MODERN APPLIANCES IN THE HOME 



Mrs. Ida S. Hakrington 

 Farmers' Institute Lecturer 



If there are any two occupations wliich ought to have the fullest 

 understanding and sympathy for each other, those two occupa- 

 tions are farming and homo-making. They have come through 

 the same experience : Both have been undervalued in the past, 

 and both are now achieving the important place which they de- 

 serv^e in the world's economy. Not so many years ago, if a farm 

 boy wanted to invest time and money in education, it meant 

 turning his back upon the farm, for the training at his command 

 took no account of agriculture as a vocation. The work of the 

 farm was left to that brother who was accounted the least am- 

 bitious and intelligent one of the family, on the theory that any- 

 body could be a farmer and that, if anything, one could farm 

 better by instinct than bv training. Todav it is generallv 

 recognized that no other line of work requires keener intelligence 

 or wider knowledge than does farming, and therefore men are 

 being educated for the farm instead of away from it. And with 

 education has come pride in the occupation once so generally 

 despised. 



In the household the same revolution has taken place. It used 

 to be the rule that a girl who wanted to invest time and money 

 in education turned her back on the field of home-making. She 

 grew farther and farther away from the round of homely duties 

 that made up the life of the sister who remained behind. The 

 home-minded sister, like the farm-minded brother, was accounted 

 less gifted, less worthy of an education, than those who preferred 

 a more showy occupation. In the household, as on the farm, it 

 was held that instinct was a sufficient guide for so humdrum a 

 business. 



But just as we are awaking to a sense of the power wielded 

 by a scientific farmer, so we are coming to recognize how far- 

 reaching is the influence of a home-maker who has mastered her 

 profession. If the Emperor of German^! thought that he was be- 



[1858] 



