Farmer's Wife Research Articles

Pesticide use and incident diabetes among wives of farmers in the Agricultural Health Study

Pesticide use and incident diabetes among wives of farmers in the Agricultural Health Study

Iowan Women Farmers' Perspectives on Alternative Agriculture and Gender

After decades of being seen as "farm wives," an increasing number of women in American agriculture are actively farming and claiming the "farmer" identity. Previous research has demonstrated that women farmers face unique challenges and that women in the alternative agriculture movement value different elements of agricultural work than their male counterparts. This ethnographic study of 11 women farmers in Iowa's alternative agriculture movement seeks to address how these women understand the relationship between their gender and their work. The majority of the women interviewed feel that their gender influences their general farming perspective, but significantly fewer believe their gender affects their approach to farm sustainability. Interviewees pointed to women's problem-solving skills, concerns with health and family, and intuitive relationships to the earth as ways in which their gender impacts their general farming perspective. Interviewees were more likely to indicate their education, coworkers, or participation in farm organizations as influential in shaping their farm's sustainability. In distinguishing between these two areas, women farmers selectively engage and reproduce culturally gendered traits when positioning themselves within alternative agriculture.

Civil War and the Devastation of Syria’s Food System

After decades of being seen as "farm wives," an increasing number of women in American agriculture are actively farming and claiming the "farmer" identity. Previous research has demonstrated that women farmers face unique challenges and that women in the alternative agriculture movement value different elements of agricultural work than their male counterparts. This ethnographic study of 11 women farmers in Iowa's alternative agriculture movement seeks to address how these women understand the relationship between their gender and their work. The majority of the women interviewed feel that their gender influences their general farming perspective, but significantly fewer believe their gender affects their approach to farm sustainability. Interviewees pointed to women's problem-solving skills, concerns with health and family, and intuitive relationships to the earth as ways in which their gender impacts their general farming perspective. Interviewees were more likely to indicate their education, coworkers, or participation in farm organizations as influential in shaping their farm's sustainability. In distinguishing between these two areas, women farmers selectively engage and reproduce culturally gendered traits when positioning themselves within alternative agriculture.

The influence of indirect exposure to chlorine pesticides on nuclear anomalies in exfoliated buccal cells

Background: The number of micronuclei (MNi) and other nuclear anomalies (NA) were studied in exfoliated buccal cells of healthy parturient women from two agricultural regions of Armenia. Methods: The women were farmer wives and were indirectly exposed to chlorine pesticides because the residues of DDE and DDE were found in their breast milk and blood. As a control were studied healthy parturient women who were not exposed to pesticides living in the capital of Armenia, Yerevan. No traces of pesticides were found in biological fluids of these women. Exfoliated buccal cells were obtained from both cheeks, washed with physiological saline, then fixed with 80% methanol on slides, stained with Feulgen reaction and counterstained with Fast Green. From each study participant 2000 differentiated cells were analyzed. All nuclear anomalies and basal cells were analyzed under bright field and fluorescent microscope. Results: It has been shown that the frequencies of all types of nuclear anomalies were not increased significantly in indirectly exposed women. Indirect exposure to chlorine pesticides with presence of their residues in breast milk did not change the level of any nuclear anomaly in exfoliated buccal mucosa cells. Conclusion: Although the differences compared to the control do not reach statistical significance, the results show that further investigations in this area are certainly warranted with increased number of participants and more detailed biochemical analyses of the study participants.

