Unless his girls could teach a country school, they sat
at home in poverty.
The Bohemian and Scandinavian girls could not get positions as teachers,
because they had had no opportunity to learn the language. Determined to
help in the struggle to clear the homestead from debt, they had no
alternative but to go into service. Some of them, after they came to town,
remained as serious and as discreet in behaviour as they had been when they
ploughed and herded on their father's farm. Others, like the three
Bohemian Marys, tried to make up for the years of youth they had lost. But
every one of them did what she had set out to do, and sent home those
hard-earned dollars. The girls I knew were always helping to pay for
ploughs and reapers, brood-sows, or steers to fatten.
One result of this family solidarity was that the foreign farmers in our
county were the first to become prosperous. After the fathers were out of
debt, the daughters married the sons of neighbours--usually of like
nationality--and the girls who once worked in Black Hawk kitchens are
to-day managing big farms and fine families of their own; their children
are better off than the children of the town women they used to serve.
I thought the attitude of the town people toward these girls very stupid.
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