Farm Women, Letters to the Editor, and the Limits of Autobiography Theory

In the past twenty years the concerted study of women's autobiography has resulted in expanded recognition of varied forms of women's life writing as well as a more nuanced theorization of potential gender differentials and their relationship to the autobiographical act. New emphases on the importance of relational identities for women—as opposed to the politics of individualism upon which traditional (masculinist) conceptions of autobiography are premised—have suggested that women's personal narratives may be based in a group, rather than a singular, consciousness, while an awareness of the ways that gender informs genre has propelled the recovery of life writing formats, such as diaries and letters, that have been frequently undertaken by women, who have been pressured historically to weigh the desire for narrative authority against, for example, cultural imperatives for female modesty. Scholarly interest in the quotidian, rather than the exceptional, and in the shaping influences of class formation have also energized the field, dislodging presumptions that the autobiographical act is necessarily a literary enterprise and revising our understanding of the types of women who wrote personal narratives, as well as the contexts within which such narratives have been or might be produced.¹

Collectively these developments allow for serious consideration of a particular form of self-narrative that assumed prominence with the proliferation of popular women's magazines in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the letter to the editor. In such letters, women weighed in on a variety of social issues and, more to the point, shared their personal experiences within a discursive context that not only permitted, but actively encouraged, public revelations concerning what previously had been viewed as the private domain of home and family. As Kathryn Shevelow has argued in her discussion of eighteenth century periodicals, it is precisely this emphasis on personal, rather than broadly societal, issues that first (re)defined this type of magazine participation as feminine, given that letters to the editor were not exclusive to women (see especially chapter 3). But it was the popular women's magazines of the 1880s and 1890s that most fully capitalized on "women's" topics, and on audience participation, by wholly re-conceptualizing the relations between public and private discourse, couching public discussions of domestic issues within a tone of conspiratorial collectivity. For instance, Edward Bok, the influential publisher of Ladies' Home Journal, developed the "survey technique," through which he asked readers to respond to particular questions and then published the results; his first successful column, begun in 1889 and entitled "Side Talks with Girls," hinged on an illusion of intimacy between editor and reader(s) buttressed by his adoption of the female pseudonym "Ruth Ashmore" (Scanlon 50-51). Thus the implied, and sometimes explicit, "we" of popular magazines such as Ladies' Home Journal and Good Housekeeping—that is, the cultivated notion that editors and readers constituted a community wherein, among other things, personal problems could be aired—curiously mimicked the dynamics of private interaction within a highly visible medium. And as scholars of popular culture have shown, these magazines both enabled and were shaped by the developing discourses of advertising, which frequently traced an opposite trajectory involving an authoritative, prescriptive voice intruding into the sanctity of bathrooms, bedrooms, and closets.²

The new form of the women's magazine thus foregrounded a presumed barrier between privacy and publicity while also making that barrier more permeable. One result was a drastic consolidation and heightening of the dynamic that had long made fascination with the narrated details of others' lives a marketable commodity.³ Yet the tone of the new magazines, carefully attenuated to confirm readers' sense of a group identity, framed the reading and writing of personal material in terms of supportiveness rather than prurience. Furthermore, they grafted such sharing onto an emerging consumer culture that was especially pitched to women,⁴ and that the magazines, as both purchased artifacts and carriers of advertising, embodied. These letters to the editor thus constituted an autobiographical gesture that was modern indeed: they re-inscribed private, "female," realms while also...