Opening Windows onto Hidden Lives: Women, Country Life, and Early Rural Sociological Research

By Julie N. Zimmerman and Olaf F. Larson

Building on their analysis in Sociology in Government (Penn State, 2003), Julie Zimmerman and Olaf Larson again join forces across the generations to explore the unexpected inclusion of rural and farm women in the research conducted by the USDA’s Division of Farm Population and Rural Life. Existing from 1919 to 1953, the Division was the first, and for a time the only, unit of the federal government devoted to sociological research. The authors explore how these early rural sociologists found the conceptual space to include women in their analyses of farm living, rural community social organization, and the agricultural labor force.

• Language: English
• Publisher: PSUPress
• Release date: Dec 16, 2010
• ISBN: 9780271067933

Book preview

RURAL STUDIES SERIES

Stephen G. Sapp, General Editor

The Estuary's Gift: An Atlantic Coast Cultural Biography

David Griffith

Sociology in Government:

The Galpin-Taylor Years in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1919–1953

Olaf F. Larson and Julie N. Zimmerman

Assisted by Edward O. Moe

Challenges for Rural America in the Twenty-First Century

Edited by David L. Brown and Louis Swanson

A Taste of the Country: A Collection of Calvin Beale's Writings

Peter A. Morrison

Farming for Us All: Practical Agriculture and the Cultivation of Sustainability

Michael Mayerfeld Bell

Together at the Table:

Sustainability and Sustenance in the American Agrifood System

Patricia Allen

Country Boys: Masculinity and Rural Life

Edited by Hugh Campbell, Michael Mayerfeld Bell, and Margaret Finney

Welfare Reform in Persistent Rural Poverty:

Dreams, Disenchantments, and Diversity

Kathleen Pickering, Mark H. Harvey, Gene F. Summers, and David Mushinski

Daughters of the Mountain:

Women Coal Miners in Central Appalachia

Suzanne E. Tallichet

American Guestworkers: Jamaicans and Mexicans in the U.S. Labor Market

David Griffith

The Fight Over Food:

Producers, Consumers, and Activists Challenge the Global Food System

Edited by Wynne Wright and Gerad Middendorf

Stories of Globalization: Transnational Corporations, Resistance, and the State

Edited by Alessandro Bonanno and Douglas H. Constance

Reactions to the Market: Small Farmers in the

Economic Reshaping of Nicaragua, Cuba, Russia, and China

Laura J. Enríquez

Rural Education for the Twenty-First Century:

Identity, Place, and Community in a Globalizing World

Edited by Kai A. Schafft and Alecia Jackson

JULIE N. ZIMMERMAN AND OLAF F. LARSON

OPENING WINDOWS ONTO HIDDEN LIVES

WOMEN, COUNTRY LIFE, AND EARLY RURAL SOCIOLOGICAL RESEARCH

THE PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS

UNIVERSITY PARK, PENNSYLVANIA

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Zimmerman, Julie N.

Opening windows onto hidden lives: women,

country life, and early rural sociological research /

Julie N. Zimmerman and Olaf F. Larson.

p.            cm. — (Rural studies)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Summary: "Examines the embeddedness of rural and

farm women's lives in rural sociological research conducted

by the USDA's Division of Farm Population and

Rural Life (1919–1953). Explores how early rural sociologists

found the conceptual space to include women in their

analyses"—Provided by publisher.

ISBN 978-0-271-03728-8

(cloth: alk. paper)

1. Rural women—United States—Social conditions.

2. Sociology, Rural—United States—History.

3. United States—Rural conditions.

4. United States. Bureau of Agricultural Economics.

Division of Farm Population and Rural Life.

I. Larson, Olaf F.

II. Title.

HQ1420.Z56 2010

305.40973'091734—dc22

2010018350

Copyright © 2010 The Pennsylvania State University

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press,

University Park, PA 16802-1003

It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use

acid-free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum

requirements of American National Standard for

Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for

Printed Library Material, ANSI Z39.48–1992.

This book is printed on Natures

Natural, which contains 50%

post-consumer waste.

FOREWORD

The social sciences tend to be ahistorical. Sociologists and others typically seek to explain generalizable social relations, theoretically invariant across time and space, as if the course of historical events matters little. We are especially blind to our own professional and intellectual histories, at best viewing the past as prologue, not as operative in our present. Social scientists, I believe, stand to learn a lot from historians about the specificities of stories of success and failure, political timing, and momentous choice points. Historians, for their part, tend toward the opposite dilemma. They are often caught up almost entirely by the particularities of the past, reluctant to use their hard-won knowledge to inform current policy or political decisions. Occasionally, though, a book comes along that is both sociological and historical, achieving the best that these two essential disciplines can offer the academy as well as the polity. Such a volume you now hold in your hands.

