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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. Continue reading “The Story of the “Farmer’s Wife” (Part 2)” →

Beclouded Beginnings and Suspicious Name Games

Little is known about the origins of the Farmer’s Wife. It might have begun publication in 1897, but more likely 1900, in Winona, Minnesota. Its first publisher was John Halvor Johnson, who went by “J.H.” just about everywhere except his gravestone. The son of Norwegian immigrants, Johnson was a traveling salesman turned investor: he began with buying-and-selling newspapers and ended with real estate. His first big investment was the Winona Daily Herald, which he purchased in 1890 and sold ten years later.¹ He then began launching new publications under the names of recently-abandoned titles. For example, in 1892 Farm, Field and Stockman changed its name to Farm, Field and Fireside, and that same year Johnson began publishing a monthly under the title Farm, Field and Stockman, which he later sold to the Model Farmer Publishing Company of Chicago. Similarly, in 1900 the weekly American Stock Farm changed its name, shortly after which Johnson began a monthly using that title as well.²

Continue reading “The Story of the “Farmer’s Wife” (Part 1)” →