Entitled to power

In the fifty-year period between World War I and the Vietnam War, a revolution took place in midwestern agriculture. The energy of people and animals was replaced by machine power, diversity gave way to specialization, and capital investment become a substitute of labor intensity. In Entitled to Power, Katherine Jellison examines midwestern farm women's unexpected response to the new labor saving devices that irrevocably changed the patterns of life and labor on the American family farm. Federal farm policy at mid-century treated farm women as consumers, not producers. Farm women had long performed their field labor under a patriarchal system in which their work "belonged" to male family members, and for much of the twentieth century, their household labor remained unaffected by the technological revolution that changed urban women's lives.^ When agricultural extension agents and home appliance manufacturers promoted new technology to the rural community, they expected to create separate spheres of work in the field and in the house. Instead of encouraging women to adopt the full-time homemaker role taken by urban housewives, however, innovations such as tractors or washing machines enabled women to work as operators of farm machinery or independently in the rural community. A variety of visual images of farm women from advertisements and agricultural publications serve here to contrast the publicized view of these women with the roles that they chose for themselves. Jellison finds that many women preferred their productive roles on and off the farm to the domestic ideal emphasized by contemporary prescriptive literature. They valued their work as farm producers and for reasons of economics and family politics wanted to retain that position.^ In a society that has recognized farming as a male occupation, many of women's contributions to modernizing farm life have been ignored or misunderstood. The letters, interviews, and memoirs assembled by Jellison reclaim this history of the transformation of rural society.