The Nonpartisan Leader Newspaper, March 10, 1919, Page 12

z | N ) R ~N ~N ~ | t H ;l. B Ve T e FARM WOM P ; vy, “ypry 2 Rtz ABIG DAL TS W WS A What Farm Women Are Thinking SHALL THE WOMEN STAY AT HOME? By Mrs. Lula Lowrie, Minnesota. =|OTHER used to say: “If I stay at home and be- have myself, bring up my children right and make a good home, that’s enough.” Even we:" ig- norant (?) farm women know that isn’t true today. It isn’t even possible to make a good home or bring up our children right by staying at home, and not finding out what the world is about —allowing someone else to arrange the outside world to suit his own self- ish interests. Our boys will be tempted by the saloon; our girls by “dress” or half-dress; and no amount of home training is as effective as what they learn outside the home. This civilized world is not the kind - of a world in which to develop honesty, NPT PR AT B AT DN I AT A S Pk e fairness and real worth, is it? Is it? Which is wiser—to attempt to bring up children able to live worthily in such a world, or to get out and do one’s best to make the world a fit place in which to bring up children? Both, perhaps. Bread can be made infinitely more easily, cheaply and of better average quality in large quantities by expert bakers, than by the individual each in her own kitchen. It doesn’t seem true now—because our bakers’ bread is not good. We won’t eat it if we can help it. Neither do we want to be made sick by eating factory canned fruit or tinned meat, and it’s often cheaper to make one’s own clothes than to buy ready-mades. But when we realize that these things can all be made better, a hun- dred times more quickly, and with less waste, and therefore more chéaply, than by each of us separately, then we are positively ashamed to stay at home and do nothing to change such a state of affairs. If business is rotten, if our prof- iteers in food and clothes, etc., are playing “kaiser” in our own country, it is nothing but foolish to whine about it or fo scold our grocer privately, un- Aess we are also doing something that will really make things different. Don’t wait until husband has work- ed himself to death, filling the wallets of the grain gamblers and the beef trust. Get out and help save him from it. . Swearing about conditions or fight- ing single-handed does just as much good as wishing for rain. Our hus- bands are UNITING with Townley, and a million others to make our world safe for our children and our- selves. Are we? FARMERS COMING TO THEM- SELVES Minot, N. D. Editor Nonpartisan Leader: As I have finished reading the Leader for the week just past, and as I have never seen anything written - by any of the lady N. P. L.s in our vicinity, I thought I would write, ' I will not try to tell what the League means to me, but I believe the women _ should give each other their -ideals once in a while. It is.quite interesting to read these letters by both women and men. I never miss one of them. I have been a farmer’s wife for 156 years and have had all the experience there was to be had, for I have toiled _in the fields along with- my husband TR AN . 4 every year. We *have five children, three boys and two girls. The eldest, a girl, is past 14 and the youngest girl is four. I have been in the field from seeding time until after the grain was hauled to market and as long as my health will permit, I expect to keep it up. ~ I was born on a farm in northeast- ern Missouri, and reared on a farm. When I was 18 I came to North Da- kota and was married at 19 to a North Dakota bachelor—and we have had all kinds of experience in our farming -career. ¢ All the grafts and bogus deals a farmer is sure to find out without any trouble, and they have been plentiful. They do not seem to be quite so bad as they were before the N. P. L. sprung up. I certainly agree with the woman who wrote in regard to those agents and Fido. I have had quite a lot of experience with them myself. They were so thick one season that as one was leaving another was com- | AT THE LEAGUE PICNIC A section of the 300 automobiles at the Nonpartisan league picnic held on the experimental farm near Edgeley, N. D . “ Farm women as well as farmers are always conspicuous at League picnics because the struggle for better con- ditions on the farm concerns them as day the women of North Dakota launch of which will be to bring the votes of much as the men. On Lincoln’s birth- ed a new organization, part of the work the women more solidly to the support of the League principles, for the women in that state now have the vote. i Work of Children’s Bureau ASHINGTON, D. C.