Popular culture and academic perceptions typically view farmers of the past in one of two ways. On the one hand, we tend to emphasize their roles as producers of agricultural commodities, and marginalize or underemphasize their roles as consumers. On the other, we might believe that farmers were simply the passive recipients of broader societal trends and developments, and think that they followed in the footsteps of their urban counterparts. A small but growing number of scholars are engaging with these views, as they examine the consumption practices of rural North America. This historiography, however, is largely centered in the American context, and the key works north of the border concentrate on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Rural residents, however, continued to account for a sizable minority of the Canadian population into the mid-twentieth century. In order to begin to redress this gap, this study focuses on Ontario from 1900 to 1945. In terms of geographical location, Ontario is a logical choice, as it had the largest rural population of all the provinces in this period, and also had the most occupied farms. In contrast to the tendency to focus on broad, overarching sources, this study builds on the historiographical push to search for the voices of consumers. Specifically, it analyzes diaries and account books kept by farm families in the prime agricultural areas of Ontario. This central source base is supplemented by a range of other primary sources, including memoirs, the farm press, and the annual reports of the Women’s Institute, an influential rural women’s organization. The study argues that these families blended a myriad of provisioning practices, including household production, local exchange, participation in co-operative ventures, and formal purchasing to acquire the food and

https://scholars.wlu.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2919&context=etd

Grassroots Consumption: Ontario Farm Families’ Consumption Practices, 1900-45

Knotted together like roots in the darkness : Rural midwestern women and region: A bibliographic guide

Marie Howland (1836–1921) was an important working-class figure in the early U.S. women's movement who mounted an inspired challenge to separate spheres and the prevailing domestic ideology. Well before Edward Bellamy and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, she called for domestic work to be respected, paid, and collectively organized. Howland made it her life's work to remove barriers to economic independence for women through the overhaul of social and economic institutions that posited the home as the center of female existence and exploited workers. She wanted women to have the economic freedom to marry for love, not economic necessity, leave a bad marriage, survive widowhood, or not marry at all.

By delving into Howland's early years in rural New Hampshire and the Lowell textile mills, her close association with radical bohemians in New York City, and her later participation in experimental communities, the following treatise provides a long overdue, comprehensive account of her life and work. My inquiry reveals how Marie Howland promoted women's freedom within a class analysis, rejecting Marxism and embracing the utopian socialist theory of Charles Fourier. It also offers an in-depth look at her popular utopian novel, Papa's Own Girl, where a cooperative community of economically independent women and enlightened men replace the patriarchy and individual competitiveness of the emerging, but by no means entrenched, industrial order.

In addition, my treatise focuses on Howland's efforts to put ideas into practice. Unwilling to limit her activism to intellectual discussions, she lived in a Fourierist household in New York City, a cooperative settlement in western Mexico, and the single-tax community of Fairhope, Alabama. She pushed the Grange and the International Workingman's Association to focus on women's issues. She also made sure that her personal relationships with men were based on free love and mutual respect, not economic necessity and legal contract.

I also examine how Howland dedicated her life to changing gender and class relations, but made little effort to improve conditions for African Americans. Like many white reformers, she drew on popular scientific theories of biological difference to justify the unequal treatment of African Americans. Besides shedding light on important intellectual and social developments, like phrenology, free love, Fourierism, the Grange, and theosophy, this examination of Marie Howland reveals the complexities, possibilities, and limitations of the women's rights movement before the passage of the 19th Amendment.

"Marie Howland—19th‐Century Leader for Women's Economic Independence

"It's Very Little I Know about the Facts of Life to This Day": Speaking about the Silence Surrounding Sex

Farm families form an interesting case for the study of the relationship between the gender system and capitalism. In contrast to artisans, who were reduced to proletarian status during capitalist expansion, farmers retained their ownership of productive property; throughout the nineteenth century they produced not only their own subsistence but also commodities for sale in distant markets. Household and workplace were not separate; kinship-based authority relations governed labor as well. This fusion of the familial and the economic makes farm families' historical experience of capitalist transformation especially illuminating, for it reveals the interaction of gender with capitalist relations in a direct and relatively unmediated fashion. The ways that farm women and men participated in productive and reproductive labor were shaped by their own traditions of organizing work, not by the demands of the capitalist labor market that controlled their workingclass contemporaries. The expansion of commodity production that took place during the nineteenth century affected working relationships among women and men, but did not fundamentally transform them; rather than reshaping gender relations within the family, capitalist expansion provided a field upon which the contradictory dynamics of gender relations within farm families were played out. The valuation of women's work reveals the intersection of

https://www.jstor.org/stable/info/3346466

Nancy Grey Osterud

Papers

The Valuation of Women's Work: Gender and the Market in a Dairy Farming Community during the Late Nineteenth Century