Celebrity gods: new religions, media, and authority in occupied Japan

Celebrity Gods explores interaction of new religions and media in postwar Japan. It focuses on leaders and founders (kyoso) of Jiu and Tensho Kotai Jingu Kyo, two new religions of Japan's immediate postwar period that received substantial press attention. Jiu was linked to popular prewar group Omotokyo, and its activities were based on millennial visions of its leader, a woman called Jikoson. When Jiu attracted legendary sumo champion Futabayama to its cause, Jikoson and her activities became a widely-covered cause celebre in press. Tensho Kotai Jingu Kyo (labeled odoru shukyo, the dancing religion, by press) was led by a farmer's wife, Kitamura Sayo. Her uncompromising vision and actions toward creating a new society-one that was far removed from what she described as maggot world of postwar Japan-drew harsh and often mocking criticism from print media. Looking back for precursors to postwar relationship of new religions and media, Benjamin Dorman explores significant role that Japanese media traditionally played in defining appropriate and acceptable social behavior, acting at times as mouthpieces for government and religious authorities. Using cases of Renmonkyo in Meiji era and Omotokyo in Taisho and Showa eras, Dorman shows how accumulated images of new religions in pre-1945 Japan became absorbed into those of immediate postwar period. Given lack of formal religious education in Japan, media played an important role in transmitting notions of acceptable behavior to public. He goes on to characterize leaders of these groups as celebrity gods, demonstrating that media, which were generally untrained in religious history or ideas, chose to fashion them as celebrities whose antics deserved derision. While prewar media had presented other kyoso as antithesis of decent, moral citizens who stood in opposition to aims of state, postwar media reports presented them primarily as unfit for democratic society.Celebrity Gods delves into an under-studied era of religious history: Allied Occupation and postwar period up to early 1950s. It is an important interdisciplinary work that considers relations between Japanese and Occupation bureaucracies and groups in question, and uses primary source documents from Occupation archives and interviews with media workers and members of religious groups. For observers of postwar Japan, this research provides a roadmap to help understand issues relating to Aum Shinrikyo affair of 1990s.

Sustainable This, Sustainable That: New Materialisms, Posthumanism, and Unknown Futures

mornings in the unknown future. Who shall repair this now. And how the futuretakes shapetoo quickly. The permanent is ebbing. Is leaving—Jorie Graham, “Sea Change”Conserving This, Conserving ThatJust a few lines from jorie graham's poem “sea change” evoke anxiety about unpredictable futures that arrive too soon, in need of repair. The abrupt departure of a sense of permanence may provoke the desire to arrest change, to shore up solidity, to make things, systems, standards of living “sustainable.” Having worked in the environmental humanities and in science studies for the last decade and having served as the academic cochair of the University Sustainability Committee at the University of Texas, Arlington, for several years, I have been struck by how the discourse of sustainability at the turn of the twenty-first century in the United States echoes the discourse of conservation at the turn of the twentieth century, especially in its tendency to render the lively world a storehouse of supplies for the elite. Gifford Pinchot, Theodore Roosevelt's head of forestry, defined forests as “manufacturing plants for wood,” epitomizing the utilitarianism of the conservation movement of the Progressive era, which saw nature as a resource for human use. By the early twentieth century Pinchot's deadening conception of nature jostled with other ideas, such as those of aesthetic conservation and the fledgling science of ecology. Pinchot was joined by the Progressive women conservationists, who claimed, as part of the broader “municipal housekeeping” movement, that women had special domestic talents for conservation, such as “turning yesterday's roast into tomorrow's hash.” Many Progressive women conservationists not only bolstered traditional gender roles but also wove classism and racism into their conservation mission, as conservation became bound up with conserving their own privileges. The anthropocentrism of the Progressive women conservationists is notable. As a participant in the First National Conservation Congress stated in 1909, “Why do we care about forests and streams? Because of the children who are to be naked and bare and poor without them in the years to come unless you men of this great conservation work do well your work.” During their conventions the discourse of conservation was playfully and not so playfully extended to myriad causes, including conserving food, conserving the home, conserving morals, conserving “true womanliness,” conserving “the race,” conserving “the farmer's wife,” and conserving time by omitting a speech (Alaimo,Undomesticated Ground63–70).

Working the land: the stories of ranch and farm women in the modern American West

