Empowered Women, Better for Business
The Webb Publishing Company enjoyed a quick success with the Farmer’s Wife. One driver of that success was the company’s ingenious use of market segmentation: to advertisers, they pitched the publication as half-farm newspaper and half-women’s magazine, a hybrid publication uniquely capable of providing access to a supposedly untapped market hiding at the intersection of two valuable demographics: rural Americans and women. The rural demographic was valuable both for its size and its unrealized spending power. This spending power, Webb argued, could best be exploited through the women, not the men, because the “farm women pull the purse strings” in the family.1 In other words, the Farmer’s Wife was, at least in part, a business that sold access to farm women. According to the publisher, the typical farm woman was independent, accomplished, and assertive, a person with considerable business sense and a can-do attitude. Webb contrasted the resourceful farm wife with what it portrayed as the pampered, functionless housewife of the nation’s cities.2 Farm wives acted independently of their husbands; they were the decision-makers and the money-spenders for their households. Webb repeatedly used the “purse strings” as a metonym for women’s power: contrary to expectations, the woman, not the man, controlled them. It wasn’t just that women spent the money, but that they personally determined how and where it would be spent.
It’s difficult to assess the accuracy of this claim, and there’s considerable evidence to contradict it.3 The publisher seems to have anticipated this doubt: “Does it pay to advertise to her? Our advertising doubled in one year—it must pay.”4 Nevertheless, the price of a subscription to the magazine was never more than 50% that of a subscription to Ladies Home Journal, and at times was as low as 20%, which suggests farm women perhaps did not control the vast coffers of wealth that Webb wanted advertisers to believe they did. Webb nevertheless continued making this assertion year after year, which is significant because, even if it did not describe reality, the magazine certainly had an interest in working to bring such a reality into existence. If the farm woman didn’t actually spend her household income, then why would manufacturers and retailers bother to court her in advertisements? The magazine’s very business model, then, made it imperative that women achieve greater levels of autonomy, and the magazine did publish articles promoting more legal rights and financial independence for women.5
While the publisher’s vision of the farm woman’s role seems far from traditional, it’s impossible to say whether the magazine’s influence was truly progressive. Casey argues that, like most early twentieth century women’s magazines, “The Farmer’s Wife shares in [the] tendency to position the housewife as a consumer,”6 a move Webb undoubtedly made in courting retailers and manufacturers of everything from apparel to household appliances. Webb furthermore seemed to argue that a woman’s power rested on her status as a consumer, the “most powerful class of merchandise buyers in America.”7 The better life constantly invoked in the pages of the magazine was, at least in part, something that could be purchased: consider, for example, an advertisement from the February 1910 issue for the Mother’s Oats Free Fireless Cooker, “Is the kitchen your prison? Do you spend four or five hours a day cooking, everlastingly cooking? Don’t do it. Save those hours for yourself. You can use them as you choose, if you choose. Let the Mother’s Oats Free Fireless Cooker do the cooking for you.” The magazine, in turn, provided tantalizing suggestions on how to use all that extra time: read a serialized novel, learn to sing a song, beautify your home, or update your wardrobe. Month after month, the Farmer’s Wife helped women imagine the good life, and then showed them where they could buy it.
Progressive Era Context
The Farmer’s Wife might not have been truly progressive, but it was very much a product of the Progressive Era, especially in its emphasis on social uplift and its fetid paternalistism. The state of rural America had become a concern within the Federal Government, where policymakers increasingly feared that degraded conditions in rural areas might result in a failure of the food supply to meet the demands of the nation’s rapidly growing urban population. In particular they were concerned by the population exodus from rural to urban areas, and believed that deficiencies in rural life made farming unattractive to young people: a shortage of farmers would mean a shortage of food. In 1908 (three years after Webb purchased the Farmer’s Wife) President Theodore Roosevelt appointed a Country Life Commission. The Commission was tasked with investigating problems in rural America, and recommending solutions to those problems. A key problem identified by the Commission was inadequate education, especially for adults. The Commission found that farmers and their wives would benefit from access to better information on farming and homemaking. To achieve this objective the Commission recommended an expansion of the farm extension services.8 The purpose of farm extension was to establish, in each county, an agent who would share with farmers the knowledge coming from the land grant universities. In other words, the agent would bring college education directly to the farmers. In the language of the Commission’s report, this enterprise took on an almost moral imperative: “It is to the extension department of these colleges, if properly conducted, that we must now look for the most effective rousing of the people on the land.”9
After the Commission submitted its report, the real work of implementing its recommendations was carried out by an informal alliance of organizations and individuals. Their collective efforts became known as the Country Life Movement.
