Book Reviews
REVIEWS On Behalf of the Family Farm: Iowa Farm Women’s Activism since 1945 by Jenny Barker Devine xi + 188 pages, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2013, paper $19.95. Historians have never disputed the significance of women’s roles in American agriculture; interpreting these roles, however, has yielded insight from various perspectives. Jenny Barker Devine’s On Behalf of the Family Farm: Iowa Farm Women’s Activism since 1945 contributes a feminist interpretation of twentieth-century Iowa farm women who engaged in political and local activities to preserve the family farm. Although working from an admittedly small number of farm women, Devine is particularly interested in tracing the post–World War II shift in rhetoric used to motivate women’s participation in agricultural organizations, from that of improving farms and their own voices, she surprisingly fails to connect her story with local communities to stemming their decline. Devine argues highly visible Populist women of the 1890s, such as Kansan Mary that farm women in Iowa—and, by extension, in Kansas and the Elizabeth Lease. These women, too, actively fought to save their Midwest—have been consistently attuned to agricultural issues midwestern farms, regardless of the discriminatory attitudes such as land and commodity prices, government policies, and that existed. True, Populism was less powerful in Iowa than in farm safety but have been less committed to rectifying gender other states, but, given the rising women’s rights movement
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