Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

W hen Thomas Jefferson envisioned an ideal United States inhabited by yeomen farmers, he offered few insights into the roles he thought farm women should fill in the new republic. Farm women were, in essence, invisible to the founding fathers and their ideological descendents: expected to perform domestic tasks and whatever else needed to be done, but not offered – or allowed to claim – a place in the nation. Their only legitimate way to participate was as Republican mothers, whose task it was to raise virtuous and patriotic sons, and not as women accorded equal or even complementary status with men. Historians have likewise traditionally accorded farm women little attention. While in recent decades women have been the subjects of extensive historical investigation, rural men and women for the most part have not been at the center of study, in spite of their numerical preponderance in the population. Interested in change, historians have assumed that cities, not the countryside, should be the focus of their inquiry. While few viewed rural areas as frozen in time, historians of the nineteenth century have tended to characterize rural areas as traditional, more like the colonial past than the emerging urban, industrial, heterogeneous, conflict-laden, reform-minded future. Even those influenced by Frederick Jackson Turner have focused on the closing of the frontier as the symbolic ... log in or subscribe to read full text