The PRESIDENT: Mr. Stevens has very forcefully brought out the factor that a book may be in bringing into life dormant faculties that might otherwise go to waste and recalls to us the remark of Prof. Dewey, that the loss of the unearned increment is as nothing compared with the loss of the undiscovered resource.
Of course you know as well as the members of the program committee that they had nothing to do with the selection of the next speaker; the topic chose her. How could anyone else be asked to present the subject of "The woman on the farm," than Miss LUTIE E. STEARNS, of the Wisconsin free library commission?
THE WOMAN ON THE FARM
Modern programs of library extension through public libraries as distinguished from traveling library systems are practically confined to an arbitrary line drawn tightly around the city's limits. Charters, laws, or ordinances under which many libraries operate are usually interpreted to restrict the use of such institutions to a narrow area and no great attempt has been made through legislation, save in California and a few isolated examples elsewhere, to extend library privileges to adjacent communities. It is a happy omen for the future that the president of the American Library Association, the custodian of a library catering to two-million city dwellers with a circulation second in rank to Greater New York, should have seen fit on his own initiative to place among the topics of this meeting the needs of the woman on the farm, the real founder of the city's citizenship.
"Who's the greatest woman in history?" was the query debated by Kansas school teachers recently. They considered Joan of Arc, Queen Elizabeth, Semiramis, Cleopatra, Cornelia, Catherine of Russia, Maria Theresa, Grace Darling, Florence Nightingale, Susan B. Anthony, and half a hundred others. When they came to deciding, all the names known to fame were ruled out. And to whom do you suppose the judges awarded the palm? Here is the answer: "The wife of the farmer of moderate means who does her own cooking, washing, ironing and sewing, brings up a family of boys and girls to be useful members of society and finds time for intellectual improvement."
These teachers knew that woman, they knew the drudgery she faced at four or five o'clock every morning the year 'round. There are twenty millions of her in this country of ours, she makes up nearly one-fourth of the population of the country, and while we are dealing with these most "vital statistics," we may include the tragic fact that sixty-six per cent of those committed to insane hospitals are from rural districts, the farm women constituting the great majority thereof.
And yet the needs of this great, deserving class of "humans" with minds and hearts even more receptive to ideas than are city women—the needs of such as these are as yet almost wholly unrealized by librarians aside from Commission workers. No committee of the American Library Association has ever had the joy of working out a program of library extension from the great city systems to rural readers. The question put by the then President Roosevelt to his Country Life Commission, "How can the life of the farm family be made less solitary, fuller of opportunity, freer from drudgery, more comfortable, happier, and more attractive?" still awaits solution from the library standpoint.
Though agriculture is our oldest and by far our largest and most important industry, it has only recently occurred to us in the United States that we had a rural problem. It is only within the last decade or so that we have awakened to the fact that there is a rural as well as an urban problem, and the library world is too prone to keep from recognizing it. We are not concerned in this connection with the problem of the retired farmer who moves into a town to spend his last days which are, seemingly, all he is willing to spend; nor shall we discuss those restless flat dwellers in our cities who, tempted by such alluring and wholly immoral titles as "The Fat of the Land," "The Earth Bountiful," "A Self-Supporting Home," "Three Acres and a Cow," or "Three Acres and Liberty"—"for those to whom the idea of liberty is more inspiring than that of the cow"—attempt to start ginseng, guinea pig, pheasant, and peacock farms, and who return to the city as shorn of guineas as the pigs they leave behind them.
In the serious solution of this problem, we may, in truth, differ as to the sort of farmers we would benefit. As Sir Horace Plunkett has said in his "Rural problem in America," "The New York City idea is probably that of a Long Island home where one might see on Sunday, weather permitting, the horny-handed son of weekday toil in Wall Street, rustically attired, inspecting his Jersey cows and aristocratic fowls." These supply a select circle in New York City with butter and eggs at a price which leaves nothing to be desired unless it be some information as to cost of production. Full justice is done to the new country life when the Farmers' Club of New York fulfills its chief function—the annual dinner at Delmonico's. Then Agriculture is extolled in fine Virgilian style, the Hudson villa and the Newport cottage being permitted to divide the honors of the rural revival with the Long Island home. "But to my bucolic intelligence," concludes Sir Horace, "it would seem that against the back-to-the-land movement of Saturday afternoon, the captious critic might set the rural exodus of Monday morning."