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Show IS THE SOUTH A WOMAN'& A Louisiana L.ectur66S Thlnkrf Gives Interesting RoasonJi The title of a lecture by a Mrs. v -New Orleans recently was "Come Soutn, Young Woman." She said she was a writer on the only great daily in the world that is owned by a woman, referring refer-ring to The Picayune and its chief owner, Mrs. E. J. Nicholson. Of Louisiana she 6aid that it was waiting to be cut up into small holdings by young Corydons and Phyllises, who will grow cotton for the central factories, have market gardens, orchards, dairy farms and poultry yards, and who will also grow flowers and make honey. She spoke of Louisiana as already possessing a woman steamboat captain Mary Miller and a3 "a state that builds a monument to the memory of a woman who never had on a kid glove in all her life, who could not write her name, who was only great in her goodness. That was Margaret Haughey, the baker woman whose loaves built asylums asy-lums and yet feed thousands of hungry ones." . Mrs. Field said that she had seen a kitchen garden whose products equaled any shown at the Chicago fair, and yet they were raised by two young girls. Near by, in the same parish of Cameron, a young Iowa girl squatter, with her 16-year-old brother, took up a government claim of 160 acres and went to planting rice, the first crop of which paid her $1,200. She lives in a three room cottage cot-tage and has a few fruit trees, plenty of good fences and a sea of waving rice blades. Her nearest neighbor is another girl farmer, who also settled a government govern-ment claim and is bossing an orchard that is already giving her a comfortable living. The lecturess also told a story of a woman who is dressmaking in Chicago and who bought 20 acres of Louisiana land out of her savings and sent her mother and brother down there to start a poultry farm. They have been so successful suc-cessful that she ia about to join them and add Email fruits and vegetables to the crops on her land, being assured of becoming be-coming independent thereby. Mrs. Field said that all along the Illinois Illi-nois Central in the river bottom land of Mississippi and Louisiana "are fruit and vegetable farms managed by women-most women-most of them newcomers." They manage man-age the farms and pack the berries and vegetables for the Chicago market. On an old plaatation near New Orleans is an old woman who grows camellias and has been to Europe twice on the profits. In Grant parish, in the Red river country, there is an lS-year-old girl who runs her father's cotton gin and gins 1,800 bales a year. "She handles that snorting machine ma-chine as if it were a baby; oils it, feeds it, fools over it, scolds it, tidies it up, and when it is working as good as gold she sits beside it dear, dainty and only 18 crocheting lace for her petticoats." Catherine L. Minor of the board of lady managers of the Columbian exposition ex-position is a Louisiana planter, and, according ac-cording to this lecture&B, in every parish aje women farmers, stock raisers and planters. Mrs. Field herself wears a njedal that was the gift of the women of Up different trades and professions fol-lotfed fol-lotfed by the working women of New Orleans. "Women are a power in the south, she says though that is not a new idea "of fearful force when they organize. I claim it was the women of Louisiana. who killed the Louisiana state lottery. When the Women's Antilottery league was formed, tire 'lottery leaders"? practically admitted that they had got their Waterloo." As for the question whether women are safe in the south, she answers boldly that "every man is her guard of honor." Accompanied only by a 12-year-old lad she says she traveled 1,800 miles in A private vehicle in Louisiana Louisi-ana safe and unharmed. She says that every man's hat ia off to the working woman, and she holds securely whatever position her virtues, her brains and her blood demand. "Come south, young woman," she says, "and you will flower there, f ragrancing all the air. There you will learn what it is to be free, and there a woman may be as she wills an ant in the morning, a bee at noon, and a butterfly but-terfly at night." New York Sun. |
