Part 6 (1/2)
If the customary subjects in a college of agriculture are organized and designed to train a man for efficiency in country life and to develop his outlook, so also is a department of home economics to train a woman for efficiency and to develop her outlook to life.
Home economics is not one ”department” or subject, in the sense in which dairying or entomology or plant-breeding is a department. It is not a single specialty. It stands for the whole round of woman's work and place. Many technical or educational departments will grow out of it as time goes on. That is, it will be broken up into its integral parts, and it will then cease to be an administrative department of an educational inst.i.tution; and very likely we shall lose the terms ”home economics,”
”household economics,” ”domestic science,” and the rest.
I would not limit the entrance of women into any courses in a college of agriculture; on the contrary, I want all courses open to them freely and on equal terms with men; but the subjects that are arranged under the general head of home economics are her special field and sphere. On the other hand, I do not want to limit the attendance of men in courses of home economics; in fact, I think it will be found that an increasing number of men desire to take these subjects as the work develops, and this will be best for society in general.
Furthermore, I do not conceive it to be essential that all teachers in home economic subjects shall be women; nor, on the other hand, do I think it is essential that all teachers in the other series of departments shall be men. The person who is best qualified to teach the subject should be the one who teaches it, whether man or woman.
As rapidly as colleges and universities come to represent society and to develop in all students a philosophy of life, the home-making units will of necessity take their place with other units.
HOW SHALL WE SECURE COMMUNITY LIFE IN THE OPEN COUNTRY?
It is generally agreed that one of the greatest insufficiencies in country life is its lack of organization or cohesion, both in a social and economic way. Country people are separated both because of the distances between their properties, and also because they own their land and are largely confined to its sphere of activities. There is a general absence of such common feeling as would cause them to act together unitedly and quickly on questions that concern the whole community, or on matters of public moment.
This lack of united action cannot be overcome by any single or brief process, but as one result of a general redirection of rural effort and the stimulating of a new or different point of view toward life. It will come as a result of a quickened agricultural life rather than as an effect of any direct plan or propaganda. When the rural social sense is thoroughly established, we shall be in a new epoch of rural civilization.
It is now the habit to say that this desired rural life must be cooperative. A society that is fully cooperative in all ways is one from which the present basis of compet.i.tion is eliminated. I think that no one intends, however, in the common discussion of cooperation to take sides on the theoretical question as to whether society in the end will be cooperative or compet.i.tive; these persons only mean that cooperative a.s.sociation is often the best means to secure a given result and that such a.s.sociation may exert great educational influence on the cooperators.
Theoretically, the cooperative organization of society may be the better. Practically, a capitalistic organization may be better: it quickly recognizes merit and leaders.h.i.+p; but if it is better, it is so only when it is very carefully safeguarded.
It cannot be contended that a cooperative organization is correct because the majority rules. Majorities show only what the people want, not necessarily what is best. Minorities are much more likely to be right, because thinking men and fundamental students are relatively few; yet it may be the best practice, in common affairs, to let the majority have its way, for this provides the best means of education.
It will now be interesting to try to picture to ourselves some of the particular means by which social connection in the open country may be brought about. It is commonly, but I think erroneously, thought that community life necessarily means a living together in centers or villages. I conceive, on the contrary, that it is possible to develop a very effective community mind whilst the persons still remain on their farms. In this day of rapid communication, transportation, and spread of intelligence, the necessity of mere physical contiguity has partly pa.s.sed away.
That is, ”isolation,” as the city man conceives of it, is not necessarily a bar to community feeling. The farmer does not think in terms of compact neighborhoods, trolley cars, and picture shows. The country is not ”lonely” to him, as it is to a city man. He does not search for amus.e.m.e.nt at night.
_Hamlet life._
It is said that the American farmer must live in hamlets, as does the European peasant. The hamlet system that exists in parts of Europe represents the result of an historical condition. It is the product of a long line of social evolution, during which time the persons who have worked the land have been peasants, and to a greater or less extent have not owned the land that they have worked.
Some persons fear that the American farmer is drifting toward peasantry.
This notion has no doubt arisen from the fact that in certain places the man who works the land is driven to great extremity of poverty, and he remains uneducated and undeveloped; but ignorance and poverty do not const.i.tute peasantry. The peasanthood of the Old World is a social caste or cla.s.s, and is in part a remnant of feudal government, of religious subjugation, and of the old necessity of protection. The present day is characterized by the rise of the people on the land; this movement is a part of the general rise of the common people (or the proletariat). If popular education, popular rights, and the general extension of means of communication signify anything, it is that we necessarily are developing away from a condition of peasantry rather than toward it, however much degradation or unsuccess there may be in certain regions or how much inadjustment there may be in the process (page 129).
In contradistinction to the exclusive hamlet system of living together, I would emphasize the necessity that a first-rate good man must live on the farm if he is to make the most of it. Farming by proxy or by any absentee method is just as inefficient and as disastrous in the long run as the doing of any other business by proxy; in fact, it is likely to be even more disastrous in the end because it usually results in the depletion of the fertility of the land, or in the using up of the capital stock; and this becomes a national disaster. I hold that it is essential that the very best kind of people live actually on the land.
The business is conducted on the land. The crops are there. The live-stock is there. The machinery is there. All the investment is in the place itself. If this business is to be most effective, a good man must constantly be with it and manage it. A farm is not like a store or a factory, that is shut up at night and on Sunday.
The more difficult and complex the farming business becomes, the greater will be the necessity that a good man remain with it.
We must remember also that if the landowner or the farmer lives in a village or hamlet and another man lives on his farm, a social division at once results, and we have a stratification into two cla.s.ses of society; and this works directly against any community of interest. It is not likely that the farmer who has retired to town and the hired man who works his farm under orders will develop any very close personal relation. The farmer becomes an extraneous element injected into the town, and has little interest in its welfare, and he has taken his personality, enterprise, and influence out of the country. He is in a very real sense ”a man without a country.” The increase of his living expenses in town is likely to cause him to raise the rent on his farm, or, if the tenant works for wages, to reduce the improvements on the place to the lowest extent compatible with profit. We need above all things to produce such a rural condition as will satisfy the farmer to live permanently in the country rather than to move to town when the farm has given him a competence.
I am not to be understood as saying that farmers ought never to live in town. There will always be s.h.i.+fting both ways between town and country.
In some cases, small-area farming develops around a village; or a village grows up because the farms are small and are intensively handled. In irrigation regions, the whole community may be practically a hamlet or village. In parts of the Eastern states, small farmers sometimes live in the village and go to the farm each day, to work it themselves. But all these are special adaptations, and do not const.i.tute a broad agricultural system.
In time we probably shall develop a new kind of rural settlement, one that will be the result of cooperative units or organizations, and not a consolidation about the present kinds of business places; but it is a question whether these will be villages or hamlets in the sense in which we now use these words.
_The category of agencies._
My position, therefore, is that we must evolve our social rural community directly from the land itself, and mostly by means of the resident forces that now are there.