132 STATE BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



by doing her work with as little tiring and time as possible. She attires 

 it in a dress of becoming pattern and color, even for her daily tasks, 

 and cares for it to the best of her knowledge and opportunity. She 

 recognizes that ''Culture is not a having and a holding but a growing 

 and a becoming" and tries in all ways available to her to secure this 

 truest of all culture. As a bit of lace in the neck of her morning dress 

 or a muslin tie under her collar is of account in the solution of her 

 nearest problems, she wears it. As a picture, cut from a magazine, 

 pinned up in her kitchen and having a message for her, is of more help 

 to her than if it were framed and hung in her guest room, she puts it 

 where it will do the most good. 



Without detracting from the faithful doing of her appointed tasks, 

 she plans to come every day in touch with some thought of some one 

 else in books or papers that will relax the strain on her mind and add 

 zest to her own thinking and planning. It may not be a set reading 

 course that she chooses to brighten her mind upon. It may, perhaps, 

 more profitably be a following up for herself of one of the lines that 

 she has the most to do with, as kindergarten, house sanitation, values 

 of food and its adaptations to her family needs, the botany of her house- 

 plants, garden vegetables and door-yard shrubs, the poultry at the barn 

 or birds in the fields. Anything, investigated and thought upon with a 

 live interest will work wonders. ''Lack of motive Is all that makes life 

 dreary," is a line that might well be written upon our home walls 

 when there is the temptation to call its work "drudgery," for that state 

 of affairs exists where there is mental inertia in connection with the 

 nearest duty set the hands to do. 



Moreover, the woman who grasps the significance of her opportunities 

 and her part in making the most of them, knows that her home in- 

 fluence is not bounded by her house walls, but that its life must over- 

 flow into the life of the neighborhood. Such community associations 

 must be formed as will widen the mental and spiritual horizon of her- 

 self and family, increasing knowledge and deepening charity in them all. 



The discussion was opened by Mrs. E. E. Bogue, Agricultural College, 

 who spoke as follows: 



The words of the subject which has just been so ably discussed embody 

 three distinct ideas — a place, a personality and a power, and the prob- 

 lem is how this power may make the most of a personality in this place. 



The place is full of meaning and possibilities to the business or pro- 

 fessional woman who is so strenuously striving to make the most of 

 herself in competition with man in his own field, and to the bachelor 

 girl who has cut herself loose from the conventionalities of her parents' 

 home and has set up a home of her own, because they need the quiet, 

 the repose and the refinement which it, may afford ; but to the housewife 

 it becomes a realm in which she rules and which loses its significance 

 and becomes an establishment without its sovereign Avho imparts to it 

 the spirit of home. 



We also maintain that even as home is not complete without a wo- 

 man, neither is a woman quite at her best except in a home. This place 

 is a narrow or a broad sphere, depending upon the woman who reigns 

 in it, not upon its wealth or other advantages. We need to cultivate 

 higher ideals in the formation of homes and to raise the standard of 

 housewifery amongst our girls. Educational institutions which afford 



