Roosevelt, much as he understood the character of the Western man, was
even more interested in and sympathetic to the Western woman. It was
on the prairie that Roosevelt learned the doctrine which he afterward
preached, that “the prime work for the average woman must be keeping
the home and rearing her children.” When with his men on the ranch
he listened by hours to their accounts of the charms and virtues of
their sweethearts, while from his own close observation he acquired a
knowledge of the homely virtues of the women pioneers of the plains
that led him to show small sympathy in later years with the idle,
luxury-loving women of the big cities.
In his description of frontier types Roosevelt pictured how the
grinding work of the wilderness drives the beauty and bloom from a
woman’s face long before her youth leaves her. She lives in a log hut
chinked with moss, or in a sod adobe hovel; or in a temporary camp.
Motherhood comes and leaves her sinewy, angular, thin of lip and
furrowed of brow. She is up early, going about her work in a dingy gown
and ugly sunbonnet, facing her many hard duties, washing and cooking
for her husband and children; facing perils and hardships and poverty
with the courage her husband shows in facing his own hard and dangerous
lot. She is fond and tender toward her children. Yet necessity
dictates that she must bring them up in hardihood. One of the wives of
Roosevelt’s teamsters, when her work prevented her giving personal care
to her flock picketed them out, each child being tied by the leg with a
long leather string to a stake driven in the ground and so placed that
it could not get into a scuffle with the next child nor get its hand on
breakable things.
Independent and resourceful as the frontiersman became in contact
with the desolate prairie, his wife was no less similarly developed.
Roosevelt met one of these women living alone in her cabin on the
plains, having dismissed her erring husband some six months previously.
Her living she earned by making hunting shirts, leggins and gauntlets
for neighboring cow-punchers and Indians, and every man who approached
her cabin door was made to walk the straightest kind of line.
The West had its lewd women--as have our big cities today--but
Roosevelt testified that the sense of honor and dignity of the average
plainswoman was as high as that found in the centers of culture. In
the cowboy balls, to which men and women flocked from the surrounding
towns, the greatest decorum was observed, and those behaving
unseemingly were banished and punished with typical cowboy celerity and
vim.
In his later years Roosevelt wrote a vigorous paper on the parasite
woman, appealing therein to American women to rear strong families for
their country, and to train them to be prepared for military service
if needed. A Michigan woman of the same brave pioneer stamp described
above formed the conclusion that Roosevelt was writing without
knowledge of the hardships many of her sex were forced to undergo, and
wrote to him this letter:
“Dear Sir: When you were talking of ‘race suicide’ I was rearing
a large family on almost no income. I often thought of writing to
you of some of my hardships, and now when ‘preparedness’ may take
some of my boys, I feel I must. I have eleven of my own and brought
up three stepchildren, and yet, in the thirty years of my married
life I have never had a new cloak or winter hat. I have sent seven
children to school at one time. I had a family of ten for eighteen
years, with no money to hire a washerwoman though bearing a child
every two years. Nine--several through or nearly--of my children
have got into high school and two into State Normal School, and one
into the University of Michigan. I haven’t eaten a paid-meal in
twenty years or paid for a night’s lodging in thirty. Not one of
the five boys--the youngest is fifteen--uses tobacco or liquor. I
have worn men’s discarded shoes much of the time. I have had little
time for reading.
“I think I have served my country. My husband has been an invalid
for six years--leaving me the care and much work on our little
sandy farm. I have bothered you enough. To me race suicide has
perhaps a different meaning when I think my boys may have to face
the cannon. Respectfully.
“MRS. ----”
Roosevelt’s reply to her was warmly sympathetic, but there was no
withdrawing from the principles he had set forth. The following
paragraphs from his reply illustrate that tender yet just attitude that
Roosevelt took toward American women, including, of course, the women
of his own household:
“Now, my dear Mrs. ----, you have described a career of service which
makes me feel more like taking off my hat to you, and saluting you as
a citizen deserving of the highest honor, than I would feel as regards
any colonel of a crack regiment. But you seem to think, if I understand
your letter aright, that ‘preparedness’ is in some way designed to make
your boys food for cannon.
“Now, as a matter of fact, the surest way to prevent your boys from
being food for cannon is to have them, and all the other young men of
the country--my boys, for instance, and the boys of all other fathers
and mothers throughout the country--so trained, so prepared, that it
will not be safe for any foreign foe to attack us. Preparedness no more
invites war than fire insurance invites a fire. I shall come back to
this matter again in a moment. But I will speak to you first a word as
to what you say about race suicide.
“I have never preached the imposition of an excessive maternity on any
woman. I have always said that every man worth calling such will feel
a peculiar sense of chivalric tenderness toward his wife, the mother
of his children. He must be unselfish and considerate with her. But,
exactly as he must do his duty, so she must do her duty. I have said
that it is self-evident that unless the average woman, capable of
having children, has four, the race will not go forward; for this is
necessary in order to offset the women who for proper reasons do not
marry, or who, from no fault of their own, have no children, or only
one or two, or whose children die before they grow up. I do not want to
see Americans forced to import our babies from abroad. I do not want to
see the stock of people like yourself and like my family die out--and
you do not either; and it will inevitably die out if the average man
and the average woman are so selfish and so cold that they wish either
no children, or just one or two children.
“We have had six children in this family. We wish we had more. Now the
grandchildren are coming along; and I am sure you agree with me that
no other success in life--not being President, or being wealthy, or
going to college, or anything else--comes up to the success of the man
and woman who can feel that they have done their duty and that their
children and grandchildren rise up to call them blessed.
“Mrs. Roosevelt and I have four sons, and they are as dear to us as
your sons are to you. If we now had war, these four boys would all go.
We think it entirely right that they should go if their country needs
them. But I do not think it fair that they should be sent to defend
the boys who are too soft or too timid ‘to face the cannon,’ or the
other boys who wish to stay at home to make money while somebody else
protects them.”