University of Virginia Library

XV
The Farm Feminine

There are in my summer neighborhood three gentlemen farmers who are women. There is an implied distinction in the implied definition. The three I have under observation are quite different from those women farmers who have shouldered their husbands' acres when forced to do so by widowhood or other marital disability. This difference, among others that readily occur, is primarily the same as that between all actual and amateur farming, the difference between those who grow up out of the soil and know its tricks, and those who come to the soil from another plane, and don't suspect it of having any tricks. At any rate, the lady farmers of our neighborhood farm because they want to, not because they have to; otherwise, perhaps, they would not be in our neighborhood at all, although it is one of the loveliest in all the land.

Somewhere between the lush luxuriance of the South and the beautiful austerity of New England lies Pennsylvania. This countryside

is rich in mellow old farms, far retired from railways. There are low, rolling hills and woodsy back roads. Houses are set far up grassy lanes, lined with trees. Doorways back and front are deep in shade. Barns are big and white, and spread broad wings over plentiful harvesting. Houses are white, too, of stucco or of stone, old, kindly, solidly built. To these shady bricked porches, where the roses clamber against gray-white walls, Washington's colonials might have come clattering up. Small wonder that women desiring farms should desire just this deep-verdured beauty, and no less wonder that the farms, many good miles from market, should be so abundantly for sale that any lady, eager to surround herself with fields and fowls, may readily choose her own particular frame and setting.

The three have chosen, each according to her heart's requirements. Lady One is the lady of the flowers, and she is the youngest. Her throat is round and white, nor beneath the droop of her great garden hat is it too much exposed to the sun. She wears gloves, white ones and unique among garden gloves because they fit. Her shoes, her kerchief, are always freshly white, and her muslin dress of soft shade, lavender or blue, or sprigged and

flounced. She might have stepped forth from fancy's gallery where we all keep pictures hanging of gardens and of grandmothers. She herself may be dreaming of just such a portrait-picture. But don't think that she is a drone because she is perhaps a dreamer. There are no such flowers in thirty miles, and flowers mean tireless toil; they take more good soil-sweat than a whole field of potatoes.

She chose her farm to fit her, it had run sadly seedy, but she retouched all its fading picturesqueness. The house is pillared, frame, low, and white. Small grilled windows wink with garret mysteries above the high porch roof, and all is deep in shade and set far back beyond low terraces with mossy flower urns and steps of cracked flags. There are trim green globes of box trees before the front door, and to the left is her garden of flowers set within a labyrinthine box hedge. Everywhere are roses, roses,— starry little yellow blossoms, red, pink, white, roses whose very names are fragrant: Flower of Fairfield, Perle de Jardin, Baltimore Belle, Soleil d'Or, Crimson Globe, Killarney.

This lady's eyes are brown and too deep to fathom because she is still too young to be fearless. Her voice, her words, are sweet and friendly, but her eyes do not see you, they see

only roses, and in roses, perhaps, those deeper mysteries all women see in all growing things; her gloved hand can touch a rose as if it were a little live face.

Quite different, Lady Two and her farm. Here all is bustle and clack. Chickens, pigs, turkeys, kittens, ducks, puppies, calves occur so frequently that every day is a birthday. You could not associate Lady One with the farmyard; you could not associate Lady Two with anything else. True, her house has a front doorway every whit as picturesque as Lady One's,—a square porch where the lilies-of-the-valley push up through ancient bricks, and a great pine bears fruit of stars every evening,—but Lady Two is not there to see, for she is putting her chickens to bed. It is out on the great back porch with its pump and its grapevine lattice, on this porch and on the slope to the big barns below, that things happen. There is no rose garden. Lady Two has flowers, it is true, in hearty democratic confusion and profusion; she loves them, too, but without subtlety, watering them and her tomato plants alike with the same splashing hand. Her vegetable garden is the garden of her heart. She is a woman radiant with a hoe.

Lady Two is tall and spare, tanned and

cheery. Somewhere she has a family, comfortable and conventional, but somehow she has managed to slip off to a farm, away from them and all social claims, and thus at forty she remains a hearty, rosy boy, with quick hands, quick feet, and brown eyes full of zest. The farm keeps her a little breathless; she is on the jump all day, from the first imperative call of hungry chicks to the small-hour barkings of Gyp. It is nothing to hurry forth from slumber with lantern and comforting words to still her dog. If she should find that Gyp had been barking at some prowling evil-doer, she would not think first of her own nerves, but of Gyp's.

Lady Two cares not for costume, choosing merely the nearest and the handiest before she hurries forth to her farm. Her hands are marked by sun and serviceability; could you succor a sick horse in gloves! In mud-streaked denim, hatted and booted like a man, she stalks the boggy pasture to recapture the black turkey-hen, an errant lady, who, in some atavistic dream, prefers to brood on an empty nest in the swamp, exhibiting a truly feminine propensity to combine a pleasing wildness with a perilous wetness.

To Lady Two her farm means primarily fowls. Down the slope below the kitchen

porch they are housed with all modern improvements, in brooders and colony house, and all manner of coops. Ducks waddle, geese strut, guinea fowl go trip-trip on feet too tiny. At feeding-time Lady Two is the center of a feathered mass, cackling, peeping, gobbling, quacking, creaking like rusty hinges as guinea fowl do. She might be a mother with a great group of happy, boisterous youngsters. Sometimes she stoops to pick up and inspect some tiny hurt chick. She croons to it with brooding tenderness. Babies, she calls the tiny things, and babies they are to her, all the little newly-borns of her farm, whether a pinky piglet, a calf that gambols awkwardly, a little turkey that must not get its feet wet, a colt unsteady on stilt-legs, a beady-eyed yellow duckling, a plunging puppy lost among its own four legs,—babies all.

