TWELFTH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART X 441 



Uowering of her adolescense, she will demand love stories. There are 

 farm homes, even today, in which the novel is tabooed as rigorously as 

 if its assimilation would send a girl precipitately to perdition. But girls 

 need novels. There is no more harm in a girl's reading a good novel 

 than thei'e is in a bird's changing its plumage in the spring. It is part 

 of her necessary education in that biggest phase of her life-work; the 

 work of being a woman — and being a charming one, if she can. Imagine 

 the supreme joy of her discovering "Rebecca of Sunny-Brook Farm" and 

 then all the rest of that splendid series that tells Rebecca's love story. 

 After this period she will begin to take an interest in the affairs of the 

 nation; and then if she can have recourse to a few high-class periodicals 

 she will find no end of stimulation. It is easy to avoid trash in literature. 



Next, the farm girl needs work, but not drudgery. Beginning at the 

 age of four or five she may be assigned some daily task in connection 

 with the household work that will be of value in establishing a regard 

 for discipline — if it be remembered that the essential thing for her is play 

 and an enjoyment of the outdoors. At this juncture some sort of inspi- 

 rational school work, useful and cultural, should be undertaken. As she 

 grows older the amount of work may be gradually increased, preferably 

 in the line of her developing interests, and always with an eye to her 

 physical growth and character-development. She may wish to attend a 

 college or school in which home economics or domestic science is taught. 

 At home some definite thing to do each day, some helping onward of the 

 family happiness and comfort, some work that is vitally related to her 

 increasing activities — all this will be of inestimable worth to her. And 

 the important thing about a mother's training at this point will be to 

 make the girl mistress of her work instead of a slave to it. It is easy 

 to teach a girl to work; and, since she is more readily enslaved than a 

 boy, she is in just that much more danger of overworking. Thus the at- 

 tention of the wise farm mother w^ill center in teaching her daughter self- 

 supremacy. Of course the problem of household work is a perplexing 

 one, on account of the prevailing inability to secure and keep good help. 

 But if the father of the family will not install the conveniences that lift 

 his wife and daughter out of drudgery — well, why is it not a good plan 

 to let that father himself assume the nature of those mechanical con- 

 veniences? As Prof. McKeever valiantly puts it in his recent book on 

 "Farm Boys and Girls:" "It is not necessarily beneath the dignity of 

 the best and most brilliant man of this country for him to get down on 

 his knees in his own home and help perform the menial work there which 

 threatens to break the health of his life-companion." 



The question, "Do you ow-n your daughter?" is one that might be put 

 fairly and squarely to many a farm household. Prof. McKeever tells of 

 an intelligent farmer he knows — a man much above the average in many 

 respects — who, being a widower and feeling it the duty of his twenty- 

 three-year-old daughter to relieve him of the expense of hiring help, 

 regards her as a sort of chattel who takes care of the home, brings up 

 the smaller children, and keeps house for himself and three or four hired 

 men. This is the kind of farmer who believes that he owns his daughter; 



