American Farm Women Research Articles

More than a farmer's wife: voices of American farm women, 1910-1960

Farm women have often been seen by their city sisters as victims of patriarchy, overwork, and poverty, aptly depicted by the 'Migrant Mother' image from the Great Depression. Amy Mattson Lauters now goes directly to the women themselves to get the other side of the story of American farm life: that many women survived and even thrived on farms through the adversity of the depression and beyond. More than a Farmer's Wife spans fifty years of farm life to reveal that many women saw farming as an opportunity to be full partners with their husbands and considered themselves businesswomen central to the success of their farms. Lauters shows that farm women were fundamental to the farming industry - backbone of the family business and manager of the farm home - as she explores the role of media in the farm woman's everyday life and discusses the construction of American farm women in those publications.Lauters combs a half-century of farming, women's, and mainstream magazines, ranging from Farmer's Wife to the Saturday Evening Post and including the journalism of writers such as Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane. She also conducted interviews with more than 180 women who were raised on or lived on farms to probe how they felt about their lives and determine how closely their perceptions matched the images found in the media. The period covered here was one of enormous instability and change for American farming: rural and farm families declined by a third as the population shifted from primarily rural to urban/suburban. Along with such changes as increasing industrialization and the rise of consumer culture, Lauters also tells how farm women responded to such events as economic depression, world war, and suffrage.And she explores the deepening divide between city and farm women, so that by the end of this period, urban and rural women had virtually no common ground for understanding each other. 'It was a hard, but simple life', one farm woman wrote, 'and I feel we had more of a family life than anyone else has today'. That sentiment speaks volumes, and this book uncovers the deep divide between urban and rural cultures that emerged during this period, one that continues to be felt today.

"I Like to Hoe My Own Row": A Saskatchewan Farm Woman's Notions about Work and Womanhood during the Great Depression

Kate Graves was my great-grandmother. She was sixty-three years old when economic depression and drought struck prairie Canada in 1929. Over the next twelve years she dispatched more than 150 letters to her fourth-eldest daughter, my grandmother Georgina Edith Graves Griffiths, from her rural community in the heart of the Saskatchewan Dust Bowl. The central theme of these letters was work. Despite her age, Kate spent seventeen-hour days churning butter, raising chickens, tending children, cooking, cleaning, canning, sewing, and gardening. Her letters reveal the vital contribution she made to her family and the family farm in the 1930s. But more importantly, they tell us how she saw her role and how her perceptions helped to shape her life and the lives of other female family members. My great-grandmother used her letters to impart her ideas about farm women’s proper work roles and to affirm her identity as a “good” farm woman. She tried to empower herself by policing gender boundaries in her family and working hard in the domestic sphere. The irony was that, rather than enhancing women’s power, Kate’s idealized notions helped to disempower her and future generations of western Canadian farm women. Seventy-five years later most prairie farm families—including my immediate family—would continue to value “men’s work” more than “women’s work” and to grant men more resources and power than women. Although literature on American farm women in the Great Depression abounds, we know very little about rural women in prairie Canada in the

Women, Technology, and Rural Life: Some Recent Literature

Historical study of American farm women has had a relatively short life, reaching back approximately twenty years.' Rural women rarely existed in earlier scholarship that reserved the categories of farmer and farming for males. Agricultural history thus manifested itself as a story of men and their tools, stretching back historiographically into the early days of the 20th century. Although in 1953 Jared van Wagenen described in careful detail many of the physical processes of farming in The Golden Age of Homespun, the women's work from which he derived his title occupied less than twenty pages at the end of his 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.

Women, Technology, and Rural Life: Some Recent Literature

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...

Ideology and Social Surveys: Reinterpreting the Effects of "Laborsaving" Technology on American Farm Women

L'A. decrit l'ideologie des habitudes de travail des femmes dans les fermes americaines au XX e siecle en etudiant l'histoire sociale de la technologie rurale qui leur a permis d'ameliorer et d'alleger leurs conditions de travail

An oral life history perspective on the containers in which American farm women experienced leisure

Life history interviews were used in this study to identify the experiences of leisure for American farm women over their lifespan. Symbolic interaction was the organizing framework in which women described the contexts of their lives and the ways in which they experienced leisure. The findings describe three typologies of women identified by their perception of the intersection of work and leisure. In addition, the farm women shared several common containers for leisure including types of activities, social settings and physical locations.

A commentary on research on American farmwomen

A commentary on research on American farmwomen

Housework

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe New Scholarship: Review EssaysHouseworkNona Glazer-MalbinNona Glazer-Malbin Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Signs Volume 1, Number 4Summer, 1976 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/493308 Views: 79Total views on this site Citations: 27Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1976 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Ildikó Dén-Nagy Social Theories and Whole Personhood During the COVID-19 Pandemic, (May 2022): 22–42.https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-6684-2364-6.ch002Rosemary A. Joyce Wealth, Women’s Labour, and Forms of Value: Thinking from the Study of Ancestral Central America, (Jun 2021): 35–53.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72539-6_3Jussara dos Santos Raxlen, Rachel Sherman Labor, Lifestyle, and the “Ladies Who Lunch”: Work and Worth Among Elite STAY-AT-HOME Mothers, (Oct 2020): 195–220.https://doi.org/10.1108/S0277-283320200000034012Dr. Annie Tubadji, Professor Joachim Mo, Masood Gheasi, Peter Nijkamp, Piet Rietveld A study on undocumented migrant workers in the Dutch household sector, International Journal of Manpower 35, no.1/21/2 (May 2014): 103–117.https://doi.org/10.1108/IJM-08-2013-0196Joyce Chan Wai-man Female University Students Dreaming of Becoming Housewives, (Sep 2012): 169–190.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-0266-4_10Judith Grant Gender and Marx's radical humanism in the economic and philosophic manuscripts of 1844, Rethinking Marxism 17, no.11 (Jan 2005): 59–77.https://doi.org/10.1080/0893569052000312908Orna Blumen GENDER DIFFERENCES IN THE JOURNEY TO WORK, Urban Geography 15, no.33 (May 2013): 223–245.https://doi.org/10.2747/0272-3638.15.3.223 References, (Jan 2010).https://doi.org/10.4324/NOE0415083348.bmatt2Deborah D. 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