Contrasts in Urban and Rural Family Life

Abstract

HIS ARTICLE shows some contrasts of activities between rural and urban life, based on data from a survey of iooo rural and iooo urban families in Illinois. The families were of the white race and represented many different walks of life such as, professional, skilled laborers, unskilled laborers, merchants, farmers, etc. The urban families lived in Mt. Vernon, Paris, and Danville, Illinois. The respective population of these urban communities was I4,000, 85oo and 63,ooo.1 The rural families lived in the open country of Clark County (I25 of them) and the balance lived in Redmon, Brocton, Westfield, Casey, Martinsville, and Marshall, Illinois. The population of the villages, hamlets, and towns ranged all the way from 250, the smallest, to 2406, the largest. The average size of the families was 4.I for the urban and 5.2 for the rural. Approximately 53.I percent of the urban families owned their own homes and the remainder were tenants. Of the rural families, about 63 percent were owners and the remainder tenants. The method of collecting data was personal interviews with family heads. The writer was assisted by fifteen field workers, ten of whom were former rural school teachers. Five were graduate students. A family schedule composed of a series of questions was used when each family head was interviewed. Approximately four hundred families, half urban and half rural, were interviewed each year from 1934 to I938 inclusive. The purposes of the study were: (I) to study the socioeconomic activities; (2) the economic status as revealed by home ownership and creative comforts; (3) the political and educational activities; and (4) the religious and the recreational activities. Table I shows the comparative economic activities of the urban and the rural families. Such activities as garment making, canning food, cleaning and pressing garments, doing home laundry, and the production of some garden vegetables, are more generally practiced by a greater number of the rural than the urban families. The reasons for this are fairly obvious, but the significant thing is the differential percentages. It would be still more significant if we knew, for example, what percentage of the rural families had commercial pressing done, and what has been the relative changes in these percentages over a period of time. This would throw light upon the degree and rate of rural urbanization, and might also reveal interesting trends in urban life, for example, is the home laundry increasing or decreasing? Many of the rural families probably have commercial pressing done since