The Midwest Farmer’s Daughter

Zachary Michael Jack

Description

From yesterday's gingham girls to today's Google-era Farmer Janes, The Midwest Farmer's Daughter explores the resurgent role played by female agriculturalists at a time when fully 30 percent of new farms in the US are woman-owned, but when, paradoxically, America's farm-reared daughters are conspicuously absent from popular film, television, and literature. In this first-of-its-kind treatment, Zachary Michael Jack follows the fascinating story of the girl who became a regional and national legend: from Donna Reed to Laura Ingalls Wilder, from Elly May Clampett to The Dukes of Hazzard's Catherine Bach, from Lawrence Welk's TV sweethearts to the tragic heroines of Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres. From Amish farm women bloggers, to Missouri homesteaders and seed-savers, to rural Nebraskan graphic novelists and, ultimately, to the seven generations of entrepreneurial Iowan farm women who have animated his own family since before the Civil War, Jack shines new documentary light on the symbol of American virtue, energy, and ingenuity that rural writer Martha Foote Crow once described as the "great rural reserve of initiating force, sane judgment and spiritual drive." Packed with dozens of interviews, The Midwest Farmer's Daughter covers the history and the renaissance of agrarian women on both sides of the fence. Giving equal consideration to both agriculture's time-tested rural and small-town Farm Bureaus, 4-H, and FFA training grounds as well as to the eco-innovations generated by the region's rising woman-powered "agro-polises" such as Chicago, the author crafts a lively, easy-to-read cultural and social history, exploring the pioneering role today's female agriculturalists play in the emergence of farmers' markets, urban farms, community-supported agriculture, and the new "back-to-the-land" and "do-it-yourself" movements. For all those whose lives have been graced by the enduring strength of American farm women, The Midwest Farmer's Daughter offers a groundbreaking examination of a dynamic American icon.
Preface: Pioneering Women

Part One

Chapter ONE: The Gingham Girl in the Google Age

Chapter TWO: The Midwest Farmer’s Daughter

Chapter THREE: How Ya Gonna Keep ’Em Down on the Farm?

Chapter FOUR: Raising Farmer Jane

Chapter FIVE: The Chores of Being a Farm Girl

Chapter SIX: Welk Girls and Daisy Dukes

Chapter SEVEN: Milkmaids in Manhattan

Part Two

Chapter EIGHT: Little Houses on the Prairie

Chapter NINE: Future Farm Daughters of America

Chapter TEN: Ag-vocating Women

Chapter ELEVEN: Community-Supported Agriculture

Chapter TWELVE: Female Farmers

Chapter THIRTEEN: Farmerettes in the Farm City

Chapter FOURTEEN: Her Daughter Has a Dynamo

Acknowledgments

Selected Bibliography

Sujets

• Histoire
• Women
• History

Informations

• Publié par: Purdue University Press
• Date de parution: 15 juillet 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781612492186
• Langue: English

Extrait

BY ZACHARY MICHAEL JACK
PURDUE UNIVERSITY PRESS WEST LAFAYETTE, INDIANA
Copyright 2012 by Purdue University. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
 
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jack, Zachary Michael, 1973-
The Midwest farmer’s daughter : in search of an American icon / Zachary Michael Jack.
    p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-55753-619-8 (paper : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-61249-219-3 (ePDF) -- ISBN 978-1-61249-218-6 (ePUB) 1. Women farmers--Middle West. 2. Farm life--Middle West. 3. Middle West--Social life and customs. 4. Women farmers--Middle West--Public opinion 5. Farm life--Middle West--Public opinion 6. Middle West--Public opinion 7. Women in mass media. 8. Farm life in mass media. 9. Popular culture--United States. 10. Public opinion--United States. I. Title.
S521.5.M53J33 2012
630.82--dc23
2012004918
Cover image: The Prairie Was Her Playground
copyright 2008 Lara Blair Images / www.modernprairiegirl.com
TO THE DAUGHTERS
THAT MADE THE SEEDBED
GAIL
BARBARA
SUSAN
AND PATRICIA
AND IN MEMORY
OF THOSE
THAT PLOWED THE FURROW
AMBER JANE PICKERT
AND JULIA MAE PUFFER
Three generations of Midwest farmers’ daughters—the author’s great-great-great grandmother, great-great grandmother, and great-grandmother holding baby Edward Lee Jack on the Jack family farm around 1920.
CONTENTS
Preface: Pioneering Women
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
The Gingham Girl in the Google Age
CHAPTER TWO
The Midwest Farmer’s Daughter
CHAPTER THREE
How Ya Gonna Keep ’Em Down on the Farm?
CHAPTER FOUR
Raising Farmer Jane
CHAPTER FIVE
The Chores of Being a Farm Girl
CHAPTER SIX
Welk Girls and Daisy Dukes
CHAPTER SEVEN
Milkmaids in Manhattan
PART TWO
CHAPTER EIGHT
Little Houses on the Prairie
CHAPTER NINE
Future Farm Daughters of America
CHAPTER TEN
Ag-vocating Women
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Community-Supported Agriculture
CHAPTER TWELVE
Female Farmers
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Farmerettes in the Farm City
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Her Daughter Has a Dynamo
Acknowledgments
Selected Bibliography
PREFACE
PIONEERING WOMEN

