The Forrest City times., 1907-04-26
THE MODERN CLTBWOMAN.


 Driver of Osceola.
 THE MODERN CLUBWOMAN.
 The idea of an Arkansas club issue is an excellent one It somehow brings us face to face with each other, in spirit, just before We meet in per son at the federation. Some writer in giving an estimate of the many-sided ability of clubwomen, says we lack humor. We might have wit, he said, flashing as keen as Damascus blade, but as for jolly joyial, genial humor we do not possess it.
 We are benevolent, we are stren- uous, we are literary, we are earnest. but we are not funny. Alas, alas. MT Stephen Leacock in his analysis of American humor, says. in referring to our national tendency to exaggerate: "The amazing rapidity of American progress, and the very bigness of our continent, have bred in us a corres- bonding bigness of speech; the fresh air of the western country, and the joy of living in the open have inspired us with sheer exuberant love of lying that has set it's mark upon our literature.
 Now, if Mr Leacock and the other analysts of humor find fault with us women for our lack of facility in lying, we can't help it. We simply cannot hope to equal the mem
 It amounts to something, however, to afford amusement to others, even if we are not funny ourselves. We can at least be the target for the wit of our husbands and other men friends. For fully thirty years the club woman was popularly supposed to leave her husbands buttons un- Sewed, her sons socks undarned, her lares and penates covered with dust, like the little toy dog, while she knit her brow over theories in psychology and new discoveries in pottery.
 But for the last ten or fifteen years she has disproyed these aspersions; she is an intelligent, devoted mother, a judiciouS housekeeper and an active church worker The gentlemen of the family have been obliged to furl the banners of their ridicule and look to the laurels of their own culture and intelligence to see if they are not a trifle faded and dust covered.
 For though the club woman may have scared into the empyrean on the wings of Carlyle and Emerson, though she may have penetrated the utter most realms of beauty and art with Tennyson and Browning, still she de- scends with good, wholesome avoirdu- pois upon the details of pantry, kitchen and backyard, cleans house, sets the table according to the last rules of household economics, paddles her recalcitrant offspring at discreet intervals, and sweetly lectures her husband on the error of his ways and Oll i4lo PiOpCllolLJ lOI OdoOOdll, bO~ bacco and mint juleps.
 Furthermore this club woman sends her energies speeding away beyond hearthstone and dining room. She knows where sweatshop garments are sold and shuns those shops. She knows in what states the laws regu- lating child labor are enforced. She knows the need of laws on forestry as we'll as those on rice puddings, and has an intelligent estimate of what the congress and the states are tor are not) doing. She simply carries her brains and culture into the realm of home and beyond it. She is as good as her grandmother-and better-to the extent that her sweet womanly intelligence touches greater number of lives. Her husband likes her none the less that she no longer sits at his feet like a kitten or Copperfield' $ Dora, drinking in the words of wis dom that fall from his oracular lips.
 She keeps her keen eye running up