Opening Windows onto Hidden Lives

Contents

Foreword by Jess Gilbert, Past President, Rural Sociological Society

Preface

Acknowledgments

Part 1: Hidden Windows, Hidden Lives

1. Opening Hidden Windows

2. “Agriculture Is Not the Whole of Country Life”

3. Women and Rural Society

4. Finding Women in the Division’s Research

5. The Test of Time

Part 2: Selected Bibliography

Citations from Sociology in Government: The Galpin-Taylor Years in the the Work of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1919–1953

Part 3: Reprints of Selected Publications

1. Woman’s Work on the Farm (1917)

2. The Woman on the Farm (1914)

3. Recommendations of the Committee (1919)

4. Farm Life Studies and Their Relation to Home Economics Work (1920)

Charles J. Galpin

5. The Advantages of Farm Life: A Study by Correspondence and Interviews with Eight Thousand Farm Women: Digest of an Unpublished Report (1924)

Emily Hoag Sawtelle

References

Index

“In this, their third book on the subject, Julie Zimmerman and pioneering rural sociologist Olaf Larson once again shed light on the often forgotten scholarship of the Division of Farm Population and Rural Life, which conducted groundbreaking social science research. As in their previous collaborations, Zimmerman and Larson document the wide-ranging nature of Division scholarship, focusing this time on studies that discuss the activities of rural and farm women. Their diligence in locating the rich data on women in Division reports is particularly impressive because most of this information is embedded within larger studies of rural living standards, farm labor and wages, and rural social organization. The book’s thorough bibliographic section and its reproduction of significant primary documents, including a 1924 report that was the Division’s only exclusive study of farm women, make it an invaluable resource for rural sociologists and historians of rural America.”

—Katherine Jellison, Ohio University; author of Entitled to Power: Farm Women and Technology, 1913–1963