Rural women's work and role in community building and institution building in Indiana from 1900-1980

Kathy Kay Miller, Purdue University

Abstract

Research on rural and farm women's work has long been overlooked or minimized and the significance of their contributions to their family's and farm's well-being. This research examines over time women's work and contributions to their family's economic and social well-being. Women's lives are documented by over 250 oral histories done by the Indiana Extension Homemaker Association Oral History Project in the late 1970's and early 1980's that reveal women's lives from the 1880's to 1980's. Second, the oral histories address how women's labor contributed to informal kin and neighborhood networks and built a sense of community that reinforced and was reinforced by local institutions. In addition, models of community have traditionally posed community in decline and replaced by society due to forces of urbanization, immigration and industrialization. These models, however, are unilinear and static. As documented by the Country Life Commission Surveys done in 1908-1909 of 100,000 farm families and thirty public hearings across the United States, farm women stated that community did not exist at a time and place when it was assumed to be present. Farm women requested help from institutions to facilitate community. By analyzing women's work on and of the farm, paid and unpaid work and their active involvement in extension homemaker clubs, churches, schools and other organizations, the connections between formal and informal networks is revealed. Finally, this research allows the voices of rural women to be heard as they describe their lives and the institutions they helped to build and maintain.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Finke, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Families & family life|Personal relationships|Sociology|American history|Womens studies|American studies

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