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