The Best Strain of Wife

As the first signs of spring began to appear across the countryside last week, a U.S. farm magazine turned young farmers' thoughts to the problems of taking a wife. In its spring issue, The Farm Quarterly (cir. 189,000) warned the young farmer to be careful to select the proper strain. Its recommendations, with some adjustments, were thought-provoking for city cousins, too.

"A Piece of Equipment." "When a farmer buys a cow," wrote Farm Editor R. J. McGinnis, "he looks at her long and carefully, goes over her point by point, and weighs his pocketbook against her virtues and her faults. He should be no less calculating when he takes a wife . . . This flinthearted approach . . . will appear to many, especially the female sex, as a way of saying that a wife should be regarded as a piece of farm equipment. That is quite right.

"Romance is only a minor consideration in selecting a farm wife . . . After he has married her, love will likely come along, in the field while she is pitching hay up to him, or in the barn when she whacks Daisy for stepping on her foot . . . After all, a farmer can give only a very small part of his time to love, working as he does from sun to sun and then falling into bed dead tired after an early supper."

The farmer often uses "very slipshod methods" in selecting a wife. "The eligible-bachelor farmer falls victim of a moonlight night, or a dulcet voice, or a sniff of My Sin, never giving a thought as to whether or not the creature in his arms can strip a cow dry or hoist the back end of a wagon . . . Farmers don't usually fall in love with the deep-bosomed, wide-hipped, somewhat unimaginative women who make the best farm wives."

A Test for a Pigeon. A young farmer who must make his way should select a "Type I" wife. She should be "sound of wind and limb," should not have more than a high-school education, and "should not be disturbed by muddy boots in her kitchen, nor by the dogs sleeping under the stove . . . nor the continuous parade of newborn pigs and lambs in bushel baskets by the kitchen stove. She should be farm-reared . . . It takes a woman a long time to learn how to get her weight properly under a bale of hay."

Since a Type I wife is a "rare flower," a likely alternative is "Type II . . . a much commoner species." Pretty, educated and sensitive, she adds to rather than fits into the farm scene, is more suitable for the farmer who inherited his land from grandpa than for the poor but ambitious tiller of the soil. For her, intelligence and education are not necessarily handicaps; she "should be able to carry on a conversation with either the hired hand or a banker whose note is due . . . She should look well in blue jeans. It's not good if she runs to hips."

Unable to find a rare Type I, how can the young farmer at least run a test on Type II? "Take your candidate to the fields and the barns. Escort her across a muddy feed lot, lead her through poison ivy and, poison and all, take her to a dance. She'll complain . . . but if she comes back for more, she's your pigeon."

Having thus completed his spring planting for a year's crop of letters from readers (mostly female), Editor McGinnis (a country boy who married a city girl) grants that there is a combination type, often selected by neither flinthearted nor slipshod methods. "She is the ordinary farm girl who takes her calf to the county fair and gets a blue ribbon, and goes to college, too, and dates her boy friend on the next farm. They go to dances together, and they eat hot dogs and drink Cokes at football games and, on some moonlight night in autumn, while parked for a spell in the lane, he pops the eternal question."

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