Resistance to “modernity”: southern Illinois farm women and the cult of domesticity

Southern Illinois, a region culturally and geographically similar to Appalachia and the Ozarks, has long been characterized as "backward" by people in more urban and prosperous regions of the state and nation; farm women, both U.S. farm women in general and southern Illinois hill women in particular, have been similarly represented (see, for example, Brownell 1958; Elbert 1988; Levin 1965). These characterizations, which interpret the area's distinctive social forms and relative poverty as relics of a prior era, miscontrue the lived history of farming people in general and of the people of southern Illinois in particular. They conflate "modern" notions and practices, such as the efficient ordering of space and the definition of women as consumers confined to the domestic sphere, with participation in the modern world, despite the obvious fact that historically, farm families-and specifically farm women-produced many of the commodities that sustained urban populations. Through a close study of Union County in extreme southern Illinois, I analyze why most farm women did not readily adopt the forms of femininity that became hegemonic in national discourse and policy in 19th-century America. There are two strands to this analysis. First, following Foucault (1979), I focus on why they-and farmers in general-did not adopt many of the "disciplines" associated with the rationalized, efficient, scientific structures of modern life until after World War II. Second, I analyze why farm women did not readily adopt the "cult of domesticity" that informed the specific practices and ideology through which American women became "modern." Because household architecture is relatively permanent and tends to be remodeled rather than replaced, I will use it as one vehicle for understanding changing roles and self-perceptions. I argue in this article that the particular way farm women-both propertied and propertyless-engaged the developing industrial capitalist economy was significantly different from that of urban propertied women, who became the norm against which all other women were judged in media representations, government policies, and elite-dominated social practices. Specifically, farm women became petty commodity producers, supplying growing urban markets, even as industrialized commodity production undercut urban women's social productions and promoted the development of a putatively private domestic sphere. The separation of the urban home from commodity production gave rise, among the urban middle class, to the "cult of domesticity," which gave women a new role and status as consumers and as guardians of moCombining feminist historical analysis with Foucault's interpretation of "modernity" as the development of functional divisions of time and space in utilitarian, rationalized practices, this article examines the 20th-century transformation of southern Illinois farm women's lives and domestic architecture. It argues that farm women's integration into industrial capitalism as petty commodity producers, agriculture's unique relationship to nature, and precapitalist social relationships undergirded the persistence of many "premodern" forms of family organization. [women, rural United States, history, household organization, modernization]