Women, Technology, and Rural Life: Some Recent Literature

Abstract

Review Essay WOMEN, TECHNOLOGY, AND RURAL LIFE: SOME RECENT LITERATURE PAMELA RINEY-KEHRBERG Historical study of American farm women has had a relatively short life, reaching back approximately twenty years.1 Rural women rarely existed in earlier scholarship that reserved the categories of farmer and farming for males. Agricultural history thus manifested itselfas a story ofmen and their tools, stretching back historiographically into the early days of the 20th century. Although in 1953Jared van Wagenen described in careful detail many of the physical pro­ cesses of farming in The Golden Age ofHomespun, the women’s work from which he derived his title occupied less than twenty pages at the end ofhis book.2 Women’s work and women’s tools fed, clothed, and provided income for farming families, but they were rarely cause for historical comment. The social concerns of the 1960s spawned new areas of historical research, and the old agricultural history became the new rural his­ tory, with a greater emphasis on farming families and communities. Women’s historians, however, were slow to acknowledge the role that rural women played in this nation’s history. In the first generaDr . Riney-Kehrberg is associate professor of history at Illinois State University. She is the author of Rooted in Dust: Surviving Drought and Depression in Southwestern Kansas (Lawrence, Kans.: University Press of Kansas, 1994). 1 Books reviewed in this essay:Jane Adams, The Transformation ofRural Life: Southern Illinois, 1890-1990 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Kather­ ine Jellison, Entitled to Power: Farm Women and Technology, 1913-1963 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993); Sally McMurry, Transforming Rural Life: DairyingFamilies and Agricultural Change, 1820-1885 (Baltimore:Johns Hopkins Uni­ versity Press, 1995); Mary Neth, Preserving the Family Farm: Women, Community, and the Foundations ofAgribusiness in the Midwest, 1900-1940 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). 2Jared van Wagenen Jr., The Golden Age ofHomespun, rev. ed. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1963), pp. 249-68.© 1997 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/97/3804-0005$02.00 942 Women, Technology, and Rural Life 943 tion of women’s history, most of the research focused on urban women and their concerns. Not surprisingly, many of the earliest studies of farm women thus adopted models first developed in the study of urban women. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, scholars committed to the possibility of combining women’s history and ag­ ricultural history developed the new field of rural women’s history. In part they took their cue from scholars in other social sciences who had already begun to studywomen’s agricultural labor in developing countries.3 By pursuing this research, they acknowledged that the vast majority of American women prior to the second half of the 20th century had been engaged, along with their families, in agricul­ ture. As scholars sought to “reconsider the relative contributions of our foremothers and forefathers to the entire process of nation­ building,”4 the efforts of rural women emerged as central to that process. The study of farm women and technology was not far behind. It was almost impossible to study women in agriculture without giving serious attention to the technology that so thoroughly shaped their working lives. By the mid-1980s, historical works had begun to ap­ pear that examined the many meanings of technology in farm wom­ en’s lives. In More Workfor Mother: The Ironies ofHousehold Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave, Ruth Schwartz Cowan devoted a chapter to the challenges of preindustrial housework, which well illustrated why so many women welcomed the coming of factorymade cloth, soap, candles, and other household goods.5 Cowan found that the passage of time and the adoption of new household appliances did not lighten the burdens of homemakers. Standards of cleanliness and good housekeeping rose as new technologies be­ came available, with the result that housework remained a heavy bur­ den for rural as well as urban women. In historiographic terms, then, one of the earliest works to reflect this new interest in the history offarm women was also a seminal work in the history of technology. In 1985 historianJoan Jensen, a...