Preserving the Family Farm: Women, Community and the Foundations of Agribusiness in the Midwest, 1900–1940 by Mary Neth (review)

Book Reviews 167 much to commend in Tribal Secrets, particularly its insistence on the value of "understanding contemporary intellectual production in the context of over two centuries of a written, Native intellectual tradition" (2), the many directions for further study to which it points (ironically, perhaps, it is to Deloria's work that the study directs this reader), the wealth of bibliographic information it provides, and, most importantly, the history and theory it recuperates. It is unfortunate, however, that this valuable endeavour to recover an "intellectual" tradition has been conducted, at times, at the expense of a more thorough critique of the ideas constituting that very tradition and of engagement with other American Indian critical perspectives. Jennifer Kelly University of Calgary Mary Neth. Preserving the Family Famz: W01nen, Community and the Foundations of Agribusiness in the Midwest, 1900-1940. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. Here is a highly interpretive and deeply researched study of midwestern agriculture in the twentieth century that will significantly contribute to the study of American rural society. The book's contributions are clear: it provides a wealth of information on changes in farm culture during the first half of the twentieth century, including technological, institutional, and economic innovation; its cental argument is made within a rural historiography that has replaced Turner's frontier thesis with concepts of industrialization and urbanization to examine everyday human behaviour over time. A chapter that traces the evolution of the communitarian threshing culture with the individualized and agribusiness-oriented combine harvest is especially rich and insightful; new technologies change the logic of economic production, alter social relations, and have a domino affect on a host of other agricultural practices. Most significantly, the book peels back the image of a static, homogeneous American countryside and explores the frequently conflicting social categories of that society, including generation, ethnicity, class and gender: in this book, the "ethnics" include not only Germans and Norwegians, but 168 Canadian Review of American Studies African Americans and Native Americans; "class" lines run not only between tenants and owners, but between farm operators and International Workers of the World (IWW)threshing gangs; and generation is more than life-cycle differences, it is intertwined with the new lures of mass media and urban culture. The most detailed analysis is on gender and on internal household relations. The central thesis of the book will be controversial. It is no longer innovative to suggest that the social relations within the farm or women's roles on the farms were crucial components in rural history. With recent books by Sarah Deutsch, Jane H. Adams, Nancy Grey Osterud, Katherine Jellison, Sally McMurry, Jane Marie Pederson, Deborah Fink, Joan Jensen, Rachel Ann Rosenfeld, Joan E. Cashin, and others, Neth is probably wrong to assert that rural history "pays little attention" to women's labour or gender analysis. Nor is it innovative to suggest that the family farm was the basis of the rural community: Jon Gjerde, Robert Ostergren, and Kathleen Neils Conzen, for example, have spoken about household-based ethnic communities on the Great Plains for some time. What makes Neth's book important is its argument that "in rural America, the development of industrial capitalism directly collided with a family based labour system" (3), which had provided women with meaningful economic roles and had been the social underpinning of the farm community. It was this system that business and government interests joined forces to dismantle. The family farm, in Neth's analysis, was not an idealized and static social formation that preceded industrialization; nor was it an economic unit that was created by the very conditions of capitalism as Canadian sociologists, Harriet Friedman, Max Hedley, and others have argued. The family farm stood in opposition to advanced capitalism; it contested the logic of capitalism for that logic "depended" on the family farm's dissolution. It was not a contest, however, between an outmoded economic unit and modern markets, but between a community-based, gender-interdependent economy and a mistaken and insidious form of advanced, consumer-oriented largescale , government-supported agribusiness whose only aim was an ever increasing agricultural efficiency. The conflict was not an abstract contradiction between structure and agency, but a direct...