418 IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE 



if I went into a farm home, there ought to be written over the door of 

 my new home these words "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here." (Laugh- 

 ter). And my grandmother, a beautiful, dear, saintly soul, said "You are 

 full of youth and hope and enthusiasm and love, but this thing is true, 'A 

 man works from sun to sun, but a woman's work is never done.' " And 

 they pulled great long faces when they said that, and I really got a little 

 bit excited about it, but I have come to this conclusion: instead of that 

 thing needing to be true, it is just a mistaken idea, along with a lot of 

 other superstitions. I believe the difference is in this: men know when 

 they have done a day's work, and have common sense and judgment 

 enough to quit, and women don't. (Laughter and applause). 



In the springtime of the year when the work is being pushed, as it was 

 in your communities and mine last May, the farmers were just as anxious 

 as could be to get the ground turned over before they left the field at 

 right, and they put in long, hard hours, all that they could get out of the 

 tractor or teams in the time that they were in the field, but when they had 

 done an honest, decent day's work, they put their tractor or teams away, 

 came to the house, cleaned up and had supper, and went to sleep and 

 forgot all about it, and wakened the next morning refreshed and renewed, 

 ready to go out and tackle the job again. But farm women sometimes 

 take their dish-washing or butter-making to bed with them, and such 

 things do not prove to be very good sleep-producers, at all. I believe we 

 have to learn the gentle art of slighting work that is non-essential. 



A few years ago in our county we were making some surveys, and one 

 of the questions that we asked in the homes that we entered was this: 

 * How much time do you spend in rest and recreation every day?" We 

 wont into one home where the woman had only one child — no hired man. 

 She was a woman who was known as an immaculate housekeeper, and 

 when we presented this question to her she said she didn't have any time 

 for rest and recreation, that she worked all the time, and finally we coaxed 

 her to say that 15 minutes, perhaps, of all the day she did something a 

 little bit different. And then we went from that home to another, the 

 home of the largest farmer in my county, a man \Tho was unique in his 

 county because at the time we paid the visit there there were 14 children 

 in the home. There were six corn-planters in operation on the day we 

 visited the home, and you know from experience how many men it would 

 take to operate all of the planters, and the amount of work made neces- 

 sary by those machines. On the trip over, we had been calculating that 

 if a woman with but one child had but 15 minutes a day for rest and re- 

 creation, a woman with 14 children would have only one and one-four- 

 teenth of a minute a day. (Laughter). But you will always find the sur- 

 prises in such homes. When the door was opened, the secretary who was 

 with me was surprised to find that the woman, pleasant-faced and cordial, 

 who opened the door was the mother of this interesting family — she looked 

 scarcely older than her oldest daughter; and when we went thru that 

 wonderful home and asked that question, "How much time do you spend 

 in rest and recreation each day?" she said, as she smilingly looked from 

 one daughter to another (she had two who were helping her do the work), 

 "Well, on the whole, I think two hours a day." 