Helen Tiegs didn't take to driving a tractor when she became a farmer's wife, but after fifty years she considers herself the hub of the family operation. Lila Hill taught piano, then ultimately took a job off the farm to augment the family income during a period of rising costs. From Montana's cattle pastures to New Mexico's sagebrush mesas, women on today's ranches and farms have played a crucial role in a way of life that is slowly disappearing from the western landscape. Recalling her own family-farm ties, Sandra Schackel set out to learn how these women's lives have changed over the second half of the twentieth century. In Working the Land, she collects oral histories from more than forty women in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, New Mexico, Oregon, and Texas recalling their experiences as ranchers and farmers in a modernizing West. Through this diverse group of women-white and Hispanic, rich and poor, ranging in age from 24 to 83 we gain a new perspective on their ties to the land. Although western ranch and farm women have often been portrayed as secondary figures who devoted themselves to housekeeping in support of their husbands' labors, Schackel's interviews reveal that these women have had a much more active role in defining what we know as the modern American West. As Schackel listened to their stories, she found several currents running through their recollections, such as the satisfaction found in living the rural lifestyle and the flexibility of gender roles. She also learned how resourceful women developed new ways to make their farms work by including tourism, summer camps, and bed-and-breakfast operations and how many have become activists for land-based issues. And while some like Lila made the difficult decision to work off the farm, such sacrifices have enabled families to hold onto their beloved land. Rich with memory and insight into what makes America's family farms and ranches tick, Working the Land provides a deeper understanding of the West's development over the last fifty years along with new perspectives on shifting attitudes toward women in the workforce. It is both a long-overdue documentation of the lives of hard-working farm women and a celebration of their contributions to a truly American way of life.

Eating Potato Salad On The Lawn Of The Damned

The very first Sunday that summer, I found out Zimmie wanted us to go to church with her. I moaned, kicked the stairwell. Kitty in the mirror threw a match on my funeral pyre, telling me Grandpa's coming with us. I moaned, flew back and forth in not-quite-circles. Grandpa usually just dropped Zimmie off at church, then cruised for an hour along right-handed black top lanes cleaving miles of gossiping cornfields. Although he was old and a smoker (living on borrowed time). But this Sunday he was going to put on a suit and come along; a terrible tragedy Zimmie couldn't drive. Kitty posed at the hall tree, its greeny mirror diseased by time. She raised one foot, then the other, trying on angles. It mattered: yesterday she'd broken in new flats, wore them all day around the farmhouse with a pair of Grandpa's red hunting socks. Said: I think after, we're going to visit Claudette. I moaned and flew, my hair a wild blonde flame throwing sparks across 122 the foyer. Church was all starch and lace, moist heat, moist sounds, programs adorned with doe-eyed Jesus fanning powdered-sugar faces slowly dissolving under delectable hats. Our grandmother Zimmie beamed and nodded all through the flydroning service. God was helium to Zimmie. Pumped her up every Sunday. She was light and happy most of the time anyway, although I have caught her, unawares, looking sucked up and airless, but I never let on; Zimmie rarely showed her hurts to the world. Basted and glazed her pain with happiness. Faked her way through life when she had to: fluent in bilingual body language. Sometimes hard to imagine she'd come out of a daredevil woman who'd stowed away from Ireland to America, ending up a suffragette, newspaper journalist, farm wife. Grandpa was always saying that only stupid people were happy all the time. Which makes you, Moms, as he called Zimmie, one of the happiest people I know. And she'd peal with laughter. Although I knew her hurt burned under her lovely skin. I'd stand where Grandpa couldn't see me and put a whammy on him, blade of my hand between my eyes. A neat trick I learned from my twin brother. He and I had been amputated that summer. It was our turn, we girls, to be farmed out, get sick on Black Cows, play Monopoly until we went blind or

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.

More than a Farmer's Wife: Voices of American Farm Women, 1910–1960

Review of: More Than a Farmer's Wife: Voices of American Farm Women, 1910–1960, by Amy Mattson Lauters.

