The Midwest Farmers Daughter: In Search of an American Icon

Chapter Thirteen: Farmerettes in the Farm City

239 Historically, the idea that the trail to America’s rural daughters wound its way through the Chicago Loop made intuitive, if not paradoxical, sense. Midwest country girl Jane Addams migrated here, after all, from the tiny farm village of Cedarville, Illinois, in 1891, a decade or so after penning her junior class oration, entitled “Bread Givers,” at Rockford Seminary. “But while on the one hand, as young women of the nineteenth century, we gladly claim . . . and proudly assert our independence,” a young Addams had declared from the lectern, “on the other hand we still retain the idea of womanhood—the Saxon lady whose mission it was to give bread unto her household. So we have planned to be bread-givers throughout our lives; believing in labor alone is happiness, and that the only true and honorable life is one filled with good works and honest toil.” After many months tracing both the routes and roots of Midwest rural daughters like Addams, I have come to the city once-upon-a-time kid milk Chapter THIRTEEN FARMERETTES IN THE FARM CITY CHAPTER THIRTEEN 240 wagon driver Carl Sandburg dubbed “hog butcherer for the world, tool maker, stacker of wheat,” a veritable hive whose “wicked” and “crooked” ways famously lured farm children to their doom or to their destiny. “And they tell me you are brutal,” Sandburg wrote in his 1916 poem “Chicago,” “and my reply is: On the faces of women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.” In the bustling cities of the Jazz Age Midwest, eager-to-blend immigrants of all kinds shed indigenous identities for the sake of cultural assimilation . As the melting pot heated up in 1915, Chicago’s own Martha Foote Crow reassured despairing farm girls that a rural upbringing, far from condemning them to mediocrity, might actually springboard them to eminence. An estimated 80 percent of the names found in Who’s Who in America, she insisted, had been reared as rural girls or boys. In fact, she reported, the “most valued names in philanthropy and literature” had emerged from the country rank and file, principal among them that “wise helper of all who suffer unjust conditions in city life, Jane Addams.” In 1924’s The Woman on the Farm, Mary Meek Atkeson echoed Crow, describing the farm-raised woman, even if her calling did take her to the city, as “the real lady—the ‘loaf-giver’” who pledged herself to “partnership with nature in real creative power.” Circa America’s entry into the World War I in 1917, Chicago was already well on its way to becoming the nation’s greatest farm commodity city, “the western outpost of a metropolitan economy centered in the great cities of Europe” as historian William Cronon puts it in Nature’s Metropolis . “Transmutation” was the foundational idea of the great agrarian city, he observes. “Whether one turned dried apples into nails, or salted hams into lumber, or bushels of wheat into bolts of printed cotton, the net effect was to link West with East, rural with urban, farm with factory.” The idea worked on a human scale, too, as cities in the hinterland began to supply their most precious human commodity—their farm daughters and sons—to the threshing floor of the city. “To make the best provisions for the transmission of produce is their office,” Margaret Fuller wrote of the industrious people of Chicago in 1843, “and the people who live there are such as are suited for this; active, complaisant, inventive, business people. There are no provisions for the student or idler.” 241 FARMERETTES IN THE FARM CITY From the very beginning the great agropolis astraddle the Chicago River sought symbols befitting its uniquely agrarian contribution, and more often than not those symbols relied on gender for their meaning. In 1885, six short years before Addams began her settlement house on Halsted Street, an unknown artist sculpted the allegoric figures of “Industry” and “Agriculture ” as two 5 and a half ton, granite-faced women in the plaza of what would become the Chicago Board of Trade building; later, John Bradley Storrs would cement the ag city’s reputation for gendered iconography by capping the building with a monolithic art deco statue of Ceres, the Roman goddess of grain. Even Addams found the need to feminize the city’s agricultural genius, her writings consistently tying women’s gift for food and...