In this connection a long step forward has just been taken through the inquiries, which during the last two years, the Department of Agriculture has been making as to the real position of women on the farm, and has been making them of the women themselves.  This came about through a letter addressed to the Secretary from Mr. Clarence Poe, Raleigh, North Carolina, under date of July 9, 1913, in which he said:  “Have some bulletins for the farmer’s wife, as well as for the farmer himself.  The farm woman has been the most neglected factor in the rural problem, and she has been especially neglected by the National Department of Agriculture.  Of course, a few such bulletins are printed, but not enough.”

A letter was accordingly sent out from Washington to the housewives of the department’s 55,000 volunteer crop correspondents, on the whole a group of picked women.  They were invited to state both their personal views and the results of discussions with women neighbors, their church organization or any women’s organization to which they might belong.  To this letter 2,225 relevant replies were received, many of these transmitting the opinions of groups of women in the neighborhood.

The letter asked “how the United States Department of Agriculture can better meet the needs of farm housewives.”  Extracts from the replies with comments have been published in the form of four bulletins.  Many of the letters make tragic reading:  the want of any money of their own; the never-ending hours; the bad roads and poor schools; neglect in girlhood and at times of childbirth.  A great many thoughtless husbands will certainly be awakened to a sense of neglected opportunities, as well as to many sins of commission.

The bulletins contain appendices of suggestions how farm women can help one another, and how they may gain much help from the certainly now thoroughly converted Department of Agriculture, through farmer’s institutes for women, through demonstrations and other extension work under the Smith-Lever Act of 1914, and through the formation of women’s and girls’ clubs.

It is of the utmost importance to society, as well as to herself, that the whole economic status of the married woman, performing domestic duties, should be placed upon a sounder basis.  It is not as if the unsatisfactory position of the average wife and mother could confine its results to herself.  Compared with other occupations, hers fulfills none of the conditions that the self-respecting wage-earner demands.  The twenty-four-hour day, the seven-day week, no legal claim for remuneration, these are her common working conditions.  Other claims which a husband can and usually does make upon her I leave unnoticed; also the unquestioned claim of her children upon her time and strength.  Marital duties, as they are evasively termed, could not be exacted from any wage servant.  Moreover, the very existence of children whom the married pair have called into being is but an argument, on the one hand, for the father taking a larger share in their care, and on the other, for the lightening of the mother’s multifarious burden by the better organization of all household work, as well as everything that belongs to child culture and care.