Laura Ingalls Wilder, Farm Journalist

by Stephen Hines

  What we have learned of economy and frugality; of substituting for too rich dishes those which are plainer, really more palatable and much healthier; of a more simple tho equally as beautiful way of dressing, should be of great value to us personally and nationally unless we foolishly make haste to forget these lessons of the hard years just passed.

  From a careful reading of the news from all over the world, it appears to me that the economy and thrift of the people of the nations will be of as much importance during the next few years as it has been during the actual warfare and may well determine in the end who are the actual victors in the conflict.

  I notice that there is a systematic effort being made to buy up the bonds of small denominations from the small bond holders and I am very sorry to learn that some are selling. I wish all might be like one farm woman of my acquaintance, who with her egg money has invested $350 in Liberty Bonds and who says she has formed the habit of buying bonds and will begin buying farm loan bonds as soon as there are no more Liberty Bonds for sale.

  Never before have government bonds of small denominations been placed within easy reach of the people of the United States. It has given us all a chance to own a financial interest in our government and to pay interest to ourselves instead of to the other fellow, a way of evening things by making one hand wash the other, so to speak.

  Some of us have been rather inclined, at times, to envy the government pensioners and to wish that we might be assured of a pension for our old age. Now here at last is our chance to earn our old age pension from the government by practicing economy now and remembering that government bonds, either Liberty Bonds at 4¼ per cent or farm loan bonds at 4½ per cent, are good, safe investments and worth making an effort to buy and to keep.

  I am not urging that we become penurious or deny ourselves or family the things we should have for our comfort and pleasure but simply that we never again fall into the way of thinking that we must buy anything because our neighbor has it or enter into the old strife for show. The reputation of a careless spender is nothing to be desired. For myself, I would prefer a government bond in a safety deposit.

  Who’ll Do the Women’s Work?

  April 5, 1919

  Flaring headlines in the papers, have announced that “women will fight to hold jobs,” meaning the men’s jobs which they took when the men went to war. What to do about the situation seems to be a very important question. One would think that there must have been a great number of women who were idle before the war. If not, one wonders what has become of the jobs they had. To paraphrase a more or less popular song—I wonder who’s holding them now?

  With men by the thousands out of work and the unemployment situation growing so acute as to cause grave fears of attempted revolution, women by hundreds are further complicating affairs by adding their numbers to the ranks of labor, employed, unemployed or striking as the case may be.

  We heard nothing of numbers of women who could not find work, before the war. They were all busy, apparently and fairly well satisfied. Who is doing the work they left, to fill the places of men who went into the army, or is that work undone?

  It would be interesting to know and it seems strange that while statistics are being prepared and investigations made of every subject under the sun, no one has compiled the records of “The Jobs Women Left or Woman’s Work Undone.”

  But however curious we may be about the past, we are more vitally interested in the future. Will these women take up their old work and give the men a chance to go back to the places they will thus leave vacant? The women say not.

  Other women, also, besides those who took men’s jobs, have gone out of the places they filled in pre-war days, out into community and social work and government positions which were created by and because of the war. Will these women go back? And again we hear them answer, “Never! We never will go back!” All this is very well, but where are they going and with them all of us? I think this query could most truthfully be answered by a slang expression, which tho perhaps not polished is very apt—“We don’t know where we’re going but we’re on our way.”

  It makes our hearts thrill and our heads rise proudly to think that women were found capable and eager to do such important work in the crisis of wartime days. I think that never again will anyone have the courage to say that women could not run world affairs if necessary. Also, it is true that when men or women have advanced they do not go back. History does not retrace its steps.

  But this too is certain. We must advance logically, in order and all together if the ground gained is to be held. If what has hitherto been woman’s work, in the world, is simply left undone by them, there is no one else to take it up. If in their haste to do other, perhaps more showy things, their old and special work is neglected and only half done, there will be something seriously wrong with the world, for the commonplace, home work of women is the very foundation upon which everything else rests.

  So if we wish to go more into world affairs, to have the time to work at public work, we must arrange our old duties in some way so that it will be possible. We cannot leave things at loose ends, no good housemother can do that, and we have been good housekeepers so long that we have the habit of finishing our work up neatly.

  Women in towns and villages have an advantage over farm women in being able to co-operate more easily. There is talk now of community kitchens for them, from which hot meals may be sent out to the homes. They have of course the laundries and the bake shops already.

  We farm women, at least farm mothers, have stayed on the job, our own job, during all the excitement. We could not be spared from it as we realized, so there is no question of our going back or not going back. We are still doing business at the old place, in kitchen and garden and poultry yard and no one seems to be trying to take our job from us.

