not in the habit of confiding his business matters to his wife. She on her part was one of the most loyal and most refined of women, the mother of wonderful children, and the very effective though unencouraged worker by his side for many years. His thought was that he would take the whole responsibility for the support of the family; he did not want to bother the rest of the household about details of business. One summer he lost a thousand dollars through the bad outcome of a bargain, but he did not tell his wife of this. Then after a while he made five thousand dollars more than usual—but neither did he share this news with her. Do you not think that if that wife had known that summer that there were four thousand extra dollars that might be depended upon for the use of the home, she would not have used two of them in the development of an efficient kitchen, placing a set of machines there that would have given her hot and cold water at hand, some form of power for the washing-machine, dummies, dust-chutes, ice chests, fireless cookers, lighting, wheeled trays, and all the necessary paraphernalia to put her household on an efficient basis—by this means not only lifting her own work up to the place of a scientific laboratory but raising the productive level of the whole valley where she lived and helping to lighten the burdens of a hundred farm women who were having not even so comfortable a time in their life plans as she was?
Now if this woman had had a little more business sense she would have realized that she had begun wrong years ago. It may also be that, if she had understood the whole situation, she would have approved of leaving the money in the bank for a time: it may be that she would have devoted it to sending a daughter to college. But, other things being equal, and if to her marriage had been a platform from which the soul of woman takes a new flight, we may believe that she would have devoted some of the money to better equipment for her own workshop.
But all these things are aside from the point, which is that she had earned the money as much as he had, and that she should have had as much to say as her husband had about the disposal of their joint savings.
The Country Girls of to-morrow must profit by experiences like these in the families of the generation now passing, and make certain that the efficiency principle of the square deal and the basic principle of a true partnership shall be established in the home-plans they are making. If they cannot assure themselves that conditions satisfying to their self-respect will prevail for them in the farmsteads of the future, they are justified in rejecting the countryside for their home and in leaving it to wither away in its lack of their dynamic and rejuvenating presence.