This third book by Olaf Larson and Julie Zimmerman extends their already important contribution to the history and sociology of rural America. The two previous volumes definitively document, describe, and analyze the first unit of the federal government that was devoted to sociological research: the Division of Farm Population and Rural Life in the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), 1919–1953. Here in their third book, Zimmerman and Larson focus on the Division's extensive research concerning rural women. And what a treasure trove of research it is. Yet it remains practically unknown to historians and sociologists alike—an ignorance that, at long last, this volume remedies.

The subjects of Opening Windows onto Hidden Lives have been doubly underserved. First, until quite recently, rural women have been rendered invisible by historians and social scientists, not to mention politicians and policy makers. Their hidden lives lay buried under myths and prejudices, yet they formed the bedrock of rural society. Feminist scholars are now excavating and illuminating the experiences of rural women. But also hidden, secondly, has been the research conducted on, with, and about them by rural sociologists in the early and mid-twentieth century. While not without their own blinders and prejudices, as Zimmerman and Larson elucidate, the sociologists nonetheless attended more to rural women than did any other researchers in the United States. (The exception was home economists, whose turf battles with the Division are also recounted in the pages to follow.)

But hidden no more! Zimmerman and Larson do us the great service of rescuing this valuable but neglected work from government archives and the lonely shelves of land grant university libraries. They even give us five original documents from the emergent years around World War I. I am particularly struck by the last reprint, Emily Hoag Sawtelle's study of eight thousand farm women's views on rural life in the early 1920s. After quoting Booker T. Washington and an eminent American Indian scholar as well as John and Abigail Adams, she presents women's voices on their partnership with their husbands (a heterosexual representation, to be sure). Sawtelle writes: We speak of the homestead and farmstead interchangeably because the farm includes the home and the home encompasses the farm. Here she anticipates some widely touted theoretical discoveries about the family farm (merging production and consumption, household and business) of the so-called new rural sociology of the 1980s. Sawtelle also scooped the parallel new rural, or agricultural, social history in claiming the centrality of women in family farming.

The notion of rural holism derives from the Progressive era, when U.S. sociology was emerging; the USDA established the sociological Division in 1919. The research unit sought an integrated approach to rural life, combining farm, agriculture, and community (in addition to culture, geography, and social psychology). Women were seen as one important part of the whole, compared to the new discipline of home economics, which tended to treat women apart. Team Zimmerman-Larson's historical sociology traces the continuation of the Progressive, integrated view into the New Deal era and beyond. Like Sawtelle's family-farm analysis, they forcefully illustrate how the Division's call for a holistic approach to rural problems, particularly one that transcends merely the economic, rings a contemporary bell today.

This book, then, provides a valuable resource for both historians and social scientists who want to learn about rural women in the early to mid-twentieth century. It also aims at rural sociologists who want to know more about their own professional and ideological past as well as historians interested in cultural and intellectual trends. Recently a few historians, as Zimmerman and Larson show, have discovered and employed pieces of the Division's research. But even these scholars, it's fair to say, could not have guessed at the depth and breadth of the work done by the Division on rural women. What's true of historians is even more true of sociologists (rural and otherwise, historical or not). Yet historical sociologists will be especially pleased to see this volume, for it exemplifies the subdiscipline that seeks to integrate the two disparate academic fields. The book itself merges history and sociology. Few of us knew of the riches it presents. Now we hold them in our hands.

Jess Gilbert

President, Rural Sociological Society (2007–2008)

Professor

Department of Rural Sociology

University of Wisconsin–Madison

PREFACE

This book is an unanticipated consequence of a project initiated to document and analyze the work of the first unit established in the federal government specifically for sociological research, namely the Division of Farm Population and Rural Life in the U.S. Department of Agriculture. This unit, started in 1919 and abolished in 1953, was charged with the study of rural life in America.

The project about the Division resulted in two books. The first, Sociology in Government: A Bibliography of the Work of the Division of Farm Population and Rural Life, U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1919–1953 (Larson, Moe, and Zimmerman 1992c), documented the Division's publications of all types. The second, Sociology in Government: The Galpin-Taylor Years in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1919–1953 (Larson and Zimmerman 2003), was a systematic examination of the Division's work—the need for it, the problems or issues addressed, the methods used, and the contributions made.