Bright Epoch: Women and Coeducation in the American West by Andrea G. Radke-Moss

 OHQ vol. 111, no. 1 federal legal circles. The thousands of newly appointed anti-liquor agents were, by some accident of legislative procedure, excluded from normal civil service rules. Washington Senator Wesley Jones — a figure of venerable seniority regularly referred to, in his own time and in this book,as“the Senator”— advocated prohibition while supping at the qualificationsbe -damned patronage trough.Thomas Revelle, his hand-picked U.S.Attorney on Puget Sound, was a former preacher turned minimally competent real estate lawyer. Roy Lyle, the regional prohibition director,secured recognition among F.B.I. investigators as “practically a mental moron.” Enforcement chief William Whitney, a previously disgraced local politico, manufactured evidence and manipulated witnesses . Protected from removal by Senator Jones,this hapless trio failed miserably in their assigned task,recording a long-term conviction rate of barely 20 percent. Ironically, Revelle, Lyle, and Whitney did manage to send Olmstead to federal prison. The much ballyhooed “Whispering Wires Case”was tried in Seattle federal court in 1926. With no credible witnesses willing to testify,the prosecution relied on wiretaps, presented in the form of a superficially impressive volume of extracts. The government, the judge, and the jury chose to ignore the inconvenient fact that the tapping of telephone conversations was forbidden by Washington state law.A legion of critics, among them Louis Brandeis, the New York Times, and J. Edgar Hoover, condemned the practice.In 1928,however,the U.S.Supreme Court, in a five-four ruling crafted by William Howard Taft, upheld Olmstead’s conviction and established wire­ tapping as a legally proper tool of justice. Metcalfe might usefully have expanded on the legal issues raised by a Seattle bootlegger’s trial. He would have produced, however, a less entertaining book.The author writes with style, in one instance succinctly describing Olmstead associate and longtime federal snitchA.I.Hubbard as “a bulky misshapen lad” who “entered puberty suddenly and in a matter of months took on the features of a man of forty”(p. 99). Sadly, Philip Metcalfe passed away shortly after completing the manuscript of Whispering Wires. The volume at hand strongly suggests that he would have become a considerable figure in the non-fiction literature of the Pacific Northwest. Robert E. Ficken Issaquah, Washington Bright Epoch: Women and Coeducation in the American West by Andrea G. Radke-Moss University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 2008. Illustrations, photographs, tables, notes, bibliography, index. 368 pages. $45.00 cloth. The Morrill Act of 1862 created land-grant colleges in the West and Midwest that were, according to Andrea Radke-Moss, “among the first public institutions in the world to practice coeducation” (p. 1). As the title Bright Epoch suggests, Radke-Moss, Assistant Professor at Brigham Young University-Idaho, seeks to highlight the successes of women from the 1860s to the First World War in four coeducational land-grant colleges: Iowa Agricultural College in Ames; Oregon Agricultural College in Corvallis; the University of Nebraska, Lincoln ; and Utah Agricultural College in Logan. Building successfully on Gail Bederman’s ideas about women’s use of gendered space at the Chicago World’s Fair in Manliness and Civilization, Radke-Moss asserts that “women students succeeded in negotiating new spaces of gendered inclusion and equality at landgrant colleges” (p. 2). Bright Epoch traces women’s experiences in these four coeducational colleges with thematic chapters on the social and spatial aspects of campus life, literary societies, coursework,  Reviews sports,militarydrill,andwomen’sparticipation in the movement for suffrage and equal rights. Administrators expected women students to be “campus housekeepers” and to prepare to be farm wives, but women established their own priorities in coursework, campus activities, and post-graduate careers. One of the main strengths of the book is Radke-Moss’s extensive primary source research at the campus level. She investigates the publications of literary societies,charts changes in course catalogs,and draws on rich materials in campus newspapers, alumni materials, photographs, cartoons, and student memoirs and diaries. In the midst of amassing the details of many women’s experiences , she also takes time to address some lives in more detail, including the budding writer Willa Cather at Nebraska and future suffrage leader Carrie Chapman (Catt) at...

Bright epoch: women and coeducation in the American West

List of Illustrations List of Tables and Graphs Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Making a Welcome for Women Students: Discourse of Coeducational Inclusion by Administrators and Students 2. Place of Women Students: Reading the Language and Practices of Gender Separation 3. Early Practice of Coeducation: Literary Societies as Laboratories for Separation and Inclusion 4. Women Students' Sociality: Building Relationships with Men and Women 5. Women's Course Work: Farm Wives, Finished Ladies, or Functioning Scientists? 6. Under the Gaze: Women's Physical Activity and Sport at Land-Grant Colleges 7. The American Eagle in Bloomers: Student-Soldieresses and Women's Military Activity 8. Challenging Political Separation: Women's Rights Activism at Land-Grant Colleges and Universities Conclusion: Bright Epoch: When the Fair Daughters Joined the Ranks Notes Bibliography Index

The Sedgwicks in Love: Courtship, Engagement, and Marriage in the Early Republic , and: “Circumstances are destiny”: An Antebellum Woman’s Struggle to Define Sphere (review)