— That the new national consciousness of chil- dren’s needs developed by Children’s Year has begun to show permanent results is indicated in the annual re- . port of the Children’s Bureau, federal department of labor, which has just been made public. The campaign was inaugurated with the beginning of the second year of the war in an effort to save babies’ lives and to raise the standards for the health, education and work of older children. The work has been done in co-operation with the child welfare committees of the Coun- cil of National Defense. “It is impos- sible,” Miss Julia C. Lathrop, chief of the Children’s Bureau, writes, “to speak with too much appreciatiorr of - the power of this great body of volun- teers.” ' 5 Between six and seven million chil- dren have been weighed and measured. Many local committees have sueceeded in providing follow-up measures to help parents in their endeavors to remedy defects which the tests have revealed. Scientific diets have been prescribed for many of the children whose examinations indicated that “they were undernourished. In a num- ber of places public funds have been appropriated for permanent work for children as a result of the\Children’s Year, and many health centers, pre- natal clinics, traveling clinics, and like measures for the better care of chil- dren have been established. = Through the weighing and meas- using tests, the report points out, general attention has for the first time been drawn to the needs of the child of pre-school age, long known as the “neglected age.” The claims of in- fants ‘and the needs of mothers for better prenatal and confinement care have been given wide publicity by local committees working for a health- ier childhood. The older children have been given special attention. In order to afford older children opportunity to gauge their physical development tests of physical efficiency were made part of the recreation drive, held in the sum- mer. The drive included many other features, planned with the purpoese of giving boys and girls a chance to de- velop wholesome interests and play under healthy, decent conditions. The present drive of Children’s Year is the Back-to-School campaign. It is now going forward in 36 states, and is an effort to get out of industry and back to school the many young boys and girls who left because of war. conditions. ing into the yard. That. may sound unreasonable, but it is true. It seems strange now compared with what it used to be. The farmers act just.as though they had been hyp- notized and are just coming to them- selves. Often I think of a few years ago, before the N. P. L. was started, of a time when one of the Minot papers came out with quite a to-do about the governor coming to Minot, and what a big banquet the business men had in his honor. Being a private affair, of course, there were no farm- ers there. Now, last summer when the farm- ers’ governor was there, what a jolly crowd of old and young farmers and “hayseeds” was there. It was better than an old Missouri “fish fry.” The governor was not afraid he would get some “hayseeds” on his clothes either. And if all the farmers enjoyed that picnic as much as we did, and I have not the least doubt but that they did, they all will be glad to have aneother . of the same kind this summer, or as long as he likes the company at farm- er picnics. 2 One party said to me that Townley just naturally had a bad reputation and he did not think the farmers were acting wisely in letting him handle so much money. I told him that Townley was welcome to all our money that he got, and that if .we were lucky enough to have any when he needed more he could have that too. I can not begin to tell you of the different muddles I have been in over the Nonpartisan league. . Well, this letter 'is getting long. When I began writing I did not in- tend starting a paper, as we already have two good ones which we are get- ting because of the Nonpartisan league, but I see by the number of * pages that I have written a' young paper. I guess this is enough for the first time. I will close by wishing the Nonpartisan league and all concerned greater success than ever before. MRS. E. O. L. WOULD LIKE TO STRIKE Cheyenne Wells, Col Editor Nonpartisan Leader: i I am sending you-a clipping from our county paper containing an at- tack on the Nonpartisan league. The old parties ‘combined; so our ticket did not win out. The attack by this paper has stirred up the Nonpartisans and I think all the farmers here. < The townspeople appear to be against the League, but the farmers are for it. I just wish we farmers could go on a strike for a month. MRS. J. R. MEROLF. The clipping from the Cheyenne Wells News which- Mrs. Merolf sends, contains one of the most unprincipled attacks which the Leader has seen. The editor is one of those sedition ex- perts who can smell sedition on any one opposing the special interests.. He also knows that the League passed away in the last election. His assump- tion that the Cheyenne county farm- ers are blockheads and need his pro- tecting judgment certainly ought to stir up the farmers against gang rule. ’ The woman's auxiliary which was sl_:grted in North Dakota on Lincoln’s birthday promises to be of great in- testet and the Leader will have a account of it in the near future. - -