tchen. While the men of the family ride the sulky
plow and riding harrow of the twentieth century, the women have neither a
washing machine nor an indoors pump,--to say nothing of running water,
sanitary plumbing or a bathtub![44] Sometimes the drudgery of the farm
kitchen is endured by the mother uncomplainingly, or even contentedly; but
the daughters recoil from it with growing discontent.

The life conditions of farm women are rapidly improving; but the gospel of
better homes and convenient kitchens needs thousands of gentle apostles,
equipped with modern methods of household economy, hygiene, cooking and
every domestic art and science. It necessitates rare tact, and it is
doubtless most effective when least professional, when its benevolence is
simply veiled by neighborliness, joined perhaps with the daily routine of
the teacher or librarian. But the purpose involved is a splendidly worthy
one, to raise the standards of housekeeping in a whole community of homes
and bring in a new comfort and efficiency for both men and women. To do
this is to enrich and sweeten country life at its source.

_Demonstration Centers of Rural Culture_

In the cities a very effective social service is done in the settlements
as demonstration centers of refinement and Christian living. We need the
same quietly effective plan in thousands of rural communities where life
is still crude rather than simple and where the finer life-values are too
little appreciated.

As the new rural civilization develops and the higher education becomes
more diffused, this gentle but powerful leavening of country life is bound
to follow. In very many communities it is already in process. It ought to
follow as a matter of course that wherever a college-bred woman returns to
a country home, or founds a new one, there is developed a real
demonstration center of rural culture. The down-drag of environment
sometimes proves too strong for weaker natures and higher ideals are
gradually forgotten. Sometimes, too, a tactless condescension reveals to
sensitive neighbors that fatal sense of superiority which is deadly to all
good influence, for rural democracy is passing proud.

But with the right spirit of neighborly helpfulness and an effort to
overcome the barrier which is always raised at first by superior
advantages, the woman of true unaffected culture has a great chance for
fine influence in a rural community.

In such a community not many miles from Buffa