While education was philosophically foundational to the Country Life Movement, consumer goods were to play a role as well, and retailers like Sears Roebuck were among the earliest philanthropic supporters of extension services to women: “Sears, Roebuck recognized the links between its fortunes and the farmers’ and it acted accordingly”.10 Publishers like Webb and retailers like Sears all wanted to make money, but the ideological connections to the Country Life Movement are real—the Farmer’s Wife covered the Country Life Movement in its pages, and even hosted a conference on it.11 The Farmer’s Wife, along with other participants in the Country Life Movement, all fundamentally believed that rural lives could be improved through better information supplied by technical experts. On the subject of child rearing, for example, the Farmer’s Wife promoted a scientific approach, which mothers could learn through the magazine itself, and could implement by using the products advertised in its pages: “Science speaks no longer with uncertain sound as to the fact that controllable parental conditions may influence the physical vigor and beauty of the child.”12 Advertisements increasingly boasted the sanction of science, as in the Cocomalt advertisement from October, 1932, “accepted by the Committee on Foods of the American Medical Association.”
Indicators of expertise, like medical degrees and university affiliations, became important in author bylines as well. Medical experts alone could be trusted to explain the mysteries of health to rural women.13 These experts wrote with an intent to educate mothers whom they often viewed as, at best, benighted, but at times appallingly negligent, as in the article “Why Do Babies Die? Mothers through Ignorance Kill their Darlings” by Leonard Keene Hirshberg, M.D. (February, 1914), or “Our Starving Well-Fed Children,” in which Dr. Caroline Hedger explains how ignorance, and not lack of food or even lack of money, causes mothers to starve their own children.14 Walter R. Ramsey, whose credentials included an M.D., an Associate Professorship in Diseases of Children at the University of Minnesota, and a position as Director of the Children’s Hospital—Dr. Ramsey specialized in articles that today would probably be considered click bait: “Are Your Children Healthy?” and “Is Your Child Well-Fed?” were two of his regular columns in the magazine. Readers, in turn, were quick to appropriate scientific discourse in their own letters to the magazine: “Having had some experience in the training of children and from observing others, I cannot state too emphatically my firm belief in beginning from the very first to train the tiny infant,” wrote Mrs. George Gerzema. On the same page another reader cautioned mothers, “I do not believe in drinking at meals at anytime. It detracts from thorough mastication, which is the great essential to good digestion. This disregard of thorough chewing is responsible for 99 percent of all gastric troubles.”15
The earliest managing editor of the Farmer’s Wife was the publisher’s sister, Dr. Ella Webb, a graduate of the Women’s Medical College, Philadelphia (now part of the Drexel University College of Medicine). Dr. Webb had been a practicing physician for nineteen years before joining the magazine. Born in India to missionary parents, she brought a missionary zeal to her work with Midwestern farm families. Like religious missionaries, she was never really part of the communities whose interests she claimed to serve. She bestowed her advice liberally and emphatically, but her articles often reveal a failure to connect with the lives of her readers, many of whom would probably never be able to use this advice, as farm women had little spare time for the supererogation of new initiatives she prescribed. Her most common concession to this challenge was a promise that her advice would, if correctly and diligently followed, save her readers time in the long run. Unfortunately, when time is at a premium, the “the long run” is often a luxury that must be sacrificed to the urgent. It seems doubtful whether Dr. Webb, who, like her brother, was accustomed to live-in servants,16 —it is doubtful whether she herself experienced many of the problems on which she so glibly claimed to be an expert.
The Webbs’ missionary certitude became, for the magazine, an animating ethos—not the religion, but the fervor for personal improvement. This missionary ethos aligned well with the Country Life Movement, which sought “to make rural civilization as effective and satisfying as other civilizations,” a summation that could just as easily describe other forms of missionary work. An account of a lecture given by Dr. Webb, awkwardly titled “The Physical Laws of Life in Relation of the Family,” burns salvifically-hot: “[Dr. Webb] urged thorough sanitation in the farm house […] She advised the absolute extermination of the domestic fly by the removal or disinfection of all breeding places.” 17 These exhortations call her recreant audience to repentance and reform (go forth and clean!) and are not unlike the moral purity initiatives Jane Addams embraced in Chicago.18 It’s unclear how such advice was received, as the magazine of course selected the letters it chose to print. There is, however, much evidence that the Country Life Movement’s message of “rural uplift” was frequently resented: “Country Life reformers lacked actual roots in the workaday rural world and therefore were without any real rapport with farmers. Removed from immediate contact with the soil and not harassed by the difficulties that beset those in farming, they appeared to be both urban and condescending to many farm people. Their advice, moreover, was unsolicited and given with self-assumed wisdom.”19
The Country Life Movement, usually dated 1900 to 1940, roughly paralleled the life of the magazine: in 1939 Webb sold the Farmer’s Wife to the Philadelphia publisher Farm Journal, Inc., which immediately merged the magazine with its flagship monthly, Farm Journal, to form Farm Journal and Farmer’s Wife. Within six years the publisher had dropped the “Farmer’s Wife” brand, and Farm Journal reverted to its original title, suggesting the Progressive Era moment, of which the Farmer’s Wife had formed a part, was over. The magazine remains, however, an important artifact of early twentieth century Midwestern history.