“T HE STORY OF a Pioneer Cedar County Farm” headlines the account of my ancestor Levi Pickert’s settling of our midwestern family farm. “The next year, 1855, he again came out to Iowa,” the recounting goes, “bringing not only his wife and son, but his father and mother also.”
So begins the history of my people, and the plot advanced as they planted seeds real and metaphorical in the good midwestern dirt. Yet while the presumed protagonist of the pioneering drama, Levi, earns multiple mentions, his helpmate in life remains nameless but for the unremarkable moniker “wife.” As the pioneering history unfolds with its breathless stories of the “coldest winter in Iowa’s history” when, “for forty consecutive days it did not thaw,” climaxing in tales of hangings and horses thieves on a frontier where “trees in the vicinity [had] been decorated with the bodies of desperadoes,” the very name of Levi’s life partner is lost to the wind, a sound and fury, signifying nothing.
By my late twenties I could recite the names of my male farming forebears on the Pickert side as far back as the early 1800s. But had I been asked to name a wife or daughter predating my great-grandmother, I would surely have come up empty, not because I was a poor student of genealogy, but because the names were seldom found in print. It wasn’t until my thirties, in fact, that a bundle of letters I’d chanced upon revealed to me the hearts of the family’s farm daughters, making them, quite literally, something to have and to hold.
In one letter datelined 1867, Syracuse, New York, Eliza Smith writes her long-lost sister, my great-great-great-grandmother Sally Pickert, wife of Levi, to observe, “This world is full of sorrow and disappointment. We was very glad to hear from you once more and know that you are alive, but I think you will not live long if you keep on working so hard as you do. What profit will it be to you to have it said that you were rich after you are dead? I have seen the folly of working so hard for greater riches and see them take wings and fly away. Sally, you do not know how much I want to see you and talk with you. I have so much to say that I can’t write . . .”
The earliest missive Sally saved, dated 1855, would have arrived while she, Levi, and her in-laws shared a one-room schoolhouse with four other families, according to a 1962 article in the Cedar Rapids Gazette entitled “Three Generations of Pickerts Have Lived in Mechanicsville House.” The Pickerts arrived in Davenport, Iowa, in 1854 by train from Waterton, New York, the Gazette’s Amber Jackson reported, and began walking west until they came upon the 200 acres of black earth that would become our Iowa Heritage Farm, purchasing the ground from David Platner for the bargain price of $10 an acre. Jackson’s recounting makes no mention of the female partners in the enterprise beyond the wife-obscuring umbrella “The Levi Pickerts,” nor does it mention the baby Sally lost in that first unforgiving year in the Heartland.
“Your Uncle Ben told me he would give $100 if you would come back,” another New York relative named William Wallis conveyed in his own note to his far-flung Iowa relatives. But there would be no such turning back for pioneering families, not for love or money, no diminution of the arcadian dream of mother and father, daughter and son, cultivating the countryside for generations. To the yeoman the dream seemed unerring, the yield perennial. The farmer’s son may have made the harvest possible, but the daughter made it worthwhile.

“A ND STILL TODAY the same reverie comes each spring, the scenes are the same. Everything, in fact, save for the little girl,” my great-grandfather Walter Thomas Jack wrote of his own farmer’s daughter, Helen, in his book The Furrow and Us . “She has grown up now and has gone, but imagination keeps her on the set, and her role will always be that of the leading lady.” Still, even as Grandpa Walt penned homage to his own long-gone girl of 1943, powerful cultural and economic changes had already swept many a farm’s “leading lady” from her bucolic perch. Lovely Helen Jack proved a case in point: she had grown up, married, and moved off the farm into secretarial work at the John Deere Company in Moline, Illinois, leaving her father behind to pine. Great-grandpa’s “reverie” of a girl “bedecked in Easter finery” was a “song,” he insisted, that “clings to us throughout our whole lives.” “Neither time nor eternity can take away the particularity, and as time passes, the charm of it remains radiant, immortal,” he opined, though he might have classed the same phenomena as a bona fide haunt.
It had been some Rip Van Winkle sleep, surely, in which she had slipped away, his girl of spring. In the pages of Walt’s wartime glossies, after all, agricultural daughters like Helen Jack weren’t pictured at desks taking rote dictation for ungrateful bosses; instead they were shown astraddle tractors, tilling the good earth while wearing straw hats and white work shirts rolled at the sleeve, frisky farm collies following in their wake. The advertisements in great-grandpa’s Collier’s toasted a girl who had become a wartime rallying cry and a Madison Avenue ad man’s dream, as enchanting to a nation of urbanites as to the farm mothers and fathers who kept the memory of her alive back home. “Uncle Sam’s traveling men . . . more than 8,000,000 strong are on the march all over the world,” read an ad for Easy washing machines. “But they’re never out of touch with home. Thanks to the farmer’s daughter, and the millions like her, our boys can count on a steady stream of the food and other supplies they need to win. Easy salutes the farmer’s daughter . . . and all the other heroines fighting so valiantly on the homefront.”
By 1949 the farm daughter had indeed emerged as a cultural leading lady, becoming the stuff of silver screens and doughboy centerfolds. Two years earlier a film entitled The Farmer’s Daughter had been honored as Life magazine’s movie of the week, and suddenly here she was—the rural equivalent of a real-life Gibson girl in the pages of America’s most iconic lifestyle magazine—Virginia Jensen of Blair, Nebraska, reclining in a bed of hay while wearing a button-down blouse and short-shorts, a hayseed slipped provocatively between her teeth. Jensen, the caption announced, had been declared the “Ideal Farmer’s Daughter” at a Chicago National Farm Show where contestants vying for the crown had made their costumes out of feedbags. In an ironic foreshadowing of the cultural postmortem to come, the vivacious, victorious Jensen earned as her prize tickets to Death of a Salesman .
The Life headline proclaiming Jensen’s reign in December of 1949 read, “Yes, My Darling Daughter,” but it might just as well have read, “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.” By 1950 the Midwest farmer’s daughter had become