  But we do not wish to be left too far behind our sisters in towns and cities. We are interested in social and world betterment; in religion and politics; we might even be glad to do some work as a side line that would give us a change from the old routine. We would like to keep up, if any one can keep up with these whirling times and we must have more leisure from the treadmill if we are to do any of these things. We must arrange our work differently in some way. Why not a laundry for a farm neighborhood and a bakery also, so situated that they will be easily accessible to a group of farms? Perhaps if we study conditions of labor and the forward movements of the world as related to the farm, we may find some way of applying the best of them to our own use.

  Women’s Duty at the Polls

  April 20, 1919

  Now that women in Missouri have been given the right to vote for President of the United States and the prospect is good that they will be granted full franchise in the state, it will be interesting to observe how they will respond to the new duty laid upon them.

  That it is a duty for every self-respecting woman to discharge faithfully there can be no question; and as these women are not in the habit of failing in their duties, there is no danger that they will do so now if they understand the situation.

  We must get rid of the habit of classing all women together politically and thinking of the “woman’s vote” as one and indivisible. When the question of woman suffrage was last before the voters of the state, one ardent advocate of the measure who was also a strong prohibitionist made the remark, “When women have the ballot we’ll do away with this whisky business.”

  But when women secured the ballot in California, the state rejected the prohibition amendment and just lately, with the women voting, Chicago went wet, “wringing wet” as one editor says.

  This simply shows what we have all really known, that there are all kinds of women as well as of men and that woman’s vote will no more bring purity into politics and can no more be counted on as a unit than can man’s vote.

  It is easy to forecast the effect of woman suffrage on politics if the homeloving, home-keeping women should refuse to use their voting privilege, for th
e rougher class of women will have no hesitancy in going to the polling places and casting their ballots. There must be votes enough from other women to offset these in order to keep the balance as it has been.

  Then too, there is legislation which is needed to protect farming interests. Shall farm women fail to use the power given them by the ballot, to help secure this legislation?

  And so, as I said before, instead of being a privilege to be taken advantage of or neglected according to individual fancy, voting has now become, for the better class of women, a duty to be bravely and conscientiously done, even tho it may be rather distasteful. It is “up to them” to see to it that the power of their ballot is behind their influence for good clean government; for an honest administration of public affairs; for justice for all and special privileges for none. In short, as they have stood behind their soldiers, at home and abroad who were fighting for freedom and democracy, now to stand shoulder to shoulder with them and keep up the fight.

  I fear that we are not quite ready to use the ballot intelligently. Tho there has been warning enough that the responsibility was coming to rest upon us, we have been careless about informing ourselves of the conditions which the people of the United States must handle and the questions they must answer.

  In this reconstruction period, the most serious time which our nation and the world has ever been called upon to face, we come into the responsibility of helping to decide the fate of the world for perhaps hundreds of years, without being prepared.

  Women can no longer hide behind their husbands and fathers and brothers by saying, “I don’t pay any attention to politics. That is the men’s business,” nor can they safely vote as their men folks do without any other reason for so doing. We women know in our hearts, tho we would not admit it, that our men are not infallible. They do sometimes make mistakes and have the wrong ideas. Frankly now, is it not true? This being the case, now that the responsibility is ours, we shall be obliged to think things out for ourselves if we are honest and fair to them and ourselves.

  If we expect to be fit companions of the men who did their duty so bravely, fighting and working to save our country, we must do our part in upholding our ideals in time of peace. In plain words, as the other women will vote, we must do so in order to keep things properly balanced and tho we may be unprepared at present, there is no reason why we should not be able to vote intelligently by the time we are called upon to exercise the privilege.

  The Farm Home (1)

  May 5, 1919

  Among all the beautiful sights and sounds of spring, there is an ugly blot on the landscape here and there, a sight that is unpleasantly out of harmony and shows as little promise for the future as a blighted fruit tree. It is the presence of children at work in the fields when they should be in school.

  There is a compulsory school law but I have been informed that it does not apply to children engaged in agricultural work. It is a sufficient excuse for absence from school if the parent says the children are needed to help in the farm work.

  And farm children are needed at home, because every bit of help it is possible to get is usually not quite enough. But it does seem unfair to country children that they should be discriminated against; that they should have no protection from the law such as town children have. Food is needed to feed the world but that is not a good enough reason why part of the children should be allowed to work to produce it while other children are protected in their right to an education.

  Tho, in a way a concession to the independence of farming, leaving them at liberty to give their children the advantages of the schools or not as they may see fit, immunity from the compulsory school law will react to the disadvantage of all farmers by making them as a class below the level of those who follow other occupations, for farmers are like other people. There are some who put the interests of their children above other things and there are others who because Johnny can save them a good deal of time and many steps, will keep him at home that he may do so even tho it will put him at a disadvantage the remainder of his life.

