Dear Household:
Come, "Missouri Mule," let us reason together! Your letter about smoking was fine, but why give all the virtues to the women! The men in our family have been just as virtuous as the women. If our daddy smoked I would not try to keep Jimmy from using the filthy weed. Women have not smoked until recently. A few have begun to "tag" the men. I predict this will open the eyes of the men smokers as nothing else could, and they will lead these foolish ones out of their folly. Few men want their mothers, wives or daughters to smoke, and I have never heard a woman say, "I'm so glad my husband smokes and chews!"
"Pep," you knew I just couldn't keep still when a discussion of outdoor work for women was on. I remember years ago, when I had promised to become a farmer's wife and realized just how little I knew of farm life. I begged my parents to let me go to K.S.A.C. to learn how to make butter and raise chickens! They consented, and I went in perfect confidence that I'd learn all a farmer's wife should know. But to my dismay I found that butter-making was taught in the animal husbandry course and poultry raising was also relegated to the boys. So it isn't entirely my fault that I have the ideas I have on this vital subject.
I learned in my own home to make butter, and still make all we use. But the chickens are beyond me.
What do you do with a setting hen that eats all her eggs (Peg says to wring her neck!)
"Them's My Sentiments"
Hope wrote my sentiments exactly, and, like you, Pep, I have no patience with any woman who would not help a domestic animal if she could. But when I hear trouble at the barn, or even the chicken house, I get the "good man" up instead of investigating myself. Just one question, Hope. You say Ruth is taking up a poultry project. Now, will Wilbert, Sonny and Jo take up sewing projects? I fear we'd have a bit of trouble getting Jimmy to either sew or can.
I have known women who were so proud of the money they made raising chickens, pay out much more on ready-made clothing which they should have made themselves. Nothing wrong with the chicken raising, but why the pride? Isn't there greater glory in a girl or woman designing and making her own clothing than raising chickens, pigs, and calves? Which would you rather your son do -- a man's or a woman's work.
So many times I've wanted to write to Mrs. Simmons and tell her how very much her "home" articles have helped me, but fearing she is too busy to bother with letters with nothing in them about chickens, I've never said thank you! Since reading her article, "An Attempted Plea for Tolerance," I must tell her that we all didn't misunderstand, but since it brought forth an even better article, I'm not very sorry that some did.
Weeks later! I put this away in a drawer and forgot it, even wondered why Hope had cast it all in the waste basket! Reading "Molly Manning's" delightful letter made me want to assure her I feel the same responsibility in regard to my children's conduct. Whenever they have made mistakes I feel that I should have prevented that, and if they ever do a grave wrong I will be mostly to blame, or rather their parents. I've known so many parents who would accept the compliments their children brought them, but not the condemnations. But isn't Hope's thought that a child learns the good characteristics as well as the bad ones from parents comforting? -- Ruth Vernon.
No Law Against It
Question always welcomed here! If Wilbert, Sonny and Jo do or do not take up sewing projects, it will not be because there is compulsion either way. I'm sure the club would be open to them, but from the present indications they decidedly will not want to enter. However, I would not forbid Ruth her poultry work on that account, any more than I would say to Sonny, "You can't be a doctor, because Wilbert wants to be a farmer." Our daughter, like her maternal parent, has a bit too strong a taste for books, and we encourage any taste for handicraft, as a balancer.
Housework, it is true, provides handicraft of various sorts, and we encourage that. But Ruth is learning to cook and sew and clean, and enjoys them all. But, having grown up as a bookworm, I have made the discovery in comparatively recent years that no individual tastes the fullness of life without some form of outdoor manual labor -- in plain English, nice dirty work. It is both a sedative and a stimulant. It touches life with serenity and wholesomeness, and it is hard for one who does his own hoeing and digging to be a radical or a fanatic.
It is true that too severe and too prolonged manual labor, especially if performed under great economic stress, wears down courage and tangles nerves just as badly as strenuous mental work. If i could arrange the lives of us humans I would choose that every one should alternate days of gorgeously grubby work with days of interesting mental exercise. Workdays would be long enough and hard enough to bring real fatigue and luxurious rest. On the alternate days I would like for every human being to enjoy leisurely well served meals, baths and clean clothes, every mechanical device to make life comfortable, work of an interesting and stimulating but not physically tiring kind, and ample time for recreation and the amenities of life. Since this is only a pipe-dream, anyway, we need not figure out who would perform those necessary services which are menial but not necessarily grubby; but perhaps we would find a group of persons who would be willing to forego the sweaty days of hard labor for the lighter, if inferior, tasks.
And if I could order the development of my children I would like nothing better than for them to happen casually, as the years go by, onto craftsmen of various sorts who could show them the delight there is in any occupation for a master-craftsman, for one who loves his work, whether that work is sawing wood or managing a colossal organization. Then my girls would not be housewives nor my boys farmers, for the reason that they knew nothing else, but because in those occupations they found their best satisfaction in life. Their farther and I find what we want in farming. Our children may not. They shall be free to choose, and I hope we shall be able to provide them sufficient experience on which to base their choice. Man's work or woman's work -- there is no sharp dividing line any more. In the home, baking is woman's work; in commerce, it is often men's. All I ask is that whatever they choose, they try to do it to the best of their ability -- and enjoy doing it. --Hope.