H.S. Canfield On the Southern Girl of Yesterday and Today, 1901

From the Sept. 26, 1901, issue of Fisherman & Farmer, Elizabeth City, N.C.

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.”