136 NEBRASKA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



home economics societies, perliaps would be better places than the Horti- 

 cultural Society itself to present such a talk. 



In talking the matter over with Secretary Marshall, when he asked 

 me if I would not come here this morning, I said I was only too glad to 

 come, and consented, feeling that it is true, that women should receive 

 some instruction before trying to buy fruit, and care for fruit, and pre- 

 serve fruit, and they should not feel as they do feel at the present time, 

 that fruit has no real food value. 



In our work over the state, we find that the average housekeeper is 

 of the opinion that fruits have no food value, but are only a luxury to be 

 added to the table when there is a little extra money to be spent, or to be 

 put by for some one when they are ill, and not to be used as a regular 

 diet. 



Beef and potatoes, and beef and potatoes, and coffee boiled today, 

 and reboiled for dinner, and then maybe reboiled the next day, are the 

 accepted diet. If we are to have grapes, oranges, and apples, we must 

 consider whether we need them or not, and whether we want them 

 around the house, to be kept a long time, and how quick they will spoil. 

 So I believe that some educational work needs to be done along the food 

 value of fruits. 



I do not like to make the next statement, but I know it is true; that 

 when any campaigning of any sort has to be done, the men have to take 

 the initiative. It seems that whenever a measure of any kind for the 

 betterment of us all is at stake, and the solution is necessary, it is for 

 the men to find the way out. In all of our domestic science work we have 

 found that it is the men who are primarily interested in the domestic 

 science work, and we find it is the men who are working with the 

 school boards, and superintendents, and county commissioners, to get this 

 work into the schools. Not in any specific instance, but in a very general 

 way, that statement is true. Of course you can point to certain cases, 

 at Crete, for instance, where the woman's clubs have taken the start in 

 the domestic science way. 



No person, whether man or woman, has an intuitive ability to make 

 a success out of any profession without any training or without the proper 

 foundation. If a man wishes to be a lawyer or a minister, or a good 

 horticulturist; if he is going to be an authority on flowers, or upon one 

 kind of flowers, or apples, then that man makes a study of those flowers, 

 and of those apples, a careful study, reading all he can find on the sub- 

 ject. He attends meetings all over the country and does all that is pos- 

 sible that will make him efficient. Efficiency is the best word that de- 

 scribes the American of the twentieth century, and if that is the case 

 with the man, it should be made to apply to the American woman. 



If we spend sixteen years fitting girls how to teach school, and prac- 

 tically no time how to keep house, I think there is something wrong. But 

 the girl can go out and teach school, in that little old red school house, 

 for a single term, and she must spend fourteen years in order to be ad- 

 missible to take a rigid examination, and then renew the examination 



