THE LADIES’ WORLD.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXVII, Issue 2471, 8 April 1909, Page 7

THE LADIES’ WORLD.

THE WOMAN ON THE FARM

An American paper tells of a Bachelor Girl’s Chib,- formed of country girls, who send out 1100 letters to the girls and women of marriageable age and over, single and married, practically all the women in the country, asking them, among other things: gfr. 1* Were you brought up on a farm? ™ 2. If you are not married would you prefer a farmer to a man of any other ■occupation, all else being equal? 3. What- is the hardest part of a woman’s work on a farm? 4. What do you think would greatly help a woman’s work on .-the farm? Out of 1100 letters 956 answers wer.e received. They were.-' very direct, not evasive. Of the 956 answers, 684, or more than two-thirds, answered that they had been brought up on the farm, so that the constituency was a fairly representative one of farm-bred women. Three-fourths of the girls said they did not. want a farmer for a husband, because—and this answer was general—they had seen - how their mothers had slaved from dawn, before dawn, and to night; and they had seen—and this was significant—they had seen all too plainly how their fathers think of nothign but their cattle and crops, to the. sacrifice of their wives. “The cattle must have everything: mother nothmg.” A positive dread of the farm, “farmophobia,” possessed these farmers’ daughters of st marriageable age to an alarming extent: • . : All this from the daughters! And the overworked wives said the same thing. . - In nearly every letter from , a farmers’ wife was the cry. raised on the lack of consideration on the p.art of the menfolks. One tired little woman—you could tell elie was tired by the way she wrote—told of her six small children ; of a farm of 360 acres, entirely paid "for, with sixty cows and three hired men, and money in the bank. No hired girl, although she had asked for one over and over again. She had no machine, no facilities for baking and doing things, a wretched old cook-stove. '>• and not even pans or dishes. She had been saving her egg-money for five years to buy a nice rug for the sittingroom, which needed it greatly, and her husband had taken the money to buy jgg him a new gasoli-ne engine for the barn! \ There was a dangerous note struck in the letters, too, these farmers’ wives

were almost, to a woman, urging their daughters not to marry farmers and repeat, what they frankly called, “their own mistake.” ‘ They were praying, they, said, that their daughters would marry away from the farm. - It was all so pathetic, so pitiful to read: the hard, uncompromising picture that these letters presented of men’s absolute indifference to the women of their homes. It wasn’t all so, of course, here and there was a happy, almost jocular, gleam, but oh, so fearfully rare. The farmer was making a living, but out of the lives of his womenkind—careful to the last degree of his cjattle and his swine, but utterly careless of the human beings of his home. A POTATO POULTICE. A believer in the medicinal qualities of the potato makes the following statement: —Boiled potatoes, well mashed with salt, and sometimes some milk to dampen them, will make a poultice that will work wonders wherever used. I keep it warm with a hot-water bottle to save changing. I use the poultice for burns, cuts and bruises, sore ■corns and chilblains, cracked toes, astone bruises, and anything barefooted ■children are exposed to. I soak wounds well in hot* water with carbolic acid, then apply the potato. You would not believe how soon they arc cured. The water potatoes ai’e boiled in will cure, chapped hands and feet which are so trad that they bleed. Use some kind of good soap-with it, and have it as hot as the hands can endure. This treatment will remove tan also.