Katherine Jellison - Entitled to power: farm women and technology, 1913-1963
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Entitled to power: farm women and technology, 1913-1963
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The advent of modern agribusiness irrevocably changed the patterns of life and labor on the American family farm. In Entitled to Power, Katherine Jellison examines midwestern farm womens unexpected response to new labor-saving devices. Federal farm policy at mid-century treated farm women as consumers, not producers. New technologies, as promoted by agricultural extension agents and by home appliance manufacturers, were expected to create separate spheres of work in the field and in the house. These innovations, however, enabled women to work as operators of farm machinery or independently in the rural community. Jellison finds that many women preferred their productive roles on and off the farm to the domestic ideal emphasized by contemporary prescriptive literature. A variety of visual images of farm women from advertisements and agricultural publications serve to contrast the publicized view of these women with the roles that they chose for themselves. The letters, interviews, and memoirs assembled by Jellison reclaim the many contributions women made to modernizing farm life.
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Entitled to Power : Farm Women and Technology, 1913-1963 Gender & American Culture
author
:
Jellison, Katherine.
publisher
:
University of North Carolina Press
isbn10 | asin
:
0807820881
print isbn13
:
9780807820889
ebook isbn13
:
9780807862278
language
:
English
subject
Women in agriculture--United States--History, Rural women--United States--History, Sociology, Rural--United States.
publication date
:
1993
lcc
:
HD6073.F32U65 1993eb
ddc
:
338.4/83/0973
subject
:
Women in agriculture--United States--History, Rural women--United States--History, Sociology, Rural--United States.
Page 1
1 To "Lessen Her Heavy Burdens": The Country Life Movement and the Smith-Lever Act
In many homes, life on the farm is a somewhat one-sided affair. Many times the spare money above living expenses is expended on costly machinery and farm implements to make the farmer's work lighter while little or nothing is done for home improvement and no provision made for the comfort and convenience of the women in the family.Kansas farm woman (1913)
When an anonymous Kansas farm woman made these remarks to the secretary of agriculture, nearly five years had passed since President Theodore Roosevelt's Commission on Country Life had first noted that the experience of many farm women bore little resemblance to the Jeffersonian ideal of personal independence and spiritual fulfillment on the farm.1 Instead, women often found hard work and frustration there, and much of their discontent lay in the knowledge that their work was undervalued and unnecessarily difficult. Under a gendered work system in which men were primarily responsible for performing cash-producing field work, women's labor in the farmhouse, vegetable garden, and poultry house was viewed as secondary. As the comments of this farm woman suggest, one indication of the subordinate status accorded farm women's labor was farm families' lack of capital investment in the equipment that women used. By 1913, technology existed that would ease farm women's labor, but most women did not yet possess the appropriate equipment. Farm women's dissatisfaction with their work lives was compounded by the fact that they had intimate contact with persons who did make use of modern equipmentmale family members. Farm women's discontent with existing gender hierarchies, therefore, readily entered into the Progressive Era debate on the modernization of American agriculture. In their comments to government officials and farm editors, women called for greater recognition of their labor and economic contribution, to be acknowledged
Page 2
by a fairer investment in the equipment they used to perform their labor.
In 1913, America was an increasingly urban society that nevertheless subscribed to what historian Richard Hofstadter referred to as the ''agrarian myth"the idea that life on the farm represented the ideal American experience. In the early twentieth century, many American leaders still believed that only in Thomas Jefferson's "nation of farmers" could the American virtues of independence and self-sufficiency thrive and prosper. Ignoring the reality that even in Jefferson's own time American farmers had been dependent upon commercial markets, twentieth-century adherents to the agrarian myth harkened back to a time of rural independence and self-fulfillment. At a time when the nation's native-born leadership worried about the influx of foreign immigrants into overcrowded, politically corrupt American cities, the vision of an ideal, rural American past was especially appealing. The idea that the federal government should be particularly concerned about the status of American agriculture and rural life was not new in the early twentieth century, but it took on a heightened sense of importance during this era of Progressive politics.2
Progressive reformers were concerned about improving the quality of rural life, believing that a stable rural society lay at the base of a successful America. They believed that a more efficient agriculture, employing fair and sound business principles, would benefit the nation's growing urban population. These reformers equated more efficient agriculture with cheaper food prices for the urban masses. They also hoped that by making farm life more prosperous and attractive for America's farm families, they could help stem the tide of continued rural-to-urban migration, which threatened to compound urban problems of unemployment and inadequate housing.3
With these concerns in mind, President Roosevelt appointed his Commission on Country Life to investigate the means by which Progressive goals might be met in America's countryside. In creating his commission, Roosevelt affirmed his belief in the agrarian myth and argued that America's greatness was "based on the well-being of the great farmer class for it is upon their welfare, material and moral, that the welfare of the rest of the nation ultimately rests."4
The seven-member commission presented its report to Roosevelt in January 1909. Ironically, the commission argued that one way to improve rural life was to make it more like urban life. The commission suggested that the citizens of rural America emulate urban dwellers by becoming more reliant on
Page 3
the use of modern technology, in the form of mechanized equipment to perform their daily labor and to communicate with the world beyond the farm. According to this view, adoption of steam-and gasoline-powered field equipment, gasoline-and electric-powered household appliances, telephones, and automobiles would lead to a more efficient, prosperous, and stable rural society.5
Commission members noted that farm women particularly considered their work to be unduly difficult and were generally less satisfied with farm life than were farm men. Arguing that "the success of country life depends in very large degree on the woman's part," the commission recommended that the mechanization of farm women's housework keep pace with that of men's field work and suggested that women would also benefit from improvements in rural roads and telephone communication. With such technological improvements, argued the commission, farm women would be more satisfied with farm life and would contribute to the prosperity and stability of life in the American countryside.6
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