  All the instruction in the farm papers, the wealth of knowledge, of new ideas and methods, of mutual help and the getting together spirit that all good farm papers are working to spread, does not reach the farmers who cannot read an article in a paper and understand it.

  Besides the loss of all this they are at the mercy of any unfounded report that may be circulated. As for instance, in regard to the League of Nations which is now so much discussed, there is a report circulating in the back places to the effect that if the United States enters the League we shall become subject to a foreign king. And it is believed literally by farmers who cannot read understandingly. Still they would not be classed as illiterate and there are no statistics from which we may learn how many such there are.

  But below them is the ignorant mass of the rural population who have not attended school for even the two years necessary to pass the literacy test and who are classed as illiterate by the Federal Bureau of Education which has compiled the statistics from the facts gathered. These illiterate persons amount to 10 per cent of the rural population.

  Of the 37 million country people, 2,700,000 cannot read a farm paper nor an agricultural bulletin and must learn the news as well as trade market conditions from some rumor, perhaps deliberately untrue, perhaps only a mistake thru much passing from one to another.

  “We shall have to spend great sums of money in improving our school systems! We shall have to undertake a nation-wide propaganda for the betterment of school buildings, for the replacement of unsanitary shacks with modern structures, for the adequate compensation of competent teachers,” says one editor writing on this subject. But of what use will all this be to the farmer boy who in school-time is driving old Bill and Kate with the heavy lines around his shoulders while with his hands he guides the plow, making the long furrows around and around the field which later he will help to plant to corn?

  Will it mean that he must begin his work earlier in the morning and keep at it later in the evening to help his father earn the added taxes to pay for these improvements that more fortunate children may have the advantage of them?

  “Pap needed me to help him,” said one such boy now a grown man. “Pap needed me to help him. I know, and it’s all right, but it’s no use for me to take a farm paper for I can’t read it so I can understand it.”

  The Farm Home (2)

  May 20, 1919

  “No article or commodity shall be shipped or delivered in international trade in the production of which children less than 16 years old have been employed or permitted to work.”

  How would farmers like to have that kind of a law? Why! They couldn’t even drive up the cows, and what would become of the pig and poultry clubs!

  When the American Federation of Labor formulated its platform of principles, and made this Article X the writers surely did not intend to prohibit child labor on the farm, for they must know that it would increase greatly the cost of produce if high priced help must be hired to do the children’s chores; and the high cost of living is already one of the chief grievances. The explanation seems to be that, as a class, farmers make so little impression that they are overlooked.

  Perhaps Article X might be a good law for city children, tho I doubt it. It does seem it would be much better for children to be employed under careful regulation than to be idle on the streets when they are not in school. We know it is better for farm children to help with the work they are able to do, giving them a greater interest in the farm, teaching them to be responsible, independent and energetic. If such a law became a fact it would be an injury to farm children to obey, and we should not wish to teach them to become law breakers by disregarding it.

  But the fact remains that the American Federation of Labor, which is a great power in politics and national affairs, in what it considers one of its most important principles, and which it is attempting to make a law, was either so ignorant of farm affairs that its writer knew no be
tter or absolutely ignored the farmers of the country.

  It only goes to show how seldom farmers are considered by some of the powers now planning to reconstruct the United States.

  - - - - - -

  Things are considerably stirred up these days as we all know, and when they settle it may be along new lines. No political party nor any industrial group is going to look after the interests and welfare of farmers.

  While we are slow to consider affairs from the standpoint of farmers as a class other classes have drawn closely together, into their own groups.

  Far back in history, in the days when Italy was a group of small principalities and of cities ruled as independent governments; when Great Britain had not been formed, and England was just England struggling to maintain its existence as an independent country, in those old days there were labor unions. They were called guilds then. There was the weavers’ guild, the dyers’ guild, the builders’ guild, and many others. Then there were the traders and merchants who worked for their trade interests, and the soldiers with which the overlord controlled his little principality, collecting taxes from the guilds and the merchants and peasants.

  Then, as now, the peasants or farmers stood alone. While the different guilds quarreled and even fought one another they all united to oppose unjust taxation or oppression. The merchants and traders had organizations, and worked together for their own ends but the peasantry stood or fell as individuals without any organized power which they could bring to bear on rulers or guilds or traders.

  There were peasant revolts sometimes but it was simply mob action. There was no organized constructive effort to win their objects.

  It remains to be proved how far farmers, as a class, have advanced since the time of those peasants. We are so busy and so careless that politicians working for self interest and industrial groups who have high salaried officers who spend their time working for the interests of their people can take advantage of our ignorance.