e. She thinks she
sees a way out in the industrial opportunity of the town. It is a
mirage--but she follows it. She follows it and follows it--and what is
the end to be? Would it not pay us to give her the opportunity to put
the housekeeping for the next generation of home-makers on a better
foundation and thus keep these finest of the girls of the nation in the
environment they love but now find unendurable because they cannot under
present conditions have the help they need?

The papers and periodicals for women nowadays devote long columns to
telling us how to make some kind of contraption that will take the place
of a fireless cooker or of a movable tray or of some other new
housekeeping device. It is true that woman may use her ingenuity to make
something that will "do."

But we have been too long getting on with half-measures, makeshifts,
contraptions of all sorts. The star we should now hitch our wagon to is
an electric motor. The young woman who wishes to live on the farm would
better enter some industrial field, make something commercially and with
efficiency, sell it, and find in her hands the fifteen dollars for the
fireless, the eleven for the double-decker wheeled-tray, and pretty soon
the larger sum that will be needed to install a perfect kitchen, that
will not only be a joy to herself but will be a lesson to her whole
community, that will lift the whole region into a new realization of
life, that will show how the time necessary to be spent on the drudgery
of the household may be reduced from eighteen hours a day to two, and so
release her energies as to give to the higher needs of the family and to
the equally great needs of the community the services that she alone is
fitted to give, and that are absolutely necessary to the well-being and
the safeguarding of the life of the rural realm and therefore also of
the whole people.

How can we get a kitchen like that? Well, that is the Gordian knot that
the farm daughters will be able to cut. They can do it--they must do it.
Every instinct of patriotism, every breathing of passion for the welfare
of the future homes, every thought of affection for the home circle that
will be theirs, calls for the most valiant struggle to gain the goal--a
perfectly hygienic, perfectly fitted household plant, with all in it
that can by scientific mechanism be placed there, to be the perfect
working basis for that highest product, human happiness in a human
home.

CH