It’s difficult to assess the accuracy of this claim, and there\u2019s considerable evidence to contradict it.3<\/sup><\/strong> The publisher seems to have anticipated this doubt: \u201cDoes it pay to advertise to her? Our advertising doubled in one year\u2014it must pay.\u201d4<\/sup><\/strong> Nevertheless, the price of a subscription to the magazine was never more than 50% that of a subscription to Ladies Home Journal<\/em>, 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\u2019t actually spend her household income, then why would manufacturers and retailers bother to court her in advertisements? The magazine\u2019s 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<\/sup><\/strong><\/p>\n While the publisher\u2019s vision of the farm woman\u2019s role seems far from traditional, it\u2019s impossible to say whether the magazine\u2019s influence was truly progressive. Casey argues that, like most early twentieth century women\u2019s magazines, \u201cThe Farmer\u2019s Wife<\/em> shares in [the] tendency to position the housewife as a consumer,\u201d6<\/sup><\/strong> 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\u2019s power rested on her status as a consumer, the \u201cmost powerful class of merchandise buyers in America.\u201d7<\/sup><\/strong> 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\u2019s Oats Free Fireless Cooker, \u201cIs the kitchen your prison? Do you spend four or five hours a day cooking, everlastingly<\/em> cooking? Don\u2019t do it. Save<\/em> those hours for yourself<\/em>. You can use them as you choose, if<\/em> you choose. Let the Mother\u2019s Oats Free Fireless Cooker do the cooking for<\/em> you.\u201d 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\u2019s Wife<\/em> helped women imagine the good life, and then showed them where they could buy it.<\/p>\n The Farmer\u2019s Wife<\/em> 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 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\u2019s 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\u2019s Wife<\/em>) 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<\/sup> <\/strong>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\u2019s report, this enterprise took on an almost moral imperative: \u201cIt is to the\u00a0extension department of these colleges, if properly conducted, that we must now look for the most effective rousing of the people on the land.\u201d9<\/sup><\/strong><\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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: \u201cSears, Roebuck recognized the links between its fortunes and the farmers\u2019 and it acted accordingly\u201d.10<\/sup><\/strong> Publishers like Webb and retailers like Sears all wanted to make money, but the ideological connections to the Country Life Movement are real\u2014the Farmer’s Wife<\/em> covered the Country Life Movement in its pages, and even hosted a conference on it.11<\/sup><\/strong> The Farmer\u2019s Wife<\/em>, 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\u2019s Wife<\/em> promoted a scientific approach, which mothers could learn through the magazine itself, and could implement by using the products advertised in its pages: \u201cScience speaks no longer with uncertain sound as to the fact that controllable parental conditions may influence the physical vigor and beauty of the child.\u201d12<\/sup><\/strong> Advertisements increasingly boasted the sanction of science, as in the Cocomalt advertisement from October, 1932, \u201caccepted by the Committee on Foods of the American Medical Association.\u201d<\/p>\n 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<\/sup><\/strong> 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 \u201cWhy Do Babies Die? Mothers through Ignorance Kill their Darlings\u201d by Leonard Keene Hirshberg, M.D. (February, 1914), or \u201cOur Starving Well-Fed Children,\u201d 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<\/sup><\/strong> 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\u2019s Hospital\u2014Dr. Ramsey specialized in articles that today would probably be considered click bait: \u201cAre Your Children Healthy?\u201d and \u201cIs Your Child Well-Fed?\u201d 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: \u201cHaving 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,\u201d wrote Mrs. George Gerzema. On the same page another reader cautioned mothers, \u201cI 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.\u201d15<\/sup><\/strong><\/p>\n The earliest managing editor of the Farmer\u2019s Wife<\/em> was the publisher\u2019s sister, Dr. Ella Webb, a graduate of the Women\u2019s 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 \u201cthe long run\u201d 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<\/sup><\/strong> \u2014it is doubtful whether she herself experienced many of the problems on which she so glibly claimed to be an expert.<\/p>\n The Webbs\u2019 missionary certitude became, for the magazine, an animating ethos\u2014not the religion, but the fervor for personal improvement. This missionary ethos aligned well with the Country Life Movement, which sought \u201cto make rural civilization as effective and satisfying as other civilizations,\u201d a summation that could just as easily describe other forms of missionary work. An account of a lecture given by Dr. Webb, awkwardly titled \u201cThe Physical Laws of Life in Relation of the Family,\u201d burns salvifically-hot: \u201c[Dr. Webb] urged thorough sanitation<\/em> in the farm house [\u2026] She advised the absolute extermination<\/em> of the domestic fly by the removal or disinfection of all breeding places.\u201d 17<\/sup><\/strong> 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<\/sup><\/strong> It\u2019s 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\u2019s message of \u201crural uplift\u201d was frequently resented: \u201cCountry 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.\u201d19<\/sup><\/strong><\/p>\n The Country Life Movement, usually dated 1900 to 1940, roughly paralleled the life of the magazine: in 1939 Webb sold the Farmer\u2019s Wife<\/em> to the Philadelphia publisher Farm Journal, Inc., which immediately merged the magazine with its flagship monthly, Farm Journal<\/em>, to form Farm Journal and Farmer\u2019s Wife<\/em>. Within six years the publisher had dropped the \u201cFarmer\u2019s Wife\u201d brand, and Farm Journal<\/em> reverted to its original title, suggesting the Progressive Era moment, of which the Farmer’s Wife<\/em> had formed a part, was over. The magazine remains, however, an important artifact of early twentieth century Midwestern history.