The Farmer And Mechanic

WOMAN'S PROBLEM

The School Question is the Woman's Question.

It is Theirs by Inheritance and They Have Wrestled With it Through Years of Anxiety.

"We think this time most auspicious to urge a general movement of all our educational forces in that direction, and therefore we appeal to all patriotic men and women who love their State, and especially that part of their State which is worth more than all its timber, lands, mines and manufacturing plants, to band themselves together under the leadership of our educational Governor."

I quote the above from a recent issue of the News and Observer, because I believe it contains the spring which is properly touched will set all the machinery in motion to accomplish the grand results to which the educational movement aspires. That spring is the "patriotic women."

The Southern woman does not like to mingle in politics. She has a strong inclination to draw her skirts about her and pass by on the other side," leaving the men to manage the government in their own way, and feeling glad to be free from a responsibility which would certainly interfere with duties that are more congenial to her. She hates a campaign year, and it must be confessed that she cannot understand how her husband, after an election, can resume friendly relations with men with whom he has engaged in a series of moral gouging and bitter personalities. She is not made that way and she does not care to try to exercise her talents in any such manner.

Nevertheless the Southern woman is a power in politics, and the men know it; for this reason she is invited to attend the great political gatherings, where clever orators tip the point of their arguments by urging the righteousness of their views for her sake; she attends these meetings with reluctance and only because she is urged to do so, but when a crisis is at hand, and she is appealed to in behalf of her home and her children, then she becomes active in every way that her sex and training make possible, and she throws her whole influence on the side of the man who claims to be fighting for her cause, and I have never known a campaign in which the women took especial interest that did not bring large results, if not victory to the cause which she espoused; but for all that she does not like politics.

However, there is a public question that closely concerns the women of North Carolina; that is the education of the children. The problem is legitimately their own. It is theirs by inheritance, and thus by long possession, they have wrestled with it through years of anxiety and self-denial, patiently struggling with the burden as well as they could, though they, like the Israelites of old, knew that they were required to "make bricks without straw." Bricks to render fit the walls of the State. The men of North Carolina have never appreciated the difficulties in the way of education; they have made laws which have never been enforced, and they have made appropriations of money which have in turn been misappropriated by ignorant and incompetent officials with the best intentions.

They have paid their children's tuition at private schools, if they had anything to pay with, and if they had not the children have been allowed to pick up what information they could at the public school, with the help of the toiling mother, who has filled the breach like the heroine that she is.

I have known mothers, respectable white women with living husbands, who took in washing to pay their children's tuition at a good school, and I have known mothers who took in sewing to eke out a living, who sat up half the night and did extra sewing to accomplish the same great purpose.

God alone knows what the State owes to the mothers of North Carolina. Even the educated father gives only a few minutes to inquire into the progress and occupation of his child's daily life, then he turns it over to the mother as if he had performed the whole duty of man, satisfied that the work will go on somehow; but he never knows how close is the intercourse between the mother and child, as the doors of learning are opened and it stands on the dark threshold of knowledge calling to her to hold a light.

Then she becomes a living-dictionary, a grammar, a history, a mythology, an encyclopedia and a source of inspiration in science and biography from her its first impressions of the beautiful and the true as well as in religion, where she is infallible and her teachings are the best that is in her, even though poverty stricken.

It is better to give.

The illiterate mother has the same feeling of responsibility, the same self-sacrifice, but her position weakened her influence; she should be a light to her child, but she finds herself groping in darkness and can give the reader any assistance. She who naturally turns to her mother she is unable to shield from the wrong influences at the right time from the bad books as well as the world.

The school question is the woman's question because the personal interests are so closely interwoven; no one is more concerned in the educational movement than she who has been the mother of ignorance. She will feel it her duty to co-operate with the educational movement.

I had occasion, last week, to interview, separately, one hundred mothers upon the subject of the interviews were tales of struggles, hope and despair that set me thinking of the great army of women who are bearing the burdens of the State, and I believe they are the ones who will respond to the call with enthusiasm if given them.

In spite of all the chivalry, I believe the women of North Carolina are more dependent on environment than the men of North Carolina, for it is often reflected in the unlettered occupants of the home.

It is that God-given principle which prompts a man to succor those who are in need of his aid, the principle which he takes into the field of battle, and which makes him a hero, that we need today for the children of the State.

When the woman chooses the side of the child there will be plenty of men to wear them, in every hamlet and cross-road, but the spirit be the same whether her battle is at the ballot box or on a field of gold. We are tired of illiteracy. Let it be a crusade.

MRS. LILE

Kinston, N. C., March.