1921.] 



Women in Rural Life. 



437 



however, women have a vital part to play in rural development. 

 The elimination of this tug-of-war is important. The War 

 encouraged us to use our reason. No person who does so 

 is going to submit to the conditions which have hitherto pre- 

 vailed in many villages. A picturesque cottage with no water 

 laid on may give pleasure to the tourist, but it has 

 disadvantages from the housewife's point of view. A life 

 of — largely unnecessarily — hard work, enlightened only by an 

 annual village concert, is not one which ought to hold men 

 or women. The natural shrewdness of the peasant is beginning 

 to ask why it should. In one village it was said that twenty- 

 eight men returned from the Army to work on the land as 

 they had done before. At the end of a month, twenty of them 

 expressed their intention of leaving and going into the town 

 because neither they nor their wives could stand the monotony 

 of country life. The same plaint rises from all sides. 



If our rural problem is to be solved, there is one way and 

 one way only in which to meet it, and that is to allow country- 

 men and women to develop rural life on lines hitherto little 

 explored. Probably there has never been so good an oppor- 

 tunity for farmers to get intelligent workers, because then; 

 has never been so wide-spread a desire for education and for 

 the stimulus of recreation. Most of us have met the 

 Rev. Abraham Plymly, who through living long in the country 

 " had become as it were a kind of holy vegetable." Let him 

 be contrasted with the group of ploughboys of 15 and 16 

 who recently came to ask for help because they were forgetting 

 what they had learned at school, or the class of elderly 

 working women in a tiny village who asked for — and attended 

 — a six weeks' course on Medieval History. Not long ago 

 the writer asked the m.embers of a Women's Institute on 

 what subject they wished to have a speaker at their next 

 meeting. The answer came prompt and unmistakable, " The 

 connection between Wages and Prices, please." ^lost 

 interesting and most hopeful of all, these women are beginning 

 to want information on which to form their own opinions. 

 They want people to give them facts, and then to discuss them 

 themselves. 



The intelligence developing on these lines is making itself 

 felt, as it inevitably must, in other directions also. The matter 

 of rural industries is by no means a simple one, but without 

 going into vexed questions of competition, local trade, and 

 home industries generally, it may fairly be said that a large 

 and rapidly increaring number of village women are learninj^ 



