FARMERS’ WIVES

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 66, Issue 5600, 2 April 1943, Page 4

FARMERS’ WIVES

COUNTRY’S BACKBONE THEIR WORK RECOGNISED At the invitation of the United States Department of Agriculture,' the lady editor of the “Farmers’ Weekly,” a well-known English agriculture journel, is going to America. She is going, not to talk “agriculture” or “polities,” 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 part played by women in the farming industry. A very large and important section of the Department is concerned purely tp f cater for and develop the interests 8 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 integal 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, theiy trails arid difficulties, but never a mention of th* thousands of farmers’ wives. Yet again, where is there another industry where women are so deeply influential ?

The farm homestead is so infinitely more than the place where the boss lives. It is the hub of thet farm, and the presiding genuis of the place is the woman of the house; She runs her household like any l other woman, but often singlehanded/ and in spite, very often, of every difficulty of primitive condition runs it infinitely well. But het industt-y extends beyond her household, beyond the milking shed, the gatden ahd the poultry, to the very farthest corner of the farm. Just how o<ten hers is the decision which settles a point of farm policy phjy the farther, who has learned to rely bh it, knows. But hone, of this appears, as it Were, on the books. , The direct and vital influehce bf farm women oh the work ahd pros* perity of the farms is 'one of the larger social facts that hits failed to racefite anything like the Xftehtiiefi it