Resistance to “modernity”: southern Illinois farm women and the cult of domesticity

Abstract

Combining feminist historical analysis with Foucault's interpretation of “modernity” as the development of functional divisions of time and space in utilitarian, rationalized practices, this article examines the 20th‐Century transformation of southern Illinois farm women's lives and domestic architecture. It argues that farm women's integration into industrial capitalism as petty commodity producers, agriculture's unique relationship to nature, and precapitalist social relationships undergirded the persistence of many “premodern” forms of family organization. [women, rural United States, history, household organization, modernization]