Rural daughters in Australia, New Zealand and the United States: an historical perspective

Abstract

This article examines the work of girls in farming families in Australia, New Zealand and the midwestern United States between 1870 and 1930. In this study, we develop an argument that the gendered nature of the rural idyll in these three locations is an historical, as much as a geographical, construct, and that it became more rigid as the 20th century progressed. The value systems within which farm girls worked were often at odds with urban, middle class models of proper childhood and womanhood. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, rural girls were workers, although the exact nature of that work varied with family composition, location, stage of settlement, crop mix, and a number of other factors. By the 1920s, however, there is evidence of increasing tensions between the values and needs of rural communities and the growing power of modern domestic ideology. Rural societies were increasingly unsure how their daughters should negotiate the slippery slope between necessary labour and desirable domestic feminine accomplishment. In locations where femininity had been epitomized by ‘usefulness’, that usefulness had to be tempered increasingly by young women's attention to their physical duties as future mothers, and by state/national desires to present their female population as leisured as a sign of prosperity, and the continued desirability of rural life.