26 BULLETIN 1285, U. S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE 
proportion of them received perquisites. If those under 20 years of 
age in 1921 are eliminated from consideration, the earnings of Ameri- 
can born and foreign born are about the same, averaging for all 
about $730 for the year. 
The earnings of heads of families averaged about $790. or about 
$60 more than for all over 20 years of age. Individual dependents 
often add materially to family earnings, although the average sum 
adde^l thereby was approximately only $50 per family. The cash 
earj jd by the working members provided an average of $211.18 for 
th iewi penses of every member of those families from which complete 
re! li "-s were obtained. For families in which the heads were foreign 
boxR T cash earnings ran only four-fifths as high as for those of the 
American born, because the average earnings of dependents were 
smaller and the families averaged nearly one person larger. 
Such limited earnings, despite any probable additional value of 
perquisites, necessitate the strictest economy in family expenditures. 
There can be left little or no money for family comforts, recreation, 
or advancement, according to reasonable American standards of life. 
Such economic disadvantages force families of such low earning 
power to put their women and children to work to supplement the 
earnings of the father. 
The remunerative work in which the wives of the farm workers 
interviewed had engaged in 1921 was in nearly half the cases domes- 
tic or personal service. Nearly as many had clone farm work, and a 
few industrial work. The occupations of the children were slightly 
more varied; about half were in farm work and a quarter each in 
industrial work or domestic and personal service. Practically all 
wives were considered wholly dependent upon their husbands for 
support, even though occasionally earning; three wives of American 
born were partially self-supporting. Three-fourths of the workers' 
children were wholly dependent upon their parents for support. A 
slightly larger percentage of the children of foreign-born than of 
native-born workers were found to be earning something. They 
were usually forced to work by the family need for more money than 
the father could earn. 
Considerable difficulty was found in getting estimates of the earn- 
ings of workers' dependents. The earnings, especially of younger 
children and wives, were frequently pooled with those of the family 
when farmers paid them off. and thus were unknown. In the cases 
of 58 dependents reported, the average amount earned by each from 
all sources was $218.19. The wives earned an average of $183.45, 
about half of it in farm work: the children earned $252.93, nearly 
all in agriculture. Most of these earnings were turned into the 
family funds. 
Farm employees were asked if they had bank accounts, life insur- 
ance, and title to real estate. Values or amounts were not asked. 
(Table 11.) Three persons in 10 who reported had no savings what- 
ever. Half had life insurance, the most commonly reported form of 
savings; two-thirds of the interviewed children of the ages 8 to 15 
had been insured by their parents. One-third of the workers had 
bank accounts, usually savings accounts. One in 10 held title to real 
estate. The real estate owned varied in character from city dwell- 
ings in Pennsylvania or New Jersey to cheap farm lands in Southern 
