More than a Farmer’s Wife: Voices of American Farm Women, 1910–1960 by Amy Mattson Lauters, and: A New Heartland: Women, Modernity, and the Agrarian Ideal in America by Janet Galligani Casey (review)

Two new works on American women and rural culture during the first half of the twentieth century, by communications scholar Amy Mattson Lauters and literary critic Janet Galligani Casey, illustrate divergent approaches to similar historical and textual material. While both analyze periodical literature, notably the nationally circulated monthly The Farmer’s Wife, which reached millions of readers, these authors reveal quite different intentions.

Lauters’s More Than a Farmer’s Wife systematically reviews issues of this and other magazines of the era (Farm Journal, Country Gentleman, Saturday Evening Post, Ladies’ Home Journal, and Good Housekeeping), to explore the publications’ representations of rural women. Based on oral histories and questionnaires solicited from approximately two hundred women who grew up on farms, Lauters finds both cohesion and dissonance between magazine images and women’s lived experiences. By contrast, literary critic Casey, who notes that her work is “less about the empirical facts of farm life than about its abstractions” (3), uses the periodical to set a contextual platform for the real focus of her work, novel-writing and photography by women that departed from stereotypical images of rural life.

Of the two works, Lauters’s study of magazines and women’s remembrances of their farm experiences is comparatively pedestrian. “I wanted to know which was the more accurate image: farm woman as victim, or farm woman as a respected part of the business of farming” (153). She concludes that general magazines of the era largely ignored rural culture, while farming-oriented magazines lifted high the image of the respected farm woman. Meanwhile, rural women were struggling with the vagaries of weather, family circumstances, and shifting economic conditions as they sought to succeed as business partners with men. By 1960, Lauters reports that a significant urban/rural divide had developed, with city dwellers increasingly viewing farm women as “plain, unsophisticated and even a marginalized ‘other’ in American culture” (160) at the same time that farm women were deeply involved in the business aspects of agriculture. Lauters finds that American rural women in mid-century, while marginalized, nevertheless found validation in forming connections across the miles, communicating as readers and letter-writers of rural-oriented magazines. Her larger point is that long before computerized social networking offered community-building possibilities for people with similar interests, rural women were identifying with each other through the medium of nationally circulating periodicals.

By contrast, Casey’s A New Heartland: Women, Modernity, and the Agrarian Ideal in America takes as its starting point the pronounced marginality of both women and rural dwellers in the face of “a modern urban-industrial hegemony” (198). Nevertheless, she asserts that rural life remained central to Americans’ cultural images of themselves and their communities, largely because of the staying power of a Jeffersonian agrarian ideal, inherited and mediated over several centuries. Within this context, Casey builds her work around the achievements of a small number of women who, in the face of rapid changes in agricultural technologies and economics, used literature and art to illumine and critique modern life.

The first several chapters of A New Heartland are, at times, opaque linguistically. But once Casey moves to the heart of her study, an examination of literary novels (four bestsellers and three lesser-known, melodramatic tales of domesticity in country settings), a fascinating world of twentieth-century American literature, written by, produced for, and appealing to and beyond rural female audiences, emerges.

Against the landscape of the more familiar literary works of Steinbeck, Cather, and others, Casey dips into the lives of writers Edna Ferber (So Big), Martha Ostenso (Wild Geese), Elizabeth Madox Roberts (The Time of Man), Gladys Hasty Carroll (As the Earth Turns), Edith Summers Kelley (Weeds...