The Midwest Farmers Daughter: In Search of an American Icon

Chapter Fourteen: Her Daughter Has a Dynamo

255 Many Moons—blanche and blue, gibbous and full, harvest and rose—have waxed and waned since first I began my search for the Midwest farmer’s daughter. And in that time I have seen more clearly how what an American icon chose and where she chose it have shaped a nation’s destiny. When the farmer’s daughter left her family’s green acres in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, she served as the vehicle by which the farm met the city en masse, and ushered in the era of the time clock and paycheck for rural women. As agricultural suffragist and farmerette in World War I, she planted seeds for the back-to-the-land movements that followed; when during World War II she left home to join the Rosie the Riveter at work in bustling East and West Coast shipyards and factories, she commenced the great youth outmigration from aging Midwest farm states that today continues apace. In leaving the farm in the 1960s and 1970s, Chapter FOURTEEN HER DAUGHTER HAS A DYNAMO CHAPTER FOURTEEN 256 she and her fellow soil sisters put the lessons of the Sexual Revolution to the test, rejecting long-grounded patriarchies for the egalitarian freedoms of the city. Today the granddaughter of Rosie the Riveter readies herself to begin another back-to-the-land revolution. From the cities she serves as a leader in urban and sustainable agriculture; from the farm, she stands to be a next-generation ag-vocate, consultant, or farm manager. In 1915 Martha Foote Crow sensed a similar historical flux, one wherein the cultural currency of the country girl seemed to be coming full circle. “The mother of to-day is a bridge between two eras,” Crow wrote. “Her mother had a wooden spoon and a skillet; her daughter has a dynamo.” The mother of the 1910s, noted Crow, might still claim “that her mother’s ways are good enough for her; but the daughter—as between the wooden spoon and the motor, what will she be likely to choose?” Crow contemporary and fellow farm-daughter academic Mary Meek Atkeson likewise envisioned the moment as a fulcrum promising exceptional potential energy. She wrote metaphorically of the peculiar tensions facing the era’s farmvested woman, allegorizing their plight as living between two very different neighbors. “On one side of her may live a family of the old days, with ideas and living conditions little removed from those of the early settlers. . . . On the other side may live a family of wealthy and cultured city people, who maintain a country home for health or pleasure. Yet somehow under these difficult conditions the woman on the farm must evolve . . . not too much like the one nor too much like the other.” In the century following Crow’s and Atkeson’s distillation of the farm girl esprit de corps, the history of the farmer’s daughter eschewed straight lines in favor of poignant circumferences. “Strangely enough, the same influence that took the industrial woman out of the home is to conduct her back again,” Crow prophesied. “It will be a regenerated home, one in which the regenerated woman will be able to live.” In digital age trends toward do-it-yourself handicrafts, backyard gardens, and work-from-home telecommutes , the prescience of Crow’s statement rings truer now than ever. “Every generation,” wrote critic Lewis Mumford, “revolts against its father and makes friends with its grandfathers.” Surely the same maxim might apply to Google-era agrarian daughters as they weigh the respective cultural and vocational legacies of their mothers and grandmothers. 257 HER DAUGHTER HAS A DYNAMO After years on the trail of an American icon, a journey that took me from the first homestead in Nebraska, to that farm-girl capital of the Dakotas , Fargo, to the heart of the Chicago Loop, and back again to the farmdaughter capital of America, Iowa, a chorus of Midwest farm daughters and granddaughters past, present, and future, still rings in my ears. For every moment en route I found myself disheartened with my generation ’s willingness to mourn the farm heritage they forfeited while refusing to vote with their feet to reclaim it, I experienced moments of near certainty that the tide is indeed turning, that a nation’s daughters—and sons—have once again, two generations after the back-to-the-land movement, trained their sights on America’s...