In the second book, a chapter was devoted to each of the Division's major substantive areas of study, such as farm and rural population, levels and standards of family living, locality groups and other aspects of social organization of rural society, and farm labor. Other areas of research that did not merit separate chapters, but were too important to be overlooked, were treated in a chapter entitled Some Other Areas of Research. In this chapter, studies of rural women were given primary emphasis. Even so, the section on The Division and Studies of Women was less than four pages long.

The Division's research pertaining to rural women was often in the category of fugitive literature and was largely hidden in research that had another primary focus—that is, the community studies. In retrospect, it seemed that because of the paucity of sociological research on rural women in the first half of the 1900s and because of the important role of women in rural life, scholars and students might welcome a volume that would make the fugitive literature more accessible and would create an awareness of the rich information hidden away in unsuspected places. Hence this book.

The larger project from which this volume emerged began in the 1980s when Edward O. Moe, then Principal Rural Sociologist with the USDA's Cooperative State Research Service and a one-time Division staff member, discussed some of the Division's accomplishments with David L. Brown, then Associate Director of the Agriculture and Rural Economy Division of the USDA's Economic Research Service. Brown, in turn, happened to pass some of this information about the Division's work on to William V. D'Antonio, who, at the time, was Executive Officer of the American Sociological Association. D'Antonio's reaction was that the story of the Division was an important chapter in the history of American sociology and should be recorded. Brown followed by setting aside funds to get such a study started, with the idea that Moe, then retired and back in Utah, do the study. Brown and Moe approached me to see if I would be willing to be a consultant for the project.

I had been on the Division staff for eight years, 1938 to 1946, during the peak of its activity. I had served on the Washington, D.C., staff and also as leader for the Division in two regional offices, first in Amarillo, Texas, and later in a new office in Portland, Oregon. Further, when at what is now Colorado State University, before joining the Division, I had a cooperative research project with it. And after leaving the Division to go to Cornell University, I continued to have close ties. In all, my involvement with the Division covered a span of about fifteen years.

As discussions continued with Brown and Moe about the proposed project, it became increasingly apparent that Cornell was the preferred location, in part because of the depth of its libraries' collection of the Division's publications. The result was a cooperative agreement between the USDA's Economic Research Service and Cornell's Department of Rural Sociology, with me as principal investigator and Moe in a supporting role. Thus, I had an unanticipated diversion from my ongoing research to take on a project that at the beginning we thought might be completed in a year or so.

In the early stages of the work to compile the bibliography, the graduate assistants engaged in this could not continue. They were replaced by Julie N. Zimmerman, who had been newly admitted to the Ph.D. program in Development Sociology. Julie's contributions and commitment to the project soon earned her the status of coauthor for the project's major publications. This led to a working relationship and friendship that has continued to the present.

Another unanticipated consequence of the original project has been that Julie's participation in it as a graduate research assistant has led her into an interest in the history of rural sociology and its significance that has been a characteristic of her professional career. As a graduate assistant she had the sociological imagination to recognize that the Division's research she was documenting included nuggets of information that could be mined about the lives of farm and other rural women in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. Her intellectual curiosity led her to place the Division and its work on women in the context of the Progressive era and to relate it to the home economics movement. Her scholarly persistence over time has resulted in her discovery of little-known inquiries about farm and rural women that preceded the Division. And it has led her to relate the Division's work on women to the growing literature in the area of women's studies, which has included studies of rural women.

Olaf F. Larson

Professor of Rural Sociology Emeritus

Cornell University

There are moments when a separate preface from each author is called for. This is one of those moments. Born in 1910, Olaf F. Larson is the oldest living member of our national professional organization, the Rural Sociological Society. His professional life spans most of the years of rural sociology and embodies a living history of our field. As a graduate student, he was present at the meetings that led to the formation of the Rural Sociological Society and was acquainted with the first field's leaders, such as Charles J. Galpin. He went on to work at the Division of Farm Population and Rural Life and, to our knowledge, is one of only a very few persons remaining with this experience. In 1985, he was the recipient of the highest award given by our national society, Distinguished Rural Sociologist. With all of this in mind, it seemed appropriate that he have the opportunity to speak in his own distinct voice.