The Sedgwicks in Love: Courtship, Engagement, and Marriage in Early Republic. By Timothy Kenslea. (Boston: Northeastern University Press, University Press of New England, 2006. Pp. xi, 269. Cloth, $29.95; Paper, $19.95.)Circumstances are destiny: An Antebellum Woman's Struggle to Define Sphere. By Tina Stewart Brakebill. (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2006. Pp. xx, 255. Cloth, $34.95.)Reviewed by Linzy Brekke-AloiseOn surface, these paired books appear to have little in common. Timothy Kenslea examines marriage and courtship among descendants of Federalist scion Theodore Sedgwick of western Massachusetts, drawing on their voluminous, multigenerational correspondence to reveal heart- wrenching story of mating and marrying in a period when ideals and expectations of married life were undergoing extraordinary transformation. Tina Stewart Brakebill, by contrast, focuses on singular struggles of Celestia Rice Colby, a frustrated and unhappy farm woman from Western Reserve of Ohio from 1827 to 1900. Yet Sedgwick children's romantic yearning for companionship and mutual from their spouses would have drawn a knowing and bitter laugh from Colby, whose marriage in 1848 was lifeless and unsatisfying virtually from start. The heady years of early national period nurtured great expectations for a post-Revolutionary shift from patriarchai families to more companionate and egalitarian ones, but interior lives exposed by Kenslea and Brakebill show that, like so many revolutionary hopes, this was often a dream deferred. Despite significant differences between subjects and themes under analysis - a large, well-to-do New England family's conception of marriage and a midwestern rural farm wife's frustrated ambitions - both authors strive to fulfill central goal of good microhistory: to draw from singular lives an allegory for broader issues affecting culture as a whole.1 Kenslea's engaging and richly researched The Sedgwicks in Love and Brakebill's narrow and awkwardly presented Circumstances are destiny both struggle with this charge. In process, they highlight enduring promises and perils of microhistorical and biographical approaches.Kenslea advances a clear and focused argument from outset: After American Revolution, within some limits, young people were expected to choose [their partners] on basis of affection (36). This point echoes a larger body of scholarship about decline of patriarchal family patterns and rise of romantic ideal advanced by Carole Shammas, Jan Lewis, Anya Jabour, and others. Yet Kenslea makes it clear that especially in affluent families, parents stubbornly maintained colonial pattern of exerting power and influence over their children's marital decisions. In case of Eliza and Frances Sedgwick, their father valued of business, men with sound material prospects (41) over their own romantic choices and went out of his way to select alternative candidates who met these criteria for his daughters. They both yielded, though not without a fight. Despite its ostensible success, Pere Sedgwick's manipulation revealed just how out of step he was with early republic culture, a culture that lauded romantic feeling and love as natural, and that considered the calculations of head (44) as unnatural and corrupt. The turbulent boom-and-bust cycles of economy of early nineteenth century proved just how disastrous choosing class interests over individual could be. Frances's husband Ebenezer Watson, selected specifically for his supposed financial prowess, went broke and failed in several speculative business ventures. Watson violently abused his wife throughout marriage, with Sedgwick clan nearly powerless to stop it. It is impossible to know whether Frances's life would have turned out differently if she had been able to marry man of her choice, but it is hard to imagine it turning out worse. …

Diffusion of a social norm: tracing the emergence of the housewife in the Netherlands, 1812–19221

The emergence of the housewife in the Netherlands over the period 1812–1922 was strongly influenced by the social norm that women should withdraw from the labour market on the eve of marriage. Adherence to this norm is most clearly reflected in the emergence of the housewife among the lower classes, especially at the close of the nineteenth century among wives of farmers. Women in urban municipalities, however, set the norm far earlier and differences across social classes were significantly greater in towns than in rural areas. Paradoxically, the rise of the housewife did not change work pressures for lower‐class women.

Feed Sack Fashion in Rural America: A Reflection of Culture

The recycling of cotton feed sacks 1 into apparel and household items was a common practice across rural America during the first half of the twentieth century. This creative recycling of a utilitarian fabric has, until recently, been omitted from histories of American fashion because the practice centered on fabric use rather than new garment styles, and because the farm wife of rural America was not considered to be a source of fashion inspiration. As an element of material culture, the clothing and clothing practices of rural populations reflect the life and times of the era to the same extent as that of the general population. However, it is the activities of these farm wives, clothing their families in feed sacks, that offer a view of life that was unique to rural communities during this time period. This project collected oral histories of individuals who shared memories of using feed sacks during the 1930s through the 1950s. The memories not only confirmed the wide spread use of feed sacks for clothing and house hold goods, but provided a glimpse of everyday life in rural America during this time period.

