Opening Windows onto Hidden Lives: Women, Country Life, and Early Rural Sociological Research

Foreword

foreWord The social sciences tend to be ahistorical. Sociologists and others typically seek to explain generalizable social relations, theoretically invariant across time and space, as if the course of historical events matters little. We are especially blind to our own professional and intellectual histories, at best viewing “the past as prologue,” not as operative in our present. Social scientists, I believe, stand to learn a lot from historians about the specificities of stories of success and failure, political timing, and momentous choice points. Historians, for their part, tend toward the opposite dilemma. They are often caught up almost entirely by the particularities of the past, reluctant to use their hard-won knowledge to inform current policy or political decisions. Occasionally, though, a book comes along that is both sociological and historical, achieving the best that these two essential disciplines can offer the academy as well as the polity. Such a volume you now hold in your hands. This third book by Olaf Larson and Julie Zimmerman extends their already important contribution to the history and sociology of rural America. The two previous volumes definitively document, describe, and analyze the first unit of the federal government that was devoted to sociological research: the Division of Farm Population and Rural Life in the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), 1919–1953. Here in their third book, Zimmerman and Larson focus on the Division’s extensive research concerning rural women. And what a treasure trove of research it is. Yet it remains practically unknown to historians and sociologists alike—an ignorance that, at long last, this volume remedies. The subjects of Opening Windows onto Hidden Lives have been doubly underserved. First, until quite recently, rural women have been rendered invisible by historians and social scientists, not to mention politicians and policy makers. Their “hidden lives” lay buried under myths and prejudices, yet they formed the bedrock of rural society. Feminist scholars are now excavating and illuminating the experiences of rural women. But also hidden, secondly, has been the research conducted on, with, and about them by rural sociologists in the early and mid-twentieth century. While not without their own blinders and prejudices, as Zimmerman and Larson elucidate, the sociologists nonetheless attended more to rural women than did any other researchers in the United States. (The exception was home economists, whose turf battles with the Division are also recounted in the pages to follow.) But hidden no more! Zimmerman and Larson do us the great service of rescuing this valuable but neglected work from government archives and the lonely shelves of land grant university libraries. They even give us five original documents from the emergent years around World War I. I am particularly struck by the last reprint, Emily Hoag Sawtelle’s study of eight thousand farm women’s views on rural life in the early 1920s. After quoting Booker T. Washington and an “eminent American Indian scholar” as well as John and Abigail Adams, she presents women’s voices on their “partnership” with their husbands (a heterosexual representation , to be sure). Sawtelle writes: “We speak of the homestead and farmstead interchangeably because the farm includes the home and the home encompasses the farm.” Here she anticipates some widely touted theoretical discoveries about the family farm (merging production and consumption, household and business) of the so-called new rural sociology of the 1980s. Sawtelle also scooped the parallel “new” rural, or agricultural, social history in claiming the centrality of women in family farming. The notion of “rural holism” derives from the Progressive era, when U.S. sociology was emerging; the USDA established the sociological Division in 1919. The research unit sought an integrated approach to rural life, combining farm, agriculture, and community (in addition to culture, geography, and social psychology). Women were seen as one important part of the whole, compared to the new discipline of home economics, which tended to treat women apart. Team Zimmerman-Larson’s historical sociology traces the continuation of the Progressive, integrated view into the New Deal era and beyond. Like Sawtelle’s family-farm analysis, they forcefully illustrate how the Division’s call for a holistic approach to rural problems, particularly one that transcends merely the economic, rings a contemporary bell today. This book, then, provides a valuable resource for both historians and social scientists who want to learn about rural women in the early to mid-twentieth century. It also aims at rural sociologists who want to know more about their own professional and ideological past...