In the years when I began first to find that the urgency of social problems was a bar to the further serenity of life, I, like other inexperienced people with reform at their hearts, dreamed dreams and saw visions. I had seen at Easton and Warwick the women of the working classes enjoying the hard work of the garden and the fields; I, too, had tried my hand, always to find that I was rewarded with a quickly renewed sense of the joy of life. Even when weather conditions were unfavourable, the rest after labour was in itself atonement for the toil--it was so unlike other rest. Then I began to see an England in which girls and young women, ceasing to be merely "ladylike," would be healthier, happier, and more useful than they had been in the years of which I could take count. I could not help realising that the desire for active physical exercise could not be limited to one sex, save in obedience to a convention that ignored human needs. It seemed to me as though the truth would be apparent to everybody, that nobody who could lend a helping hand would withhold it. Naturally I was soon undeceived.
I was assured that only the children of working farmers and labourers could possibly milk the dairy herd, that gardening work in many of its aspects would be beyond the limits of the capacity of the gently nurtured. The girl market gardener was voted an impossibility; as landscape gardener, I was assured, she could never compete with a man. Poultry-farming and stock-breeding were even voted indelicate! Household management, to enable girls to take posts as housekeepers in public institutions or large private houses, was regarded as something to be acquired without training, and even the commercial side of farm management was vetoed as a study for girls, as though a well-managed farm would be the worse for a competent book-keeper because that book-keeper chanced to be a daughter instead of a son of the house. I could prolong the list of vetoes and taboos that were presented to me, but no useful service would be served in doing so. I am only concerned to remember now--after nearly twenty years--that I was regarded as an unpractical dreamer, and that, as I write, there are letters on my desk asking me if I cannot recommend lady gardeners and agriculturists of all descriptions. I cannot: they are all fully occupied. Many are at work in England, not a few are busy thousands of miles oversea--in Canada, Australia, and the United States. Think of the freedom and the fullness of their lives, never a taboo to stand between them and any sane development!