COUNTRY’S BACKBONE

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume 52, Issue 3253, 16 April 1943, Page 2

COUNTRY’S BACKBONE

WOMEN PLAY A VITAL PART FARMERS’ WIVES RECOGNISED At the invitation of the United States Department of Agriculture, the lady editor of the Farmers’ Weekly, a well-known English agri' cultural journal, is going to America. She is going, not to talk “agriculture” or “politics,” but simply to tell the country women in the U.S.A, how country women in Britain have carried on during the war.

In the States immense importance is given by the Department of Agriculture to the part played by women in the farming industry. A very large and important section of the department is concerned purely to cater for and develop the interests of country women. The invitation to the English woman journalist is an indication of this.

We in New Zealand, says the New Zealand Farmers Weekly, are all too apt to take the role of our women folk for granted. Yet where will you find another industry where women play so integral and so vital a part as farming? Our Department of Agriculture has no service for them. Our statistics speak of our thousands of farmers, their accomplishments, their trials and difficulties, but never a mention of the thousands of farmers’ wives. Yet again, where is there another industry where women are so deeply influential? The farm household is so infinitely more, than the place where • the boss lives. It is the hub of the farm, and the presiding genius of the place is the woman of the house. 'She runs her household like any other woman, but often singlehanded, and in spite, very often, of every difficulty of primitive conditions runs it infinitely well. But her industry extends beyond her household, beyond the milking shed, the garden and the poultry, to the very furthest corner of the farm. Just how often hers is the decision which settles a point of farm policy only the farmer, who has learned to rely on it, knows. But none of this appears, as it were, on the books.

The direct and vital influence of farm women on the work and' prosperity of the farms is one of the larger social facts that has failed to receive anything like the attention it deserves.