Dear Editor—In the November 6th issue of your journal, you print an unwarranted
and gratuitous attack upon me, signed “Plough Girl,” and you append an
editorial note to this communication expressing approval of the sentiments
therein stated. Under the circumstances, I request that you print the following
by me:
I object to being pictured by your correspondent as an idle, snobbish woman,
living in luxury on a modern ranch, and making reflections upon the hardworking
farmers and their wives of this country.
I have not seen the article in the Canada Weekly,
purporting to be an interview with me, and from which your correspondent quotes.
However, it is not true that I made any derogatory statements whatsoever
concerning the farm folk of this or any other country.
The statement that a great many of the women on the farms grow old while young
and often work as hard as beasts of burden, etc., is neither original with me, nor
constitutes a reflection on their goodness and splendid qualities.
All of our writers have made practically the same observations. Mrs. McClung, in
her poems and novels, Robert Stead in his novel “The Homesteaders,” Jack
Lait in a short story, and others. It is not a reflection upon these women, but
a pathetic and self-evident fact. If I were to say or write a lot of slush and
gush about their condition, I would simply state what is not true. Your
correspondent herself, while in one paragraph righteously condemning me for this
statement, in the very next paragraph makes the identical statement. The women,
she admits, in their “feverish ambition and devotion to their families” do
look old before their time, “owing to the dry air and extremes of temperature
of our Western prairies. Farm women work hard, often beyond their strength,
and in some cases ruin their health.” She goes on to aver that this is
not “through the goading of brutal husbands as Mrs. Reeve would have us
believe,” etc. Now, I never made any such statement or suggestion; nor
have I yet encountered the brutal species of husband to which she so eloquently
refers and seems determined to credit to me.
What is more, her sarcastic allusion to me as a
“farmerette” is very
foolish.
1870 I never made any such claim. I never came out here
“at war time,” nor have I been
“lauded as a heroine under the name of
a farmerette.” I happen to be the wife of a ranchman and cattleman.
Naturally, my place is in his house. I am sure I am far more useful there than I
could possibly be if I went into the fields and attempted to do a man’s work, as
Miss Plough Girl suggests is the job for a professional farmerette. It is no
light undertaking to manage a large ranch house and see that fourteen or fifteen
men are properly housed and fed. That has been my job for some time on the
prairie.
“Plough Girl” has my
“number” wrong. I am not loafing on some
fancy ranch, and gathering material for a novel concerning a subject about which
I know little save as a dilettante.
It is true ours is a modern ranch, and we have city conveniences, but when we
first came from New York City to the prairies, the ranch was anything but
modern. I lived for six months in a little two-roomed bunk house, and during the
long period when we were building, I and another woman did all the work of the
place. At one time when my cook was sick and taken to a hospital, I, myself,
cooked for sixteen “hands.” That would have been no light task even for a
farm woman. However, looking at from a common sense point of view, I saw merely
that our men had to be fed and there was no one there to do it but me, and
against my husband’s protests, I “boned” in and did it for several days. My
little girl (of ten) and I just played it was an adventure, and we showed those
“hands” that even people from New York City can be “sports” when
“up against it.”
One does not need to be born and brought up in a certain environment to
understand it. In fact, an observer from the outside is often keener to get the
points and the proper perspective. Those born to the life very often, from force
of habit, find what seems to an outsider as a burden, an ordinary commonplace of
life, and I do not doubt but that a great many of the women I have studied out
here, who not merely have arisen long before dawn and worked well into the
night—doing housework, “packing” water, milking, caring for the poultry and
feeding pigs, and doing ever imaginable work—both man’s and woman’s, are so used
to working that they do not consider their lot a hard one.
It might be I shall not soon write a story of the “cattle” of this country,
but it will not be for the reason attributed to your correspondent—that I am
viewing the situation by the dimensions of my living room? No—not for that
reason, but because the longer I am here, the more I feel the necessity of an
even longer stay in which to do justice to my subject. A two years’ residence
gives one an opportunity merely to skim the vital details. Moreover, in spite of
the contemptuous allusion to my supposed idle life on a modern ranch, I really
believe my poor work here, such as it is, is worth while. You know, after all,
the wife of the man who is producing cattle and grain in large quantities in
these times, really has some little niche to fill. Do you not think so? Are her
services not as vital as that farmerette in the field?
It is funny to hear myself described as an “advanced woman.” What on earth
is that anyway?
By the way, the interview attributed to me has several inaccuracies, judging from
your correspondent’s quotations. I am quoted as saying “Jean Webster told me
when I started for Alberta,” etc. etc. Now, my friend, Jean Webster, died
just about a year before I came out here, and I am ashamed to confess that I
barely knew there was such a place in the world as Alberta—so provincial are we
residents of New York.
Now, I believe an apology is in order from some direction? At least, you, as
editor, owe it to me, if only for these several pages of script, while are sent
to you gratis.