As Olaf said, the project to rescue, document, and assess the work of the Division of Farm Population and Rural Life has had unanticipated consequences. My own work on the project is no exception. When I began as Dr. Larson's graduate research assistant more than twenty years ago, I could not have anticipated my continued involvement with the history of the Division, the blossoming of such a dear friendship, and having such an inspiring and exceptional mentor. Nor could I have anticipated that one day we would come to switch places, with myself being the principal investigator on research concerning the Division and Olaf playing the supporting role.

The idea for the current analysis first emerged as I was reading the Division's research and developing keywords for the first phase of the project: the bibliography (Larson, Moe, and Zimmerman 1992c). I kept noticing many and consistent references to rural and farm women: descriptions of their lives, and data documenting their varied work—in the home, on the farm, and in the agricultural labor force. While women were never the main focus of the research, their consistent inclusion was unexpected and sparked my curiosity.

Sixteen years later and with our last book having been completed for several years, one day Olaf called and asked, How would you like to get into ‘trouble’ together again? That phone call was all it took. I arranged my sabbatical and set to work on developing this book. Pursuing my initial hunch those many years ago, I delved back into the Division's research. The inclusion of women in their body of work, I thought, could not have been an accident. Even still, I was surprised at the depth, breadth, and degree to which women were interwoven into the unit's research. This book gave me the chance to not only examine the inclusion of women, but put it into theoretical and historical perspective.

We tend to remember the history we lived. Now I not only have my own years, but I feel a part of these early years of rural sociology. And, because of working with Olaf, these years are not just pages in a book: for me they come alive with people and personalities.

To work with Olaf Larson once in a career has been a treasure. To be able to continue that partnership these many years has been a privilege. When I first began work on this project as a graduate student, I had no idea about the history of rural sociology, what the Division was, what it had accomplished, or its role in the development of American sociology or the field of rural sociology. Little did I know then that I would become Historian for the Rural Sociological Society, continue to conduct research on the Division, and, in a way, carry on the torch for this nearly lost piece of our intellectual history.

Julie N. Zimmerman

Associate Professor, Rural Sociology

Department of Community and Leadership Development

University of Kentucky

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Since its beginning twenty years ago, the larger project to document and analyze the contributions of the Division of Farm Population and Rural Life would not have been possible without the support of many people. The initial project received funding and assistance from the Economic Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture; the Department of Rural Sociology (now the Department of Development Sociology) at Cornell University; the Rural Sociology Program of the Department of Sociology (now the Department of Community and Leadership Development) at the University of Kentucky; the Rural Sociological Society; and the American Sociological Association. Yvonne Oliver at Fort Valley State College and our late friend and colleague Edward O. Moe played critical roles in the research, and our advisory group made up of former members of the Division helped guide our first analyses. Since this book would not have been possible without the work to first document and assess the Division's contributions, we would like to thank all those who supported the project in its beginnings twenty years ago, particularly David Brown at Cornell University, who was so crucial in its initiation.

Many have supported our continuing efforts to examine the importance of the Division and this current book project. In particular, we would like to thank both Dean Scott Smith and Associate Dean Nancy Cox of the University of Kentucky's College of Agriculture, as well as Gary Hansen, chair of the Department of Community and Leadership Development at the University of Kentucky, for providing support and financial assistance so that we could pursue this unique opportunity to work together again. We would also like to thank Clare Hinrichs, the editor of the Rural Studies Series, for seeing this book through even beyond her term as editor; Jess Gilbert, 2007–8 president of the Rural Sociological Society and professor at the University of Wisconsin, for interrupting his sabbatical to write a wonderful foreword; the anonymous reviewers, whose insights and questions were invaluable; and Sarah Michelle Frank for her keen attention to detail in proofreading the manuscript. Finally, a special thank you is needed to the rural sociology graduate students in the Department of Sociology at the University of Kentucky, who listened about a time and place, and place in time, so very distant from their own.

ONE

Hidden Windows, Hidden Lives

1

Opening Hidden Windows

When historian Katherine Jellison discovered six community studies from the 1940s in the archives of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, she described them as among the first works to offer significant discussions of rural gender roles (1991, 172). Not apparent at the time, however, was that the studies were but one piece of a much larger body of work conducted by the Division of Farm Population and Rural Life, the depth and breadth of which have only recently been examined (Larson and Zimmerman 2003).

The inclusion of women in these studies and the significance that Jellison placed on them raises important questions. Were these isolated studies? Are there more like them? If there are more, where are they? And, given that this was not a time when social sciences were giving priority to examinations of women and gender, why did this inclusion of women occur at all?

