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In orOut of the Historical Kitchen?: Minnesota Rural Women Glenda Riley The development of a market economy in rural Minnesota during the last decades of the nineteenth century changed farming and rural life. Glenda Riley discusses how the new market economy,defined as“an economic system where supply and demand determine what goods are produced and the methods of production,”altered the lives of rural women in Minnesota. Before the coming of a market economy,women worked in their homes.Using letters and reminiscences of pioneerwomen living in Minnesota ,Riley describes their usual tasks such as making candles and soap,making cloth and clothes,hauling water to wash clothes,and cooking with open fireplaces or primitive stoves.They also usually had farm chores like tending chickens,pigs,and cows.Often the women also tried to generate a little extra income for their families by selling butter and eggs.These early settlers also lived in a world with possible Indian intruders , frequent guests,and scarce raw materials.Nature was often threatening with storms,blizzards,and grasshopper devastation.Using rural Minnesota as a case study,Riley demonstrates how the lives and activities of rural women changed with the economic developments of the late nineteenth century. Whether categorized as women’s history or rural history,the study of women in the American West is not only alive and well, but is extremely robust and vital.Its practitioners are numerous and its literature exceedingly rich.Yet one troubling question increasingly demands attention:should the history of western women be recounted in a way that is as scholarly and “objective” as possible ,or should it be presented in a manner that reflects and advances contemporary feminism? Often, scholars of the first persuasion place women within the historical kitchen while scholars of the second prefer to emphasize women’s resistance to, and rejection of, the kitchen. Sometimes the two sides engage in sincere, collegial dialogue,but too often one side is disparaging and disrespectful of the 213 other.It is the intent of this essay to illuminate this scholarly conflict by establishing a case study of Minnesota women before and after the emergence of the market economy and to explore how each interpretive viewpoint might explain the alterations that that economy wrought in women’s lives. There is little doubt that the market economy created a wide range of modi fications in Minnesota women’s lives.This economic system,in which supply and demand determine what goods are produced as well as the methods of production, modified women’s work loads, type and amount of work, equipment used, range and number of customers, and attitudes toward their work and leisure time.1 Before the market economy developed in any given region of Minnesota, women worked as domestic artisans in their homes,which also served as their workplaces or factories.The technology available to them ranged from basic to downright primitive.As a result,early rural women’s writings overflowwith details about whitewashing cabin walls,making medicines and treating the ill, making candles and soap, processing foods,cooking in open fireplaces or on small stoves, making cloth and clothing, and washing clothes “on the board.” ASteele Countywoman remembered,for example,that her mother made shoes with uppers of thick cloth and soles cut from the tops of worn-out boots. She also dyed and braided straw for summer hats,spun yarn and knitted socks,and sewed clothes by hand for ten people. Most of this work was done during the evening by the light of a candle, but despite the diIcult working conditions, she also made hide gloves to sell for extra cash.2 This combination of domestic and market production was not unusual. Mary E. Carpenter,who lived on a farm near Rochester,wrote to her cousin that she had gotten up at four in the morning to prepare breakfast.After breakfast , she “skimmed milk, churned . . . did a large washing, baked 6 loaves of bread,& seven punkin [sic] pies . . . put on the irons & did the ironing got supper &c—besides washing all the dishes, making the beds.” In the same letter, she told of making 100 pounds of butter in June and selling “28 doz of eggs at 10 cts a doz” later in the summer.She proudly,and expansively,added that her butter-and-egg money had paid for“everything that her family had.3 These early rural women in Minnesota frequently performed their domestic and market chores under great pressure.For instance...

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