"The Answer to the Auxiliary Syndrome": Women Involved in Farm Economics (WIFE) and Separate Organizing Strategies for Farm Women, 1976–1985

"The Answer to the Auxiliary Syndrome":Women Involved in Farm Economics (WIFE) and Separate Organizing Strategies for Farm Women, 1976–1985 Jenny Barker Devine (bio) On the evening of 13 December 1976, more than seventy farm and ranch women from three states converged on the Fort Sidney Motor Hotel in the small panhandle city of Sidney, Nebraska. A short "squib" in the newspaper invited any interested person to join nine farm women from Cheyenne County, Nebraska to discuss recent downturns in agriculture, and to initiate a letter-writing campaign to President-elect Jimmy Carter. For Marilyn "Mickey" Spiker, one of the nine women from Cheyenne County, the response was overwhelming. The women had no political experience and no clearly defined mission aside from the letter-writing campaign. That evening, however, Spiker listened to them vent their "frustrations, and all of this resentment . . . They were on their feet, they were talking, and it made the meeting easy. We didn't have agenda one, but boy, we had a meeting." They chose a name, Women in Farm Economics, or WIFE, establishing a new organization for women to lobby state and federal officials on behalf of farm families.1 Unlike established, male-dominated farm organizations that placed women in auxiliaries or supportive roles, WIFE was among dozens of grassroots groups to emerge in the 1970s that cultivated female authority on agricultural issues and placed women directly in the public realm of state and federal politics. In its early stages of development, between 1977 and 1982, members carefully navigated the masculine worlds of agriculture and politics and sought to refine a unique, public voice for farm women in politics. Women who joined WIFE were often already active in community groups and agricultural associations, but believed them to be politically ineffective, especially women's auxiliaries within male-led organizations. Members utilized strategies from second-wave feminisms, but rather than portray WIFE as an affront to patriarchy, they rejected "women's lib" as being incompatible with their cooperative work relationships with men. WIFE did not intend to "remake" rural America, or protest women's conditions [End Page 117] in rural communities, but rather to maintain viable, efficient family farms. As they set out to lobby politicians, educate the public, and raise awareness of economic hardship, their rhetoric celebrated farming and ranching as male occupations and presented WIFE as a group of educated, politically moderate "farm wives." Theirs was a "politics of dependence" that strengthened women's relationships with one another by emphasizing their sense of place and common rural experience. At the same time, women believed they needed to acknowledge their dependence upon men for access to land and a livelihood, and on familiar rural communities for resources and social relationships. They rooted their activism in agrarian ideals that upheld farmers as the hard-working, independent purveyors of American democracy, and family farms as the ideal mode of production. In doing this, members of WIFE gained access to state and federal governments, and became part of a growing movement to create new spaces for women in agriculture by asserting women's vital roles as agricultural producers.2 By the mid-1970s, farm and ranch women organized across the country in order to address increasingly unstable and unpredictable economic conditions. After years of growth, commodity prices fell dramatically while rising fuel prices and stagflation led to increased costs of agricultural production. This was further exacerbated by trends in rural depopulation, the subsequent loss of political power, and the "get big or get out" mentality that encouraged farmers to either invest in more land and equipment or leave farming all together. Agricultural leaders feared that rural depopulation created a power vacuum for farmers in Washington, DC, where sound farm policies and financial resources for price supports lost out to the interests of urban consumers and industrialists. In this same period, new household and agricultural technologies eased the burdens of cultivation and housekeeping, farm and ranch women experienced a significant readjustment in their work roles. Many women shifted their work to encompass activities such as bookkeeping, farm management, running errands, wage-earning jobs off the farm, and even political activity. For members of WIFE, then, gaining direct access to...

