Consumers in the Country: Technology and Social Change in Rural America (review)

Consumers in the Country: Technology and Social Change in Rural America. By Ronald R. Kline. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Pp. xii+372. $39.95.

For years, sociologists and many historians have implored fellow scholars to stop accepting the notion of technological determinism and thus much of what we thought we knew about the process by which people have adopted new technologies. While such a mandate is intrinsically appealing and sensible, it has been much harder to attain than one might think. Because people eventually have accepted, sometimes enthusiastically, both the promise and the reality of new technologies, it is important to tell stories in which people resisted and rejected such technologies. Recently, this approach has characterized several strong studies of rural change, notably Hal Barron's Mixed Harvest: The Second Great Transformation in the Rural North, 1870- 1930 (1997) and Mary Neth's Preserving the Family Farm: Women, Community and the Foundations of Agribusiness in the Midwest, 1900-1940 (1995), both of which emphasize the strength and stability of rural traditions and relationships during periods of modernization and the forcefulness of rural communities in resisting and accommodating to new technologies.

Now Ronald Kline joins these scholars in arguing that, far from embracing new technologies with open arms, rural families often considered innovations with skepticism; slowly, many families adapted these technologies to fit into an existing rural social and economic structure that urbanites only dimly appreciated. Rural families may have eventually adopted new technologies, but it was on terms set down by the rural, rather than urban, context.

Kline's book examines the introduction of five technologies--the telephone, the automobile, household appliances and plumbing, radio, and electrification more generally--and tells his story in three parts. Part 1 locates the tension between urban technologies and their advocates and rural families and their desires, pointing out that urban and rural views on modernization were often at odds. This tension provides the background for Kline's discussions of each of the technologies. As studies in the Third World have shown, rural families often appropriate technologies in novel ways. Kline reports on farmers who ran belting from automobiles to washing machines, easing the load for women on wash day, and homemade "farmer line" telephones, designed using materials at hand by farm people desiring to make only local calls. Such innovations testify to the ingenuity that allowed rural families to make do rather than literally buy into modern convenience.

Part 2 examines rural electrification, in particular the tangled relationship among the federal Rural Electrification Administration, rural cooperatives, and private electric companies, each of which envisioned rural electrification somewhat differently. In Part 3, Kline takes his story from the war years of the 1940s into the 1950s and 1960s, focusing particularly on the increased adoption of these technologies and the continued "ruralfication" of technological practice.

Kline's book is important less for its effort to bring agrarian subjects into the story of industrialization than for its description of ordinary humans resisting and appropriating technological steamrollers. The consumers in this case are much like the women in Ruth Cowan's More Work For Mother, who find that the technologies offered by those who have created them are not entirely the technologies needed and wanted by those who will use them. Kline's story also nails down the very important difference between the availability of technologies in the marketplace and their adoption by consumers. That something was available at Montgomery Ward does not mean that people actually bought it.

Although it can be very difficult to infer what, if anything, farm families wanted from urban and consumer culture, among Kline's main sources of information are studies and reports written by extension workers and other specialists in the United States Department of Agriculture. These allow him to report very precisely on the numbers of families who bought new technologies, where they lived, and when they made purchases...