Mrs. Patterson Encourages Farm Girls, July 8, 1925

A “Success Talk” for Farm Girls

By Mrs. Lindsay Patterson

I do hope that you have a pretty room that is all your own and that you are putting in all the new and attractive furnishings so easy to make today with paint and cretonnes and artistic shapes in furniture.

I am crazy over the pretty clothes the girls of today can wear and I hope you live where you can take domestic science and have learned to make your belongings, so you may have an opportunity to use your own distinctive good taste and have clothes that are really becoming. Girls are the prettiest things in the world, and I just love to see them prance around looking like a flower garden. And that isn’t all. If we didn’t have them to make fun of us older ones and the clothes we wear, and advise us as to new styles, I don’t know what we would finally wind up looking like for the most of us get to the place where we aren’t very much interested in what we wear, only if we are warm in winter and cool in the summer. We need you girls, if anything more than you need us.

And do join all the canning clubs and social clubs and activities like that, so you can bring all the new ideas in housekeeping and entertaining back home. Learn to take the lead in neighborhood pleasures, picnics, meetings of all kinds. The country should be the pleasantest place in the world in which to live, and an up-and-coming daughter can do more to make it than any 50 other people who are set in their ways.

Do try, too, to have your own flower garden and plant enough to spare to the stranger within the gates, the sick and afflicted, and the old people who are not thought of so often as they deserve. No one appreciates a remembrance as much as an old person. They are not intentionally neglected, but the matter is just put aside for convenient season which does not always come. Try to be a girl who is always commended for her thoughtfulness of the aged and infirm.

And finally, little sisters to the roses, please don’t paint—not that it’s wrong, but because it’s an artistic mistake. It covers up your individuality, and individuality is what makes you yourself. When I see a group of girls all painted up, I am always reminded of a bunch of Christmas dolls, all exactly alike—no expression, just color. If you had no sense, you would be forced to paint to hide your lack of expression, but when you are a bright American girl, it seems such a pity to make yourself look like an 89-cent doll.

From page 4 of The North Wilkesboro Hustler, Wednesday, July 8, 1925

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