“In the Humble Fashion of a Scripture Woman”: The Bible as Besieging Tool in Freeman's “The Revolt of ‘Mother’”

Much bas been written about Sarah Penn, rural, New England heroine of Mary E. Wilkins story, Revolt of 'Mother' (1891). Sarah-who has been waiting forty years for new house her husband, Adoniram, promised her--one observes a group of men digging a foundation for a new barn on very spot where long-promised house was to have been constructed. When she confronts her husband, demanding to know why he is building a barn for which he obviously has no real need instead of a new house to replace their inadequate dwelling, refuses to speak, and building project continues. When barn is almost finished, leaves on business, and Sarah takes advantage of opportunity, moving her two children and all of family's belongings into newly constructed barn. The story concludes with Adoniram's return and capitulation: he tearfully agrees to transform new barn into new home he promised to build so long ago. In end, Freeman writes, Adoniram was like a fortress whose walls had no active resistance, and went down instant right besieging tools were (468). In particular, much has been written about those besieging tools, about why and how this meek, dutiful farm wife won battle for barn. Although several critics have shed important light on strategies both Sarah Penn and Freeman herself employ in their struggle against patriarchy, most have ignored religious underpinnings of revolt and biblical tools used to besiege and, at last, to topple walls of patriarchal fortress. As Elrod has noted, readers have failed for most part to see connection between defiance of [Freeman's] strong female characters and their identification with New England religion. Rather, Puritanism is frequently understood as an entirely malicious force always and simply at odds with positive change (229). Elrod writes that Freeman's work reveals her sense of both liberatory possibilities and severe restrictions of her New England religious (226) and that Freeman's heroic women's boldest moments occur, fairly consistently, in context of religious meaning of defiance within her own tradition; it is this tradition they chafe against, this tradition they derive meaning (228). generous use of Bible and her sense of liberatory possibilities of her religious tradition, including the possibility of more expansive views of gender roles (Elrod 228), place her squarely in tradition of domestic writers of her day. Ann-Janine Morey points out that the domestic writers often were critical of workings of religious institutions and round Bible to be their ally against official interpretations. These women encountered scriptures as uniquely applicable to their situation of domestic and cultural confinement (Morey 744), and their work represents a monumental effort to reorganize culture from woman's point of view (Tompkins 124). Of course, culture these writers were trying to reorganize was steeped in biblical language. In order to address that culture, domestic writers registered impact of Bible, and they assumed an audience that was familiar with scripture and doctrines derived from scripture by church (Morey 744). stories rarely contain biblical quotations (Morey 753), but Revolt of 'Mother' relies upon numerous allusions that her biblically literate audience would have noticed immediately. For example, Michael Tritt argues that Freeman's choice of names Sarah and ... indicates a subtle subversion of presumed gender stereotypes prevalent in New England of day (209). Tritt points out that both Sarah of Genesis and Sarah Penn are women of considerable force who exert powerful influence over their husbands and over succeeding generations (209). They are also women of great patience. …

Hypospadias--genetics, epidemiology and other possible aetiological influences.

Questionnaires relating to 515 children with hypospadias were evaluated in respect of course of pregnancy, family history and epidemiology. The domiciles were more often in rural areas as compared to the average population in South Bavaria. A seasonal trend favouring the six months' period December to May could be observed. Children with hypospadias especially of higher degree were more often preterm and more frequently firstborn. 59 children (11.5%) had associated malformations particularly of the urogenital tract. Mothers of children with high-degree hypospadias were remarkably young and conspicuously often wives of farmers. There was a clear correlation between the degree of hypospadias and threatened abortion, drugs, sexhormones and other disturbances during early pregnancy. The trend to lower age classes could be also observed in fathers. The incidence of hypospadias in fathers was 5-fold and in brothers 30-fold above average. The risk of recurrence was 1.4% if the father had a hypospadia and 6% if a brother had hypospadias. The incidence of other malformations did not seem to be enhanced in relatives.

The Vacant Chair on the Farm: Soldier Husbands, Farm Wives, and the Iowa Home Front, 1861–1865

The Vacant Chair on the Farm: Soldier Husbands, Farm Wives, and the Iowa Home Front, 1861–1865

Food on the Farm: One Kansas Farm Woman's Cooking

ABSTRACT Wilma Counts kept two manuscript cookbooks during her life that reflect at least part of her cooking style; the rest of her cooking style is merely oral history. She was an atypical farm wife in that she had a college education. In many other aspects Wilma was not so unusual for her time; thus, her cooking practices serve as a valuable case study for researchers of twentieth-century food history. This paper tries to capture what she cooked as reflected in her cookbooks and as it changed over the years.