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BEAUTY IN THE SERVICE OF A POLITICAL AGENDA
By Dr. Ruth Schwartz Cowan
Historians of technology and historians of
agriculture have also taught us a lot about farm incomes,
as well as about the price of electrification and the price
of appliances in relation to farm income in the interwar years.
All of what we have learned about these matters leads to the
same conclusion: no one viewing Power in the Land
when it was first produced could possibly have believed that
the Parkinsons acquired all that equipment at one time. (Indeed,
as we now know, Bill Parkinson would not agree to have his
family and his farm filmed until he had been guaranteed that
he could keep most of the equipment free of charge.) Farm
incomes varied a good deal from year to year and from region
to region; $1135 was the average reported for 1935, right
in the middle of the Depression.[
ii ] The
per household startup costs for an REA co-operative (for a
generator, wiring and poles, labor, household outlets and
some small appliances) came to roughly $600 —more than
half of that average annual household income. The average
price of a refrigerator was $164 in that same year (prices
varied from $75 at the bottom of the line to almost $600 at
the top); an average electric cooking range cost $130, a water
heater was $73, a washing machine $66 and a table model radio
was $41.[ iii
] Indoor plumbing (a pump, piping,
a single toilet, two sinks—one for the kitchen, one
for a bathroom—a tub or a shower) was similarly expensive,
even with bottom of the line fixtures. Small wonder, then,
that REA officials had more than a little trouble getting
farmers to sign up. Small wonder, too, that they asked the
directors of Power in the Land to make a film that
would magnify the possible benefits of electrification without
once discussing, or even intimating, what the dollar cost
would be.
 Historians
who study the complex relations between gender, work and
technology can also help us to interpret Hazel Parkinson’s
enigmatic smile. In that concluding scene with the roast
which has just been cooked in an electric oven, she looks
both pleased and wary simultaneously. In many ways, that
ambivalent expression reflects the realities of farm lives
and farmer’s attitudes in the years between the two
world wars. In those years, American farm families lived
very differently from their urban and suburban contemporaries;
in the cities and suburbs the transition to industrialized
living had been almost completed; on the farms and in rural
towns the transition was still an ongoing process.
 Rural
lifestyles of the 1930s required enormous amounts of physical
labor, every day, from every member of the family: men,
women and children. When women cooked on wood-burning stoves,
their husbands and older sons hauled fuel, and the younger
children hauled ashes. Men and boys produced, gathered,
stored and processed wheat, corn and hay; women and girls
produced, processed and preserved vegetables and fruits.
Young girls milked cows; older girls and adult women made
cheese and butter—and also cared for the roosters,
hens and eggs. Cloth was bought from a store or a catalogue
(in earlier times, of course, yarn might have been spun
and woven at home) but women and girls made it up into shirts
and dresses and overalls. Men and boys cared for, butchered
and preserved cows and pigs; women and girls killed and
plucked poultry. All of this was hard work. On the Parkinson
farm, and thousands of others like it, everyone had to work
hard--mothers, fathers, children, hired hands-- in order
to maintain a minimal level of health and comfort.
[ ii ] From,
U.S. Department of Commerce, The Statistical History
of the United States from Colonial Times to the Present
(New York: Basic Books, 1976) pp. 457, 483 as used in Table
A.1 in Ronald Kline, Consumers in the Country: Technology
and Social Change in Rural America (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins Press, 2000) p. 285.
[ iii ]
These figures come from Electrical Merchandising and Radio
Retailing, Appliance Specifications and Directory, Including
Refrigerators and Radio Sets, 1936 (New York: McGraw
Hill, 1936) as tabulated in Kline, Consumers in the
Country, Table A12, p. 294.
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