Women Writing About Farm Women

University of Nebraska - Lincoln DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln Great Plains Quarterly Great Plains Studies, Center for Spring 1998 Women Writing About Farm Women Becky Faber University of Nebraska-Lincoln Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsquarterly Part of the Other International and Area Studies Commons Faber, Becky, "Women Writing About Farm Women" (1998). Great Plains Quarterly. 2027. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsquarterly/2027 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Great Plains Studies, Center for at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in Great Plains Quarterly by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. WOMEN WRITING ABOUT FARM WOMEN BECKY FABER I spent the first sixteen years of my life on I disliked that childhood. I found it confin Iowa farms. We lived in rural Adair County, ing and painful, contrary to the stereotype of Iowa, in an area that was remote, quietly tucked farm life being the ideal childhood. I couldn't about halfway between Des Moines and play with friends after school because I always Omaha. All I knew was rural life. My parents had to go home to gather eggs, wash eggs, pack were farmers, my grandparents were farmers, eggs, wash electric milkers, bring in the cows and most of my uncles and aunts were farmers. to be milked, and then help my mother in the The farm determined many elements of my house with domestic chores. The work was life. We raised much of our own food, butch painful and hard, and I found at an early age ered our own beef and pork, raised chickens that I was expected to work as much like an for eggs and meat, milked cows and sold the adult as possible. Carrying heavy buckets of cream, wore clothes that defined our tasks sour milk to feed to hogs in the midst of July such as overalls and chore boots-and social was hot, full of flies, and painful to my arms ized primarily with relatives and other farm and shoulders. Lifting bales of hay and scoop families in the immediate area. ing corn made me ache all over. But this was farm life. As soon as I could find a way to escape, I did. That means of escape was through books. I read as much as I could, starting in third or fourth grade with biographies, generally of fa Becky Faber is academic advisor for the College of Arts mous women. I would read about Abigail and Sciences at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Adams and Florence Nightingale and Amelia This is one of a series of articles she has published on Earhart, letting the excitement of their lives Cather and related literature of the Great Plains. fill me. As I approached junior high, I switched to romances-shallow, silly books that focused on being attractive for the right boy, the power [GPQ 18 (Spring 1998): 113-26] of the first kiss, and true love. Somewhere 113 114 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, SPRING 1998 around the age of fourteen, I moved to "real" In a recent interview, Jane Smiley noted literature. And it was at this point that I turned that to her, "the promise of fiction is the prom away from American literature and toward ise that everyone gets to speak, that every voice English literature, reading Jane Eyre, Wuthering is heard."l To begin looking for those voices, I Heights, and as much Shakespeare as I could narrowed my search in two ways. First, I de make myself understand. Later I ventured to cided to explore novels written about farm Les Miserables, shifting my reading tastes as far women by women. I wanted to clarify the fe away from my own life as possible. male voice as much as possible. Second, I de Many years later, when I began to teach cided to concentrate on the twentieth century. literature to high school students in a small My grandmother was born at the end of the town in west-central Nebraska, I would tell nineteenth century, so to explore three gen them that literature reflects society. I used erations of farm women's experience, I wanted that concept to help them connect with the to remain parallel to the stories that were im literature, to let them know that the ideas portant to me. expressed came from real people who had had According to the culture, these voices were real experiences, who lived lives in some way self-controlled. Women rarely spoke of their like theirs. To some extent, this idea worked lives to anyone outside the family or immedi for me as teacher. But, at some point, it broke ate community. Part of being a good farmwife down for me as a reader when I began to ex was enduring, being stoic and hardworking, plore where literature reflected the segment believing that one's lot in life was silently lived. of society in which I had been raised. Nonfiction accounts-letters, journals, and Ifliterature reflected society, then I should diaries-bear this out. Elizabeth Hampsten in have been able to find books about farm Read This Only to Yourself: The Private Writings women, an important segment of society from of Midwestern Women, 1880-1910 notes that my childhood. I knew that women had stories "the literature of working class women is the to tell. My paternal grandmother talked about literature of a class of women who have been her life when her children were young-the silent, and it bears few resemblances either to hard work, losing a child, and even the breach public literature ... or to the private writing with my grandfather when he insisted that my of men or of upper class women. To reach it, father drop out of school in the eighth grade one must read letters and diaries, for the and become their full-time hired man. I had thoughts of working women are recorded no likewise heard my mother talk about her where else."2 In Hampsten's work with mother's garden, the process of canning veg women's personal writings, she comments that etables during the Depression, the terror of privacy was a large issue, explaining that let being chased by a mean bull, and the excite ters were full of phrases such as "'Read this ment of going to town on Saturday night. I only to yourself,' 'Don't read aloud,' 'Keep also had my own set of stories. However, I these things to yourself,' and sometimes re couldn't recall ever reading a novel that re quests for a separate, secret reply in addition flected the experiences of the women in my to the main letter."3 Linda Hasselstrom de family. This was not just a void of matrilin fines this in her essay "How I Became a Bro eage. I had friends who were married to farm ken-In Writer" as "Show no pain. Our business ers but who worked outside the home; one of is no one else's. Introspection is a luxury, self my sisters was married to a farmer. In a literary analysis is a sign of weakness or dementia."4 world that seemed to be expanding in terms of And women's lives were so full of work-daily adding women's literature, I still could not work to be repeated at least six (and probably find the voices of my grandmother, my mother, seven) days per week-that they had little time my sister, my friends, or even myself. to record their lives. Hampsten explains that WRITING ABOUT FARM WOMEN 115 the lives of women, so seldom being given farm novels are in Nebraska, Iowa, Colorado, to mobility or progress, have scarcely ap or Kansas.8 What binds their experiences is peared in traditional history. Nor in the the rural setting and the consistency of the arts. Art is judged by how long it lasts, work involved. And so, why would one wa"nt whereas the most common artistry of to write about such lives? What could these women is occasional and impermanent: novels bring to a reader? And what can we food cooked, clothes sewn, letters written. find in these novels that runs parallel? These are consumed, worn out, thrown My beginning point in searching for away, and they go out of style or out of date women's farm novels was Roy Meyer's The if kept too long. So it is understandable Middle Western Farm Novel in the Twentieth that the usual focus of history upon chro Century. His annotated bibliography gave me nology and change should leave women out, a sufficient start to trace writers and novels for it is difficult to write about events that that enlarged my own independent research. do not happen, or about conditions of liv To provide a context for novels examin ing that hardly change. Women, by their ing farm life at the beginning of the century, own account, do all they can to keep stable consider these facts. According to the Bureau the lives of others in their care; they work of the Census, 37.5 percent of occupied Ameri so hard to see that as little as possible "hap cans were engaged in agriculture in 1900.9 The pens" that their writing obliges us to look number of people on farms in the United States deeper, to the very repetitive daily-ness that in 1910 was thirty-two million; for full-owner both literature and history have schooled farms, the ratio of debt to value was 27 per us away from.

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