ortant person, measured
in influence upon the life of the nation, than the farmer's wife,
no more important home than the country home, and it is of
national importance to do the best we can for both.

_Theodore Roosevelt._

CHAPTER XI

THE NEW ERA

The mother of to-day is a bridge between two eras. Her mother had a
wooden spoon and a skillet; her daughter has a dynamo. As for herself,
she hardly knows which way to turn--whether to be loyal to the wooden
spoon or to enlist her sympathies with the dynamo.

This is, by the way, the reason for many of her troubles, though she may
not assign them to this cause. For the utensil is the symbol of a
psychology, of a rationale of living, of an esthetic ideal, of a
spiritual recognition. When the soap-kettle was carried for the last
time into the backyard to rust away forever in the weeds behind the
barn, the New Era believed itself safe in the dining-room and made up
its mind to stay there. Science riding on a gang-plow and scattering
bulletins along the way, was making happy inroads on the farm; and the
electric motor in the kitchen became inevitable. All that remained for
us was to adapt ourselves to it, and that is what we have been doing
ever since.

It was a revolution--this introduction of machinery; and it was none the
less so because it came so gradually and with so little show of
intention. No one noticed when Hannah found it no longer possible to sit
by her window binding shoes. She then, however, ceased to look through
the pane for her unreturning lover, but sorrowfully rose from her chair
and walking out of the low door, she passed over to the factory across
the street and there went on as before, binding shoes--but in another
way. She simply became one of a hundred who gave their whole attention
to one single element among the forty-nine different elements now made
possible in the process of making a pair of shoes, and left the other
forty-eight elements to be done by other industrious women working in
groups of one hundred. The women were not driven out of their work; they
did not crowd into the places of men in the manufacturing field. They
simply took their long-accustomed work in hand and went into the factory
to do it. So with weaving and many other kinds of industry. So is it now
with canning. Women are the prehistoric caretakers of our foodstuffs.
They still are this when in the factory they are canning pickles and
green corn