[The Family and it’s Members by Anna Garlin Spencer]@TWC D-Link bookThe Family and it’s Members CHAPTER II 11/37
The three-meal-a-day routine, the actual preparation of raw material of food for the table, the personal offices of housework, washing, ironing, mending, making, sweeping, dusting, cleaning, in all their varied details, keep her in active sympathy with the past.
This fact furnishes the main reason why "Women's Columns" and "Magazines for Women" reach such large circulation in rural districts, where they help toward lessening the domestic burden by showing how to carry it more easily. The farm woman, however, is moving, many thousand strong, with men as many, to mitigate the isolation of the solitary household, to bring the home nearer to the neighbors, the school, the church and the store, by massing rural homes in villages and forming the habits of the men-folk to go further afield for their own work.
This movement, which is of all social reforms most needed because affecting larger classes than any other and also because affecting the basic industry of all countries, that of agriculture, is working toward making farm-life once more attractive to young men and capable of winning young women to the life of the farmer's wife. Meanwhile, the higher forms of social organization possible in cities and in closely settled towns and villages are working to lessen house-keeping burdens to an unprecedented degree.
It is noticeable that all schemes for so specializing woman's work and so easing the domestic burden as to make, as one writer puts it, "the home a rest place for women as for men," have their imaginary seat in great cities or closely built suburbs.
The farm-women we know can combine and cooeperate to a greater extent than they now do and the town and city women may take far better advantage of the agencies of household assistance now at their doors.
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