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3 Women and Rural society The embeddedness of women in the Division’s research was influenced by two differing perspectives on the role of women. One saw a larger role for women in society but was particular to rural areas. The other, based on an urban Victorian ideal of separate spheres, firmly placed women within the home. These two views were reflected in two distinct trends at the turn of the last century: rural holism and the rise of home economics. While holism saw the home as part of the farm and women as part of the social organization of rural life, home economics focused on the home and women’s relationship to society was mediated by it. In between these two views stood the Division of Farm Population and Rural Life. women and rural holism The emergence of a rural holism in the Progressive era opened room for seeing and including women in the social organization of rural life. Since the problems facing rural areas were neither reducible to nor fixable by focusing on agricultural production alone, then both the problems and their remedies could be seen as needing to include their social aspects as well. If the farm was not just a business but included the home, then women’s roles could be seen as including the home while also extending beyond it. Moreover, if the whole of rural life required attention, then examining its social organization meant including all of its participants, even women. Liberty Hyde Bailey reflected this view of women’s roles in his chapter dedicated to their contributions and participation in the transformation of the whole of rural life (1911). Tower summarized Bailey’s overall argument concerning women in his review in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences (1912). Among the “means of developing a better country life,” Tower noted Bailey’s argument for “reorganizing the household part of farm life so that woman may be more of a factor in the affairs of her community, and bringing people 28 hidden WindoWS, hidden LiveS together so that they may act together on questions affecting the community ” (1912, 353).1 The Country Life Commission, headed by Bailey, also reflected the view that while women’s roles included the home, they extended beyond it. In their report, the Commission not only considered the role of women, but were explicit in naming and discussing the importance of farm women as contributors in the social organization of farms, agriculture , and communities. They also saw women as having a role in the development of rural and country life.2 In summarizing their work, the Commission identified “the burdens and narrow life of women” (1917, 20) as one of the “causes contributing to the general result,” noting that the remedy lay in “a quickened sense of responsibility in all country people . . . in the better safeguarding of the strength and happiness of farm women” (23).3 The attention given by the Commission to the role of women could have ended there, with the acknowledgment that they played a generalized role in the issues and challenges facing rural life. But the Commission went further and named “Woman’s Work on the Farm” (1917, 103–6) as one of the six deficiencies facing rural areas that it specifically examined (Reprint 1). The Commission explained their reasoning, they focused on the deficiencies “that seem to be most fundamental or most needed at the present time” (1917, 20; emphasis added).4 1. For more on Bailey and his contributions to rural life, see, for example, Larson (1958). 2. Roosevelt himself may have subscribed to a very restrictive view of women. For example, he wrote in his preface to the Country Life Commission report issued to the U.S. Senate, “If a woman shirks her duty as housewife, as home keeper, as the mother whose prime function is to bear and rear a sufficient number of healthy children, then she is not entitled to our regard” (quoted in Fink 1992, 26). This preface was not in the copies published by Sturgis and Walton in 1911 and 1917 or later by the University of North Carolina Press. Testi, in his analysis of the construction of masculinity in the Progressive era, situates Roosevelt’s views on women (1995, 1524). 3. This is also notable because, after all, the Commission could have achieved the same ends by relying on broad concepts, such as the family, that included women but maintained their invisibility. This was...

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