<\/p>\n 1.<\/strong> Webb claimed that \u201ctwo-thirds of the population of this country live in the country\u201d. N.W. Ayer and Son\u2019s American Newspaper Annual<\/em> (N.W. Ayer and Son, 1909), 1289; the publisher also claimed that \u201cfarm folks are the most prosperous class in America\u201d. N.W. Ayer and Son\u2019s American Newspaper Annual and Directory<\/em> (N.W. Ayer and Son, 1913), 1343.<\/p>\n 2.<\/strong> 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, \u201c\u2018This Is YOUR Magazine\u2019: Domesticity, Agrarianism, and The Farmer\u2019s Wife,\u201d American Periodicals: A Journal of History & Criticism<\/em> 14, no. 2 (2004): 191, https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1353..<\/p>\n 3.<\/strong> 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<\/em> (The University of North Carolina Press, 1993).<\/p>\n 4.<\/strong> N.W. Ayer and Son\u2019s American Newspaper Annual<\/em> (N.W. Ayer and Son, 1907), 1177.<\/p>\n 5.<\/strong> See, for example, the long series of articles on women\u2019s rights under the law, beginning with Marjorie Shuler, \u201cDo Your Laws Protect You?,\u201d Farmer\u2019s Wife<\/em>, April 1927, 208.<\/p>\n 6.<\/strong> Casey, \u201cThis Is YOUR Magazine,\u201d 181.<\/p>\n 7.<\/strong> N.W. Ayer and Son\u2019s American Newspaper Annual and Directory<\/em>, 1343.<\/p>\n 8.<\/strong> United States Country Life Commission, Report of the Country Life Commission and Special Message from the President of the United States.<\/em>, with Liberty Hyde Bailey (Printed for free distribution by the Chamber of Commerce, 1909), 52\u201353.<\/p>\n 9.<\/strong> United States Country Life Commission, Report of the Country Life Commission and Special Message from the President of the United States.<\/em>, 53.<\/p>\n 10.<\/strong>\u00a0Jellison, Entitled to Power: Farm Women and Technology, 1913-1963<\/em>, 16; See also: Marilyn Irvin Holt, Linoleum, Better Babies and the Modern Farm Woman, 1890-1930<\/em>, 1st ed. (University of New Mexico Press, 1995); See also: William L. Bowers, The Country Life Movement in America, 1900-1920<\/em> (Kennikat Press, 1974), 20.<\/p>\n 11.<\/strong> The conference was held at the Edgewater Beach Hotel in Chicago, from March 8-11, 1926.<\/p>\n 12.<\/strong> \u201cThe Kingdom of Motherhood,\u201d Prairie Farmer<\/em>, March 16, 1895, 11.<\/p>\n 13.<\/strong> See, for example, Caroline Hedger, M.D., \u201cThe Health of the Farm Woman,\u201d Farmer\u2019s Wife<\/em>, January 1931, 26\u201327.<\/p>\n 14.<\/strong> Harriet S. Flagg, \u201cOur Starving Well-Fed Children,\u201d The Farmer\u2019s Wife<\/em>, April 1921, 408.<\/p>\n 15.<\/strong> \u201cOur Home Club,\u201d Farmer\u2019s Wife<\/em>, December 1909, 6; Between 1880 and 1930 there was a rapid growth of interest in what contemporaries called \u201cphysical culture,\u201d a belief that good health could be promoted through a properly regulated diet and fitness regimen. See Dennis Allen, \u201cPhysical Culture,\u201d in Encyclopedia of Sex and Gender<\/em>, ed. Fedwa Malti-Douglas (Detroit, Mich.: Macmillan Reference, 2007), 1141.<\/p>\n 16.<\/strong> According to census records, the Webbs employed live-in servants.<\/p>\n 17.<\/strong> For more on the country life movement, see L. H. Bailey, The Country-Life Movement in the United States<\/em> (Macmillan Co., 1911), 1; For biographical information on the Webbs, see: \u201c[Funeral Notice for Ella Webb],\u201d Morning Journal<\/em> (Lancaster, Pa.), November 24, 1914, 9; and: Distinguished Successful Americans of Our Day: Containing Biographies of Prominent Americans Now Living<\/em> (Successful Americans, 1912), 397. See also United States Decennial Census enumeration forms for 1860, 1870, 1880, 1900, and 1910. On Dr. Webb\u2019s lecture, see: \u201cRural Schools Need Attention: Speaker at Dry Farm Congress Urges More Attention to Conservation: Traces Development of Agricultural Education,\u201d Montana Daily Record<\/em> (Helena, Mont.), October 19, 1911, 8.<\/p>\n 18<\/strong>. See, for example, Rima Lunin Schultz, \u201cJane Addams, Apotheosis of Social Christianity,” Church History<\/em> 84, no. 1 (2015): 207-19.<\/p>\n 19.<\/strong> Bowers, The Country Life Movement in America, 1900-1920<\/em>, 104<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Empowered Women, Better for Business The Webb Publishing Company enjoyed a quick success with the Farmer\u2019s Wife. One driver of that success was the company\u2019s 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":40,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[46,96],"tags":[91,103],"class_list":["post-8521","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hpnl","category-idnc","tag-farm-newspapers","tag-farmers-wife"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.library.illinois.edu\/hpnl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8521","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.library.illinois.edu\/hpnl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.library.illinois.edu\/hpnl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.library.illinois.edu\/hpnl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/40"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.library.illinois.edu\/hpnl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8521"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.library.illinois.edu\/hpnl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8521\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8710,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.library.illinois.edu\/hpnl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8521\/revisions\/8710"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.library.illinois.edu\/hpnl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8521"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.library.illinois.edu\/hpnl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8521"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.library.illinois.edu\/hpnl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8521"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Progressive Era Context<\/h2>\n
![\"Headline](\"http:\/\/wordpress.library.illinois.edu\/hpnl\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/19\/2025\/12\/cream-of-wheat-1024x236.jpg\")
Notes<\/h2>\n