Mrs. Juliet V. Strauss: the country contributor of the Ladies Home Journal

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Mrs. Juliet V. Strauss
The Country Contributor of the Ladies Home Journal


MRS. JULIET V. STRAUSS   A Plain Country Woman

Introducing A Plain Country Woman
FIVE years ago an article appeared in the Indianapolis News, under the signature of A Country Contributor.  Although the article was made part of a paper of many pages, it immediately found itself with the readers—principally the women readers.  The writer was asked to continue, and for all these years there has appeared in the Indianapolis paper the weekly views of The Country Contributor.

It was this work to which my attention was called, and I invited the author to contribute to the Ladies Home Journal.  This was three years ago, and I have no hesitation in saying that her contributions have been more widely read and are today more popular than the writings of any single contributor to the magazine.

It is difficult to analyse the peculiar charm that the writings of The Plain Country Woman have for a wide public unless it is that the author has lived deeply and touches upon the vital well-springs of living with a hand that we feel is that of experience.  As the author herself says of her writings: I know all its shortcomings; I know it is disjointed; I know it lacks continuity—but it's me.  But it is also true that people by the millions have read and are today, each week and each month, reading the writings of The Plain Country Woman irrelevant as it may be in her eyes and in their eyes, and they have read with pleasure and with profit.

And it is with the hope that her views dealing with those phases of life that she believes to be woman's best estate may find new and approving readers that this, the author's first book, is presented to the public.

EDWARD BOK.

Philadelphia, 1908.



Lecture Subject:
How Mother Gets Her Halo



Concerning the Lecturer
MRS. JULIET V. STRAUSS is a native of Rockville, Indiana, where she was born in 1863 and where she has lived continuously ever since.  Her mother, a woman of unusual talents and fine education, was left a widow with four children when Mrs. Strauss was but four years old.  To the early training received at the hands of this unusual mother Mrs. Strauss owes much of her knowledge of life and her amazing fund of information.

In December, 1881, Isaac R. Strauss and Juliet Virginia Humphreys were married.  The young couple started out in life on nothing but courage.  Mrs. Strauss, a real helpmeet, began early to assist her husband in the newspaper business.  After a few years her work on The Rockville Tribune, her husband's paper, began to be noticed throughout the State and she began writing for the Indianapolis papers, her first contributions appearing in The Indianapolis Journal.  Later she began writing for The Indianapolis News over the nom de plume of The Country Contributor.

These letters soon achieved great popularity and it was through them that Mrs. Strauss became connected with The Ladies' Home Journal, the title which she now uses for her lecture, How Mother Gets Her Halo, attracting the attention of the editor of The Ladies' Home Journal, Mr. Edward Bok, who engaged her as a staff writer for that publication.

Mrs. Strauss is a woman of very pronounced individuality.  On the lecture platform she appears to be talking rather personally to each person in the audience, and she has the great advantage of long years of actual experience in the things she is talking about, having for many years been a home woman doing her own housework and caring for her children.



Concerning the Lecture
MRS. STRAUSS' lecture is based upon the idea of bringing the beauty and light of spiritual things to the doing of the difficult and common tasks of every day.  Mrs. Strauss believes that the brightest halo which surrounds any human face adorns the strong countenance of the old-fashioned mother who meets the affairs of life in the cheerful, uncomplaining way peculiar to people who have learned the great lesson of finding themselves in their native element.

The lecture abounds in little home and kitchen stories such as have given vogue to The Ideas of a Plain Country Woman and The Country Contributor letters.  These stories are keenly humorous, though their application has root in great and deep meanings.

Questions of public interest now before the American people are discussed in their relation to women and to the home.

The lecture closes with Mrs. Strauss' dialect verses entitled Where Boogers Is.  This is a monologue by a boy expressing himself regarding his confidence in his mother.





The Country Contributor

How She Says Things
I am not much of a reformer, being doubtful of the real good of many things that we call progress, but I am not going to set myself in the path and get run over by them.  One can keep out of their way and, besides, although there is a lot of fuss over the changing conditions of woman's lot and the new regime, when the shouting and the tumult die it will be seen that there is a respectable minority living close to the ground, holding to the old ideals, and, above all, minding their own business—which is genius of the highest order.

My mother was not a new woman, but I am quite sure she had the proper theory of life.  You never went into her kitchen but you found there a copy of some entertaining or instructive book.  You never helped her wash the dishes without learning something widely removed from dishes.  Hers was the secret of a most successful way of living, and it is a way that any thinking woman can adopt.  She could not go out into the world, but she could bring the world to her.

I come back to the old doctrine that service is the crowning glory of life, and that through it alone do we lay hold upon the eternal; and then I cease to wonder how mother gets her halo—I know, and I know, too, that it is none too bright and glorious for the service by which she earns it.  Every woman is a mother at heart, but it takes a mother in fact to know things just as they are.

The intelligent woman who has done real work—and by real work I mean labour with her own hands year after year in her own house and kitchen, and who has meanwhile reared a creditable family and still kept for her soul a pair of wings like a dove, is the perfect flower of civilization, far superior to the woman of the world who knows the lingo of polite society and little else.

A sick man is God's ignoblest work.  When a man is sick you might just as well abuse him first as last, because he is determined it shall be so.  Take up cold coffee and cold toast and a cold egg for his breakfast.  Never try to keep them hot—it irritates him.  He wishes them to be cold and have no taste to them, so he can give up after a few in-effectual attempts to eat, and lie back on his pillow with a sigh and a reproachful glance and ask you to send for his sister, and perhaps she can cook something he can eat.

The 'well-preserved' woman of forty with her massaged face and juvenile costume looks her years more painfully than the sweet country mother with life's dear story written on her strong, quiet face.

I always wondered what became of the girl who ran away with Young Lochinvar.  I warrant the quiet fellow who stood awkwardly by and let his bride be carried away would have made the better husband.  'A laggard in love and a dastard in war' is sure to be a good hand to do up the chores and dry the dishes and stay at home evenings.  He will go to church with his wife, and set the hens, and run the clothes through the wringer, and read aloud from the farm paper while she fashions garments for the little ones from the worn-out raiment of their elders.  This is the domestic kind.

It is a pet idea of mine that the great majority of married couples love each other.  Maybe it isn't 'smart' to think this, but I do think it, sensational newspapers, putrid fiction and the divorce docket to the contrary notwithstanding.

The day belongs especially to the women.  Men think in years and decades, but woman's life is in the details of the big scheme of things, and she sometimes rebels that it is so, and wishes that she, too, might take a hand at epoch-making.



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