Not for roses, not for chicks, that grow, both, beneath a fostering hand, did Lady Three choose her farm. Roses and chicks she has both in plenty, and tends them with her own hands, adequately and happily, but without absorption. She has outlived the need for absorption, so that the twinkle in her gray eyes is imperishable. She has also outlived the need for varied costume. Hers has the detachment and independence of

uniform, always straight-cut, gray serge with a straight-cut linen collar, and small crimson tie. Her dress has all a man's superiority to his exterior, but her choice of a farm reveals nothing masculine in her spirit. Her great farmhouse is built of brown stones set irregularly in clear-seamed white. There are big twin chimneys at right and left. There is a white tablet beneath the eaves bearing a date of Penn's time, but only the shell of the house is old, within all is remade to a mistress's liking. If in all women the root of all impulse is to be always making something that shall tangibly shape to the impress of each woman's separate self, then Lady Three chose neither flowers nor fowls, she chose to create for herself a home. Much-traveled herself, she found her farm far from beaten paths, lost down a grassy lane where a brown brook clatters and chuckles from out a hushed woodland. A business woman, so-called, executive, successful, as any man, she chose, ten years ago, at fifty, her far-off farm. Her lawns are clear of litter as was her desk in her counting-room. Her house is heated, watered, furnished in neatest and completest comfort. Many electrical devices, and her own ruddy health make her quite independent of kitchen itinerants not like the mistress inured to loneliness. Having read much, seen much, done much, known much, in her fifty years, she chose to spend the rest with herself, in her home, a home where every chair, book, rug, picture speaks individuality, some quick quaint taste, some humorous little philosophy. It is a house warm with welcome, but genially self-sufficient. Of the three, this lady, wise and gray, is the only one who really sees you, and listens; the other two see only farm. Lady Three is not afraid to live alone with the stars out-of-doors, or alone indoors with her hearth fire. You can't be afraid of the lonely wind when you have long ago ceased to be afraid of yourself.

Thus my three lady farmers; and now that question, Does their farming pay? All lady farming depends entirely on the quality of its male assistance. You cannot farm without a man; it has been tried. Help is an ever-present trouble, but the Lady of the Roses has not found this out, because she is still too young and too pretty. Whenever she steps far from her roses, it is to look at her sky rather than her soil. Unwitting she has power to turn that brute species, Hired Man, into a very knight of chivalry, jealous to guard every blade of wheat that springs for her. Busily binding, cutting, watering her roses,

she never even sees her servitors; but they see her, in all those frail fripperies of hers, while in the summer evening they linger, blue-overalled and bounden, just beyond her low hedge, to hear the sound of her voice in its sweet, absent responses. Her men know she does not see them, but perhaps they think some day she will perceive what tall corn she has, what sleek cattle. Does her farming, therefore, pay? Yes, a little, which is as much as can be said for most farming.

Quite different is the case with Lady Two. She has her hired men and her hired boys, big and little, and they all keep very busy, watching her, and they keep still busier demanding that she watch them. She is a cheery, desirable comrade for any toil, their "Miss Katie," diminutive, both affectionate and superior, showing small awe for their tall boy mistress, in whose brisk capability they have, however, pride. They constantly call her to see them do it, whatever it is she desires. "Miss Katie," "Miss Katie," resounds from garden and furrow and hencoop. They cannot detach a setting hen, or churn the butter without her oversight, loudly bellowed for. They are children demanding that their mother shall watch their prowess at play. She wonders why her farm does not

pay; it is because of that expensive little name of hers, because of her "Miss Katie."

Lady Three,—does her farm give her dollar for dollar? Precisely that, and that is all she asks of it. Her oversight is brief, adequate. Men have always worked well for her, they always will. She has the quiet mistress-mastery that every man recognizes; moreover, she has a bank account that every man respects.

No, on the whole, lady farming does not pay, if you reckon success not by desires, but by dollars. From that point of view, only those women farm successfully who have at least once or twice in their lives possessed a husband and assimilated his manner of dealing with crops and with animals. Farming qua farming, that is essentially man's work, but farming qua joy, that's a woman's discovery. A man farmer is never fused with his farm, because a man is not built to share earth's parturition. In some way or other a woman must be always creating, always bringing forth. If she is not a house-mother, then she must be slipping, sliding, something of herself into her roses, her baby chicks, her home. To be joyous, she must be putting forth shoots, blossoms, must be pushing down her roots. To be glad, she must feel

herself part of this great springing, growing universe. That woman who has chosen herself a farm has done so that she may feel her head warmed by the life-giving sun and her feet firm in the fertile earth.

If success lies in having what you want, then my three farmer friends have attained it. But sometimes I look at them and wonder, Is it what once they wanted? The Lady of the Roses, I am sure she has a story; I am not sure she will not some day have another; surely there are things her hands might touch fairer even than roses. Lady Two has no story, and is too hearty and happy to note the fact, but when I see her lift in a strong brown grasp a yellow duckling, I remember there are heads even more golden and downy. Lady Three, cozily ensconced in her snug old farmhouse, looks back into her homeless past, forward into her unhoused future, fearless in the knowledge that whithersoever she goes she carries with her a serene personality that will always be shaping its whereabouts to fit it, but her eyes are bright with philosophies that might have sent forth sons and daughters to splendid living. Like my three friends who have found quiet in the morning call of the sun, in the coming of the rain on a thirsting flower-bed, on all the big little

concerns of a farmyard, I must lean back on the good green peace of the universe—a universe which must have some stout principle of growth spiritual beneath its seeming waste of mortal energies, in order that I may not question why it is that the farm feminine is not, as it might have been, the farm masculine, the farm infantine.