420 IOWA DEPARTMENT OP AGRICULTURE 



borrows from and depletes her capital, for there is strength in reserve 

 enough for just each day. So that I am urging that the farm women 

 learn all of the short-cuts that it is possible for them to get. 



The next thing I would ask you to observe, in order to keep up with 

 father and the boys, is the matter of co-operation. I have heard farmers 

 Fay in the past few years that they have been terribly short of help about 

 their farms. That time comes to all of us, and I have helped my farmer 

 do things that I didn't think I should be asked to do, but I have turned my 

 head and smiled, because, bless your hearts, there has been a shortage of 

 help for the farmer's wife for 25 years. 



I have known of farmers in my community to be all ready to thresh and 

 to have to put it off a week or ten days. Why didn't they go ahead and do 

 it? Because they were co-operating with their neighbors, and they have 

 learned to make a great big picnic out of the threshing rig. Have you 

 ever noticed, when you had time to watch the threshing outfit at work, 

 how many aren't busy? They have their shifts — one works a while and 

 then another comes on and works — and it is perfectly right and proper. 

 I am not finding fault with it, but I am wondering if we couldn't co- 

 operate that way too. Perhaps we will learn to co-operate in labor-saving 

 devices. 



We are learning to co-operate in our community, in our community club. 

 We have a 12-family club, and a few years ago we had a great crop of 

 undersized peaches which were quite delicious, but they were a terrible 

 torment for any woman to peel enough to can, all by herself, and so one 

 of the enterprising members of our club invited us all in, requesting us to 

 bring our paring-knives, to come early, and we would organize into little 

 groups and companies — one party was to do the paring, the second was 

 to do the canning, another group was to help get the dinner, and still 

 another group was to do something else, and we canned and preserved 

 and buttered enough of those peaches that day to do the county farm, 

 and, best of all, we had a grand, good time. We had to learn a great 

 many things; we found we didn't all do the things alike, and we brought 

 these ideas together. The club functioned so well that we even exchanged 

 patterns of our house dresses. But think, it would have been a great deal 

 of a drudgery on the part of any one woman to sit down all alone and 

 peel and can that many peaches; and so I am only passing this good 

 suggestion along to you. 



In the next place, keep up in social affairs. If you neglect to do that 

 that is one reason why women become discontented. They say that the 

 farmer is individualistic. Maybe he is, but farmers manage to get together 

 over the fence or at the farm bureau meetings, and they talk and see one 

 another oftener than the women, and so I think we ought to get together 

 and have something doing in a social way. 



The other evening I was invited across two or three counties in my 

 own state to a farm bureau banquet. Two hundred and ten plates were 

 set, all at one time, in a room something like this one. They had made 

 arrangements for all the members of that township unit, and every family 

 to be seated together at one time, and then, just as the bankers do, they 



