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5 the test of time For more than three decades, the Division of Farm Population and Rural Life worked to bring a sociological perspective to changing national needs and helped build a broad knowledge base about rural life. From its first analyses of farm population, rural institutions, and locality groups, over the years the Division’s research grew to include extensive community studies and develop new tools for understanding the variations among rural areas. The researchers saw themselves first and foremost as sociologists seeking to better understand the whole of rural life and, in so doing, provide information needed for a better rural America. Women were never the sole focus of the Division’s research. Instead, it was in defining their object of study as the totality of rural life that women became embedded in some of the Division’s research as one of the facets needed to understand the rural social landscape. As only one part of the larger whole, this means that women were also never critically examined. Today our focus on women is deliberate. Women’s lives are being rescued from historical obscurity (e.g., Bernhard et al. 1994), and their diversity and social location are being explored (e.g., Sharpless 1999). Their views and experiences are used to reexamine the assumptions we make in our theoretical models and conceptualizations (e.g., Jones 2002). And the socially embedded nature of the research process itself is now examined for how it can contribute to women’s invisibility (e.g., S. Harding 1986; Folbre and Abel 1989). Contemporary insights and theoretical perspectives such as these offer new opportunities to return to the Division ’s body of work and visit the women living there. epilogue for the division The Division and its parent agency, the BAE, existed from 1919 to 1943. As the years passed, industrialized agriculture and separate spheres of work for women were increasingly being promoted. Despite the changing atmosphere surrounding it, the unit’s Progressive-era roots remained 66 hidden WindoWS, hidden LiveS strong.1 As Henry Taylor later reflected, the BAE saw itself as having a “larger task”—that of “laying the foundations of progress” (1954, 13). Even as the USDA increasingly focused on farmers, particularly commercial farmers, BAE chief Tolley defended his unit’s work, maintaining that “to keep abreast of the ... status of the agricultural situation and its people in this country” meant understanding the larger social conditions surrounding agriculture (U.S. Congress, House 1946, 239). It also meant looking beyond the needs of commercial farmers alone to examine issues ranging from tenants and rural poverty to communities.2 For Tolley , focusing on one group only meant ignoring the needs of others. “If economic democracy is to be anything more than a phrase to cover the selfish desires of any given class,” he advised, “it must mean that the welfare of each individual and class in the nation is in the long run best served by that type of policy which will best serve all individuals and all classes” (quoted in Kirkendall 1965, 28). The role the BAE had differs from today’s expectations for similar units in the federal government. As Bowers and Harrington put it in their review of Henry Taylor’s autobiography, the BAE “expected to influence policy, and its head reported directly to the secretary” (1995, 227). It felt that the government had a role to play—a kind of “assisted laissez faire” (Hardin 1946, 639). Central to this idea was the belief that not only were better conditions and resources needed, but, through research and education, solutions were possible. Appleby described the Bureau’s sense of purpose as focused on “more common learning, more advanced learning, dissemination of learning , coordination, and top-level policy guidance” (1954, 8). Indeed, Tolley made Robert Lynd’s 1939 book Knowledge for What? “required reading for everyone in the Bureau” (Kirkendall 1965, 31; 1966, 185). The fallout that included the Coahoma County reconnaissance study not only affected the Division and its research but also made it clear that views and expectations had changed and the BAE and the Division were not adhering to them.3 Using references to segregation and 1. Gilbert, for example, calls into question the “outsider” status of several key leaders in the New Deal (2000, 2001; Fitzgerald 2001). See also Gilbert and Baker (1997) and Gilbert and Howe (1991). David Hamilton tries to explain why the USDA contained contradictions such as this (1990). For more detail, see Jellison (2001). 2...

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