THE CHANGING COUNTRYWOMAN
By ESTHER NEVILLE-SMITH
APLATONIST, bent upon planning a good citizen, could hardly find more unpromising material than the country housewife of fifty or even thirty years ago. "The foundation of democracy," writes Professor R. H. Tawney, "is in the sense of spiritual independence " ; to which we should probably add the sense of community. These were, perhaps, the qualities most signally lacking in the rural scene at the turn of the century. The con- ditions of village life, except for the minority of the rich, were not favourable to the development of independence of the spirit. Most country places were ruled by the big house with help from the vicarage. The squire looked on himself as the father of his people, and followed the approved pattern of Victorian paternalism in extending his domination to the control of his dependants' personal conduct and political views, an attitude that was made easy by the system of tied cottages and the weakness of the agricultural unions. His mansion dispensed comforts for the old and sick, Christmas beef and tea for all the village, fetes for the tenants and punishments for offenders. Such authority was often beneficently exercised and kindly taken, but it was not calculated to produce self-reliance or initiative.
Any sense of unity with the men and women outside the narrow bounds of the village, or feeling of responsibility for their welfare, was made exceptional by the slow diffusion of news and the lack of rural transport. The man from the next village was a stranger, and the family that came from a different part of the country were foreigners with outlandish speech and ways.
For women above all it was made supremely difficult to acquire any consciousness of a common life. The men had opportunities for association in farm work, at market and in the village inn ; but, as the work of women tended to be increasingly withdrawn from the fields and concen- trated on the specialised spheres of the dairy and poultry yard, and as the old festivities of country life fell more and more into disuse, their activities and interests became increasingly confined to the home. They made a virtue of these disqualifying limitations ; to hold aloof from neigh- bours became a sign of social superiority.
The change, when it came, was sudden. In the years that followed the War the Americanisation of life affected the countryside even more than the towns. The squirearchy lost much of its dominance as the increase in the number of houses gave some release from the tyranny of the tied cottage. The most laborious household drudgery was lightened by the coming of water, gas and later electricity to many country places, and wireless, week-enders and charabancs brought the outside world to the village. In its turn the village moved out into the world. The motor-bus gave the rural woman a weekly visit to the nearest town, and familiarised her with urban life, mass-production and the strange new values of the films.
At this time, when so many of the old inhibitions and limita- tions were disappearing, it had a determining effect on the development of the village woman that a new movement was peacefully growing up in the countryside. The Women', Institutes were founded in England under the auspices of the Ministry of Agriculture with the primary aim of increasing the supply of home-grown food in the War ; but their characte- was so well adapted to the needs of the period that in a fev. years their range was extending over garden, farm and home- craft to drama, music and other cultural interests, and beyond to the whole scene of rural life. They included women and girls of all religious denominations, political parties and social positions. The wives and daughters of squire and groom, farmer and ploughman, rector and local preacher found themselves gradually unlearning patronage and obligation, and adjusting themselves to the demands of a microcosm in which all had equal responsibilities and equal rights.
The education given in the Women's Institutes oh food- values, child-management, house-planning, and other needs of body and mind, led the rural woman to turn a critical eye on the existing conditions of housing, diet, schools, sanitation and general amenities of the countryside. The result of this was first shown in corporate efforts to supply some obvious need in the village—a refuse collection, hot soup for the school-children, a branch of the county library, a hall or playground, an infant-welfare centre. Then, as Women's Institutes from widely distant parts of England and Wales became used to meeting and discussing, with a growing sense of solidarity, the problems which were the same for so many of them, their outlook widened to cover the whole country- side. They assembled evidence on many rural questions : the need for a village telephone in many remote country places without the heavy guarantee then demanded, the urgent lack of low-rented cottages for the rural worker and for the aged poor, the inadequacy of the rural water-supply schemes, the need for hot dinners for school-children, and the inability of the country worker's family to buy enough milk for health at present prices. They have set to work themselves on some of these matters ; they have pressed Local Authorities to use their permissive powers ; they have furnished information to many Government departments.
The value of the Women's Institutes' work on such ques- tions lies in its objectivity. These problems are discussed in their own village meetings, and the delegates at the General Meeting in London have behind them the experience and judgement of women who have no axe to grind, and for whom these so-called public questions are the intimate stuff of their private lives. Saved from utopianism by the house- wife's sense of what is practically possible, from feminism by their origin in a crisis of the whole nation, from political bias by their rule of non-party discussion, the Women's Institutes can speak with authority on the condition of rural England and Wales. They have already enabled country women to move out of isolation and indifference towards independence and community. It is interesting to specu- late what will be their contribution in the future to national life.
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