SETTING THE STAGE

The studies that Jellison discovered are known as the community stability/instability studies. In rural sociology, they became classics and provided a standard for subsequent community research. Since the original studies were conducted, the communities have been restudied, some of them several times (Loomis 1958, 1959; Luloff and Krannich 2002; Mays 1968; Nostrand 1982; Ploch 1989).

The sociological research of which the six community studies were part was conducted by the Division of Farm Population and Rural Life. Located in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Division, as it came to be called, was established early in the development of rural sociology and conducted much of the first systematic research on rural America. The unit existed from 1919 until 1953, but despite its importance in the development of rural sociology, the history of sociology's relationship with government, and the breadth of its research, the Division's body of work has largely remained hidden.

In 1986, the invisibility of the Division's contributions to knowledge about rural life and agriculture and the unit's role in the development of rural sociology began to change. Formerly on the professional staff of the Division, Olaf F. Larson and Edward O. Moe began a project to rescue the Division's research and understand its place in the intellectual history of rural sociology and sociology.¹ Perhaps it is a testament to the breadth of the Division's research that despite their former relationships with the unit, both Larson and Moe still underestimated the amount of research conducted by the Division. When the project was first created, a single monograph encompassing both a bibliography and a historical analysis of the Division was proposed. As work to identify Division- produced research progressed, however, it soon became clear that the bibliography alone would be book-length (Larson, Moe, and Zimmerman 1992c), and it was published separately from the full analysis (Larson and Zimmerman 2003).

This book builds on the larger project, begun more than twenty years ago, of understanding the research and contributions of the Division (Larson, Moe, and Zimmerman 1992c; Larson and Zimmerman 2003). As part of the next chapter and next generation of the story, we examine how the approach that led to the inclusion of women in parts of the Division's research developed and events that affected those areas of research. Since the initial project focused on rescuing the Division's body of work and documenting the contributions of the unit and its research, we do not present again the entire history of the unit or the full breadth of its research (Larson and Zimmerman 2003). Instead, we focus on the intellectual genesis and contemporary contributions of this unit of the federal government in order to examine one of the unexpected legacies of the Division: its contribution to the knowledge base on rural and farm women.

DISCOVERING WOMEN

When the project to recover the Division's research began, the first step was to document its products and understand their context and contributions. This was done by first compiling a bibliography of the unit's work, understanding the changes that occurred in the content, topics, and types of analyses conducted, and developing a contextual understanding of the unit's thirty-four years. For the bibliography, we developed a system of keywords that best described the main focus of each research product.

As we examined every piece of research that could be located,² the process of generating and assigning keywords for each citation meant reading and summarizing every publication or manuscript. As dominant trends emerged, so too did a curiously consistent pattern of repeated references to women, their work, and their lives. While this was noted at the time, the immediate need to first recover the Division's body of work and understand the unit's contributions precluded our examining it further (Zimmerman and Larson 2003, 257–60).

In this book, we return to the Division's body of research in order to explore the pattern of unexpected references to rural and farm women first noticed more than twenty years ago and to ask, are there more? What we found is that there are indeed more. In particular, three areas stood out where women's lives were embedded within larger studies: the early standard of living studies (Bibliography 3); the social organization of community studies (Bibliography 4, 5, 6); and the hired farm labor and wage rate studies (Bibliography 7).

In the Division's research, rural and farm women were embedded within larger analyses of American rural life.³ Instead of examining the farm in isolation, Division researchers saw that the farm included the home and that women's lives and work extended beyond the confines of home life. Focused on the social organization of communities, they saw women as contributors to and participants in that organization. And women were documented as participants in the hired and migratory agricultural labor force. Although women were never the specific subject of inquiry, the holistic approach underpinning the Division's research opened room for including aspects of women's lives and led to the documenting of some of their roles in rural life.

The interwoven nature of women's lives within parts of the Division's research, we argue, is traceable to the conceptual foundations of holism in the Progressive era, its influence on the formation of the Division and rural sociology, and the coterminous rise of home economics. The resulting approach sought to understand rural social organization as a totality, while leaving the functioning and roles of women within the home to home economics. With their sights set on the whole, women were embedded within the Division's analyses of farm, community, and agriculture, but they were never the sole or specific focus.

While today our attention to women and gender is deliberate, with only one exception (Sawtelle 1924), the Division never conducted research that specifically focused on women. Moreover, any appearance of women does not mean that their lives or perspectives were privileged in the Division's research. Nevertheless, given that this was a time when the world of women was more often invisible or subsumed within the household, their appearance in the Division's research