The Midwest Farmer S Daughter

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.

From yesterday's gingham girls to today's Farmer Janes, The Midwest Farmer's Daughter unearths the untold history and renewed cultural currency of an American icon at a time when fully 30 percent of new farms in the US are woman-owned. From farm women bloggers, to back-to-the-land homesteaders and seed-savers, to rural graphic novelists and, ultimately, to the seven generations of farm daughters who have animated his own family since before the Civil War, the author travels across the region to shine new documentary light on this seedbed for American virtue, energy, and ingenuity. Packed with many memorable interviews, print artifacts, and historic images, this groundbreaking documentary history describes the centuries-long reiteration and reinterpretation of agrarian daughters in the field, over the airwaves, on the printed page, and in the court of public opinion. Offering a sweeping cultural and social history, it ranges widely and well from Jane Smiley's Pulitzer Prize-winning A Thousand Acres to Laura Ingalls Wilder's proto-feminist commentaries for the Missouri Ruralist; from the critical importance of rural girls and young women to time-honored organizations such as the Farm Bureau, 4-H, and FFA to the entrepreneurial role today's female agriculturalists and sustainable farm advocates play in farmers' markets, urban farms, and community-supported agriculture. For all those whose lives have been graced by the enduring strength of this regional and national touchstone, The Midwest Farmer's Daughter offers a one-of-a-kind scholarly examination and contemporary appreciation.

This first-ever encyclopedia of the Midwest seeks to embrace this large and diverse area, to give it voice, and help define its distinctive character. Organized by topic, it encourages readers to reflect upon the region as a whole. Each section moves from the general to the specific, covering broad themes in longer introductory essays, filling in the details in the shorter entries that follow. There are portraits of each of the region's twelve states, followed by entries on society and culture, community and social life, economy and technology, and public life. The book offers a wealth of information about the region's surprising ethnic diversity -- a vast array of foods, languages, styles, religions, and customs -- plus well-informed essays on the region's history, culture and values, and conflicts. A site of ideas and innovations, reforms and revivals, and social and physical extremes, the Midwest emerges as a place of great complexity, signal importance, and continual fascination.

Those personal accounts resurrect the essential experience of children's work, play, education, family relations, and coming of age from their own perspectives. Steering a middle path between the myth of wholesome farm life and the reality of work that was often extremely dangerous, Riney-Kehrberg shows both the best and the worst that a rural upbringing had to offer midwestern youth a time before mechanization forever changed the rural scene and radio broke the spell of isolation. Down on the farm, truancy was not uncommon and chores were shared across genders. Yet farm children managed to indulge in inventive play---much of it homemade---to supplement store-bought toys and to get through the long spells between circuses.

A rich exploration of friendship and heartache in the Midwest." - Kirkus ReviewsVal Van Dyke has just won a cruise to Alaska - and it couldn't come at a better time for this rural Wisconsinite. On the verge of turning the big 5-0, the former world traveler has found herself constrained in recent years - by her job and her marriage to a much younger husband, who has grown as distant as the far-flung places to which she once traveled. Her lifelong friends are facing similar ruts. Former prom queen Crystal Brenner now tips the scale at three-hundred pounds and has to balance taking care of a child with Down syndrome and a verbally abusive live-in-father. Penny Hansen, who has that typical "middle child" mentality of appeasing everyone, finds herself constantly at war with her obstinate teenage daughter. So, when Val invites Crystal and Penny to join her on the cruise, it offers the friends a welcome respite from their daily routine and the exciting chance to revisit the carefree days of their youth. But as they prepare to embark on their vacation, things begin to unravel in their personal lives, leading them to reassess choices, reveal long-held secrets and confront a life-or-death crisis that will change their friendship forever. "Alternately humorous and heartbreaking, the novel is an incisive triple portrait of the way small choices shape the courses of people's lives." - Kirkus Reviews

Farm and Factory illuminates the importance of the Midwest in U.S. labor history. America's heartland - often overlooked in studies focusing on other regions, or particular cities or industries - has a distinctive labor history characterized by the sustained, simultaneous growth of both agriculture and industry. Since the transfer of labor from farm to factory did not occur in the Midwest until after World War II, industrialists recruited workers elsewhere, especially from Europe and the American South. The region's relatively underdeveloped service sector - shaped by the presumption that goods were more desirable than service - ultimately led to agonizing problems of adjustment as agriculture and industry evolved in the late twentieth century.