Notes
1. Webb claimed that “two-thirds of the population of this country live in the country”. N.W. Ayer and Son’s American Newspaper Annual (N.W. Ayer and Son, 1909), 1289; the publisher also claimed that “farm folks are the most prosperous class in America”. N.W. Ayer and Son’s American Newspaper Annual and Directory (N.W. Ayer and Son, 1913), 1343.
2. Janet Galligani Casey draws attention to two articles from the magazine that make this invidious comparison between the farm wife and city housewife explicit. Janet Galligani Casey, “‘This Is YOUR Magazine’: Domesticity, Agrarianism, and The Farmer’s Wife,” American Periodicals: A Journal of History & Criticism 14, no. 2 (2004): 191, https://doi.org/10.1353..
3. Katherine Jellison argues that women had very little independence, and less control over where farm capital was spent; she also observes that farm women were viewed more as producers than consumers. See Katherine Jellison, Entitled to Power: Farm Women and Technology, 1913-1963 (The University of North Carolina Press, 1993).
4. N.W. Ayer and Son’s American Newspaper Annual (N.W. Ayer and Son, 1907), 1177.
5. See, for example, the long series of articles on women’s rights under the law, beginning with Marjorie Shuler, “Do Your Laws Protect You?,” Farmer’s Wife, April 1927, 208.
6. Casey, “This Is YOUR Magazine,” 181.
7. N.W. Ayer and Son’s American Newspaper Annual and Directory, 1343.
8. United States Country Life Commission, Report of the Country Life Commission and Special Message from the President of the United States., with Liberty Hyde Bailey (Printed for free distribution by the Chamber of Commerce, 1909), 52–53.
9. United States Country Life Commission, Report of the Country Life Commission and Special Message from the President of the United States., 53.
10. Jellison, Entitled to Power: Farm Women and Technology, 1913-1963, 16; See also: Marilyn Irvin Holt, Linoleum, Better Babies and the Modern Farm Woman, 1890-1930, 1st ed. (University of New Mexico Press, 1995); See also: William L. Bowers, The Country Life Movement in America, 1900-1920 (Kennikat Press, 1974), 20.
11. The conference was held at the Edgewater Beach Hotel in Chicago, from March 8-11, 1926.
12. “The Kingdom of Motherhood,” Prairie Farmer, March 16, 1895, 11.
13. See, for example, Caroline Hedger, M.D., “The Health of the Farm Woman,” Farmer’s Wife, January 1931, 26–27.
14. Harriet S. Flagg, “Our Starving Well-Fed Children,” The Farmer’s Wife, April 1921, 408.
15. “Our Home Club,” Farmer’s Wife, December 1909, 6; Between 1880 and 1930 there was a rapid growth of interest in what contemporaries called “physical culture,” a belief that good health could be promoted through a properly regulated diet and fitness regimen. See Dennis Allen, “Physical Culture,” in Encyclopedia of Sex and Gender, ed. Fedwa Malti-Douglas (Detroit, Mich.: Macmillan Reference, 2007), 1141.
16. According to census records, the Webbs employed live-in servants.
17. For more on the country life movement, see L. H. Bailey, The Country-Life Movement in the United States (Macmillan Co., 1911), 1; For biographical information on the Webbs, see: “[Funeral Notice for Ella Webb],” Morning Journal (Lancaster, Pa.), November 24, 1914, 9; and: Distinguished Successful Americans of Our Day: Containing Biographies of Prominent Americans Now Living (Successful Americans, 1912), 397. See also United States Decennial Census enumeration forms for 1860, 1870, 1880, 1900, and 1910. On Dr. Webb’s lecture, see: “Rural Schools Need Attention: Speaker at Dry Farm Congress Urges More Attention to Conservation: Traces Development of Agricultural Education,” Montana Daily Record (Helena, Mont.), October 19, 1911, 8.
18. See, for example, Rima Lunin Schultz, “Jane Addams, Apotheosis of Social Christianity,” Church History 84, no. 1 (2015): 207-19.
19. Bowers, The Country Life Movement in America, 1900-1920, 104