One of the perks of being a published author is the occasional treat of new materials sent right to your door, for no other reason than somebody thinks you, the author, might want them.
Such was the case with the big box full of photocopies of Laura’s Missouri Ruralist columns that arrived from my editor a few months ago, a box I haven’t had time to look into until today. Laura wrote regular columns and articles for that newspaper from 1911 to 1926.
“Favors The Small Farm Home” shouts a headline from February 18, 1911. A running subhead underneath, draped over the two middle columns of four across the tabloid-sized paper, says “It lessens the Investment, Improves Country Social Conditions, Makes the Owner More Independent of Poor Help, Promotes Better Farming Methods and Reduces the Labor of Housekeeping.”
Mrs. A.J. Wilder, of Mansfield, Mo., had the entire front page, with a photo I can’t quite make out under its photo-grayed appearance. Her head shot appears with the first column of her text, and it, too, is a rare photo of Laura, her hair piled on her head, her eyes glancing off to the right and downward.
The article itself takes up the entire space. Rather than being a cohesive, all-one-story piece, Laura’s work contains one themed article and several small notes after it, responses to other news of the day.
What I’m looking at is probably one of the most cohesive arguments for farm women as entrepreneurs and business women ever written by a farm woman, and it gives me a tingle just to see the original copy. She writes, too, about the advantages of country living in a time when many were starting to leave for the city.
“Yes indeed, things have changed in the country and we have the advantages of city life if we care to take them,” Laura writes. “Besides we have what it is impossible for the woman in the city to have. We have a whole five acres for our backyard and all out doors for our conservatory, filled not only with beautiful flowers, but with grand old trees as well, with running water and beautiful birds, with sunshine and fresh air and all wild, free, beautiful things.”
The “wild, free, beautiful things”? There’s our Laura.
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