In the Woman’s Home
Companion for October Mr. H.S. Canfield has an entertaining article on “The
Southern Girl of Yesterday and To-day.” He compares the girl of the South with
the girl of the West and North and finds much in the former’s favor. He says:
“In former days the more slaves a girl’s father owned the
more she felt it a requirement to become an accomplished housewife. These
recondite arts, of which we men pierce not the mysteries and see only the
results, are preserved today ‘down South,’ and if there is one quality which
more than another endears a southern girl to her worshippers, it is her love of
home, her pride in her home and her ability to make that home a home. This is a
knowledge which does not glare oppressively in the drawing room; but when she
marries it becomes more and more golden year by year. The young Southern mother
happily married does not think her life restricted because that life is
homelife. She does not feel ‘cabined, cribbed, confined.’ She enjoys brief
excursions into the outside world; but she tires readily, and on the return
journey her eyes light up as the car’s wheels whirr under her, and she thinks,
‘Each revolution is that much nearer home!’ If some wrestler wearied in the
area of earth’s activities, some Cynic sickened with this ‘deep disease of
life,’ should seek her in her peaceful fastness, and borrowing from sardonic
Iago, and tell her that her mission is to ‘suckle fools and chronicle small
beer,’ she would smile superior. She knows better. Home is home—in summer when
the wide fields stir not in the swooning noons; in autumn when hillside and
valley blaze in a riot of hue; in winter when the mild air has a tang that
merely hints of snow in the far country where the wild goose beats his way with
steady wing; in spring time when she sees the fat soil rise and roll in smooth,
dark waves back from the plow.”
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