Another feature of this idea of the Town and Country Club is the "rest room" for farmers' wives. In a number of cases where this has been tried, the women of the village or town provide a room as near the shopping center of the town as possible, where the country women can find a place to rest, to lunch, and to leave their children. These rooms are fitted up in a neat but inexpensive manner with the necessary conveniences, and are entirely free to those for whom they were intended. If these rooms are well managed, they offer not only a very practical form of assistance to the women of the farm, but they may be the means of developing a form of co-operation between the women of the village and the farm, and eventually leading to some permanent scheme of mutual work. Possibilities of this sort of thing are easily recognized. In the realms of higher education the girl who is to stay upon the farm has not been wholly neglected. In Kansas, Iowa, Connecticut, Illinois, Ohio, and Michigan, at least, and in connection with the agricultural colleges of those states, courses for women (including domestic science) have been provided. They are well patronized by girls from the farm. Many of these girls do not marry farmers; many of them do. And their college training having thus been secured in an atmosphere more or less agricultural, they must inevitably take rank among their sisters of the farm as leaders in demonstrating what farm life for women may be. Nor should it be forgotten that the tremendous movement of recent years which has so multiplied standard reading-matter, both periodicals and books, has reached the farm. A census of country post-offices will reveal the fact that the standard magazines go regularly to thousands of farm homes. Agricultural papers, religious papers, and even dailies find multitudes of intelligent readers among farmers. With the advent of better highways, electric car lines, rural free delivery, and the rural telephone, each of which is looming on the horizon as an important feature of American farm life; with the Grange or similar organization in every school district; with the development of courses for women at all our colleges of agriculture, and the logical complement of such courses in the form of college extension--farmers' institutes, reading-courses, traveling libraries, lecture and correspondence courses--we shall find farm life taking on a new dress, and perhaps farmers' wives may come to enjoy the envy of those women who are unfortunate enough not to have married farmers. CHAPTER XII THE COUNTRY CHURCH AND PROGRESS