FOURTEENTH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART X. 667 



welfare. In many places the fields of literature and science have been 

 invaded, much to the pleasure and profit of the club memoers. 



I read the other day a somewhat amusing anecdote of how one country 

 club came to be organized. Two women lived in sight of each other's 

 homes, but did their shopping in different towns. They met one day 

 at the funeral of a mutual friend and one of them said to the other: 

 "Do you realize that this is the first time we have met face to face 

 in fifteen years?" The neighbor who overheard the conversation de- 

 termined then and there that he would see what could be done in the 

 way of neighborhood organization. A club was organized and they 

 found it answered a long felt need. 



When I spoke to a friend, one day, about the possibilities of rural 

 organization, she sighed and said: "But I am so busy now I don't see 

 how I could take up anything more." It is true, we farm women are 

 busy, but it is this overworked condition that the rural social center has 

 been able to remedy. When, up in Minnesota, the first co-operative 

 laundry was started in connection with the co-operative creamery already 

 in operation, the farm women of the surrounding country were able to 

 breathe great sighs of relief, especially in the busy season, and neigh- 

 borhood friendliness was revived in consequence of one burden being 

 lifted from their shoulders. 



WTiat may be done through community work is concretely shown in 

 the story of what it meant to an isolated little woman in the heart of 

 the corn belt. She lived on a small, unproductive farm which was 

 heavily mortgaged. She had no driving horse and they felt they could 

 not afford .a telephone. So her only means of keeping in touch with the 

 outside world were her occasional trips to town with her husband and 

 the small neighborhood gossip which the children brought home from 

 school. The neighbors, according to the present rule in country com- 

 munities, no longer visited and she was left out of the telephone chats 

 which most of the women around her could indulge in. There was no 

 gainsaying the fact, her life was extremely narrow and monotonous. In 

 her girlhood she had been vivacious, entertaining, and extremely popular; 

 the center of the village crowd in which she lived. But she had mar- 

 ried badly, people said, and with her marriage she had been forced to 

 take up an entirely different way of living. At first she had been bitter 

 and resentful but as the years wore on and her work increased, as it 

 did with each new baby, she seemed to have neither time nor heart 

 for anything but a sort of apathetic resignation to the fates which 

 bound her. 



Then the new teacher came. Heretofore, because the schoolhouse 

 was so far from town and in such a bad state of repair, only inefficient 

 little high school girls who were in danger of not getting a school at all 

 were the only sort that could be persuaded to teach in it. But the 

 new teacher was different. She .was a matured and experienced woman 

 who had lately moved into the neighborhood. Therefore, the neigh- 

 borhood interests were her interests, and she began at once to take the 

 whole community tactfully under her wing. Her first work lay in waking 

 up the children to the fact that they were the coming citizens of the 



