FIG. 117.—Restfulness and hospitality pervade this farm living room
HOME Life on the Farm
The last 10 years have seen revolutionary changes with the farm home in the United States. Good roads, transportation, mechanical inventions, and improved service of the press and educational agencies have been as important factors in improvements in the home as they have been in the well-recognized improvements brought about in American agriculture.
Probably the most important change made within the home has been in the thinking of the farm woman. She has come to recognize satisfying home making as her objective rather than simply efficient housekeeping. She has found that rest and recreation are needed for all members of the rural family if their duties are to be performed more efficiently, and if their life is to be satisfying. She has become conscious of the necessity of procuring efficient tools for her work and of obtaining scientifically accurate knowledge regarding adequate methods of caring for the physical well-being of her family. She has developed a keen desire to make the home beautiful within and without, to developing correct habit formation in her children, and to make the home and community a place of satisfaction and pride to all concerned.
This viewpoint has developed rapidly, particularly during the past five years. Rural women in all sections of the country have begun to meet regularly in small groups to obtain the desired information, and to enjoy the satisfaction of group discussion and of social contact thus afforded.
The results of such activity by farm women and the resultant effort is in evidence on every hand. The yard and fences about the house have been put in orderly condition and a well-designed scheme for using grass, trees, flowers, and shrubs has made of the farm home a place of beauty.
The interior of the farm home has been made equally attractive. Simplicity, usefulness, and beauty have been made the keynote of selection and arrangement of house furnishings. Family recreation and music have been planned for in many homes. Such an atmosphere in the farm home has made rural children love their home and think of it as a place of satisfaction rather than one from which to go to seek pleasure elsewhere.
Through increased efficiency in the performance of necessary duties the farm woman has gained time which she has learned to use constructively. She has had more opportunity to study her mode of living and its possible improvement. She has been able to give more time to rest and recreation, to training her children in correct habits of acting, speaking, and thinking, to companionship with her husband and friends, and to carrying out her responsibilities as a member of the community.
The farm family has become more satisfactorily clothed. Clothing has been economically purchased. Becomingness, appropriateness to needs, and hygienic properties have been considered in its selection. Clothes have been made with less consumption of time and energy. The family has been more attractively dressed and has possessed that sense of poise and of satisfaction which comes from such knowledge. This has helped to overcome. self-consciousness, and has encouraged participation in group endeavors and acceptance of a place of responsibility in the community.
The food of the farm family has become more adequate as to desirable quantity and variety. It has been procured more economically. The more general use of a garden and a canning budget based upon family needs has developed. This has tended to prevent physical ills, and this improved health of the family has made for greater efficiency at work, and increased enjoyment of leisure time.
Unavoidable illness on the farm has been cared for with greater skill and correct methods, and the healing processes have been accomplished with satisfying results and with less delay.
With her husband, the farm woman has studied the family income and the type of life desired for the family. They have come to use greater discrimination in the use of their income, so that desired objectives may be realized more surely, either immediately or over a period of years.
The farm woman has come to see more fully her opportunities and responsibilities in the community. She has come to regard the community as a modern day extension of the home. Through her vote and personal activity she has promoted better services in schools, churches, public health, recreation, merchandising wares, public office, and the like. She has helped increasingly to promote civic pride through bringing about beauty in the community environment.
During the decade just past many thousands of farm women have come into this larger consciousness of the importance of the farm home and of their opportunity in serving it and the rural community. Each year the number has increased of those who have joined with their neighbors in setting up wholesome standards of rural family life, in obtaining helpful information, and in checking improvements made. The growth in vision and abilities of these women has been the outstanding result of this group endeavor. They have intelligently evaluated the possibilities in home making, in community life, and in citizenship. They have set up goals of desired accomplishment for themselves in relation to each of these factors.
On this forward movement, farm women have been aided to a large degree by the State and county home demonstration agents and home economics specialists of the cooperative extension service of the United States Department of Agriculture and the State agricultural colleges. Through these extension workers there has been made available in a practical form the results of home-economics investigations by the State agricultural colleges, the Bureau of Home Economics of the Department, of Agriculture, and other institutions and agencies contributing to the science of home making. In addition, these extension workers are helping farm women to assume intelligent leadership in all affairs having to do with promoting economic and social well-being in rural home and community life.
At present approximately 1,000 county home demonstration agents and 300 home economics specialists are aiding farm women in this constructive undertaking. The demand for this type of leadership is steadily increasing.
By the hundreds of thousands farm women have accomplished these changes in their thinking and in their home conditions. By the tens of thousands they have given volunteer service in interesting their friends and neighbors in like undertakings. In addition they have given time and energy to receiving practical training in these fields from technical experts and have voluntarily aided their neighbors to become equally skillful in these lines. In 10 years farm women have become more conscious of the possibilities of satisfying life on the American farm. The results accomplished point to marked further development in the future in the interested and efficient conduct of daily tasks, the intelligent and constructive use of leisure, and in making of the rural home and community places affording greater beauty and satisfaction to those who live in them.