The American Country Girl. Martha Foote Crow
whether desirable or not, such a thing as this would never be seen in America. No woman (unless it were a deaconess or a Salvation Army lassie or a nun) would pass through the general crowd showing her rank or profession in life by her style of dress. And that is how it happens that neither by hat nor by hatlessness would the country woman here make known her pride in the possession of acres or in her relation to that profession that forms the real basis of national prosperity. Hence no country girl counts such a pride among her inheritances. Therefore if it is not easy to find and understand the country girl as a type, it is not because she is consciously or unconsciously hiding herself away from us; she is not even sufficiently conscious of herself as a member of a social group to pose in the attitude of an interesting mystery. She is just a human being happening to live in the country (not always finding it the best place for her proper welfare), just a single one in the great shifting mass.
Although it may be difficult to find what we may think are typical examples of the Country Girl as a social group, yet certain it is that she exists. Of young women between the ages of fifteen and twenty-nine, there are in the United States six and a half million (6,694,184, to be exact) who reside in the open country or in small villages. This we are assured is so by the latest Census Report.
By starting a little further down in the scale of girlhood and advancing a trifle further into maturity this number could be doubled. It would be quite justifiable to do this, because some farmers' daughters become responsible for a considerable amount of labor value well before the age of fifteen; and on the other hand the energy of these young rural women is abundantly extended beyond the gateway of womanhood, far indeed into the period that used to be called old-maidism, but which is to be so designated no more; the breezy, executive, free-handed period when the country girl is of greatest use as a labor unit and gives herself without stint (and often without pay) to the welfare of the whole farmstead. The American Country Girl is not by any means behind her city sister in her ability to make the bounds of her youth elastic, though the girl on the farm may go at it in a somewhat different way. Then, perhaps, too, the word "youth" may, alas! have another connotation in the mind of one from what it has in the dreams of the other.
If we should, however, thus enlarge the scope of our inquiry, we should increase but not clarify our problems. Moreover it is the Country Girl that interests us, the promise and hope of her dawn, the delicate swiftly changing years of her growth, the miracle of her blossoming. There is something about the kaleidoscope of her moods and the inconsistencies of her biography that fascinates us. The moment when she awakes, when the sparkle begins to show in her eyes, when we know that a conception of her mission and of her supreme value to life is beginning to glow before her imagination—that is the crisis to work for and to be happy over when it comes. As for us, we ask no greater happiness than once or twice to catch a glimpse of that.
That great host of six million country girls is scattered far and wide; they are everywhere present. A certain number of millions of them are working industriously in myriads of unabandoned farms all over the Appalachian plateau, and on the wide prairies to the Rockies, and beyond. In thousands of farmsteads they are helping their mothers wash dishes three times a day three hundred and sixty-five days in the year, not counting the steps as they go back and forth between dining-room and kitchen. They are carrying heavy pails of spring water into the house and throwing out big dishpanfuls of waste water, regardless of the strain in the small of the back. They are picking berries and canning them for the home table in the winter; they are raising tomatoes and canning them for the market; they are managing the younger children; they are baking and sewing and reading and singing; they are caring for chickens and for bees and for orphan lambs; they ride the rake and the disc-plow and sometimes join the round-up on the range. Moreover they go to church and they go to town and they look forward to an ideal future just as other girls do. The Country Girl is a human being also.
It has been intimated that young women living on remote secluded farms have not, with all their singing, been always able to dispel the monotony of a thousand inevitable dishwashings a year; they are said nowadays to have opened their ear to the lure of the town and to have started out, keeping step with their brothers, to join what some one has called, "the funeral procession of the nation" cityward. If we could, in fact, get them to confide in us, we should find that they have longings and aspirations, many of which are unsatisfied; and that is the reason why it seems to be high time for their voice to be heard.
Some of the younger farm women are showing themselves equal to the larger burdens in the business of agriculture. They are running their own farms in Michigan and their own automobiles in Kansas. They are taking up claims. They are developing them and proving up in the Dakotas and through Montana and Wyoming. From four to six in the morning they till an acre; then they ride twenty miles to the school and teach from nine to four; after that they ride back and work in their cornfields till the stars twinkle out. They stay alone in their shack and are happy and fearless and safe.
Moreover some thousands of the girls are laboriously teaching schools in thousands of one-room schoolhouses, where they provide almost one hundred per cent. of the common instruction for fifty per cent. of the population.
Besides this, there is no one of all the gainful occupations in which young women of this country engage which has not drawn upon the reservoir of country strength for supplies. Among those women blacksmiths and engineers, those clerks, secretaries, librarians and administrators, those lawyers, doctors, professors, writers, those nurses, settlement workers, investigators and other servants of the people in widely diverse fields, there are many whose clearness of eye and reserve of force have been developed in the wholesome conditions of the open country. The Country Girl has no reason to be ashamed of the part she has borne in the non-rural world. It has been said that about eighty per cent. of the names found in "Who's Who in America" represent an upbringing in the rural atmosphere. The proportion of women in this number or the special proportion of grown-up farm girls to be found among those women cannot be stated; but the number must be large enough to justify a belief that to spend a childhood in the open country or in the rural village will not, in the case of women any more than in the case of men, form an impassable barrier to eminence.
From this great rural reserve of initiating force, sane judgment, and spiritual drive have come, in fact, some of the most valued names in philanthropy and literature. Among them we find the leader of a great reform, Frances Willard; the inaugurator of a world-wide work of mercy, Clara Barton; the president of a great college, Alice E. Freeman; the wise helper of all who suffer under unjust conditions in city life, Jane Addams; and the writer of a book that has had a national and world-wide influence, Harriet Beecher Stowe.
It heartens us up a bit to name over examples like these. They give us a vista and a hope. But now and then there is a Country Girl who would rather have, say, a better pair of stilts over the morass or a stronger rope thrown to her across the quicksand, than a volume of "Who's Who" tossed carelessly to her in her difficulties. For all the Country Girls on their farms do not sing at their work. They are not idle, heaven knows!—but their work does not invariably inspire the appreciation it deserves.
CHAPTER II
THE HEART OF THE PROBLEM
New times demand new measures and new men;
The world advances and in time outgrows
The laws that in our fathers' day were best;
And, doubtless, after us some purer scheme
Will be shaped out by wiser men than we,
Made wiser by the steady growth of truth.
Lowell.
CHAPTER II