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BEAUTY IN THE SERVICE OF A POLITICAL AGENDA
By Dr. Ruth Schwartz Cowan
 Survey
after survey of farm men and women between the wars revealed
that modernization seemed a very mixed blessing to them.
Well, yes, making work easier and incomes higher, that would
be a very good thing—but changing everything about
the way we work, day in and day out, well, that’s
not quite so attractive. Here’s one telling example
out of many: when farm women were asked what appliances
they most wanted to purchase, electric ranges (like the
one in Hazel Parkinson cooked that roast) and refrigerators
were almost always at the bottom of the list. The reasons
for this low priority were complex but, interestingly enough,
not always primarily related to the price of the appliances.
Many farm women liked to cook and did not regard cooking
on wood or coal burning stoves as especially taxing, since
someone else had to deal with the heavy lifting of fuel
and ashes. Cooking on such a stove was very skilled work;
farm women were proud of their skills and looked forward
to passing those skills on to their daughters; electric
ranges did not require nearly as much skill. Most important
of all, no electric range on the market was large enough
for the important work of canning. Canning, of course, was
the way in which farm women and girls preserved farm produce
for off season use. If you were canning and if you had a
few dairy cows, well then, why would you need a refrigerator?
Some farm women told the survey takers that they would rather
have electric incubators for chicks than ranges or refrigerators;
more chicks meant more chicken and eggs to sell on the market,
more income for the family—without anyone having to
leave the farm to go out to work. Others women said they
wanted their husbands to purchase tractors instead of kitchen
appliances. With a tractor fewer hired hands would be needed;
this would lower the number of mouths to be fed at dinner
time. The labor of cooking and serving would be reduced
while family privacy would be enhanced—and there would
be no alteration in the traditional allocation of work roles.[
v ]
All
these surveys led to the same, crucial conclusion. Reasonably
prosperous farmers, people who had managed to hold on to
their farms during the Depression, people who had decided
to stay on their farms when their neighbors had given up
and headed for the city-- the very people that Power
in the Land depicted, the audience that it was made
to attract--these people wanted to modernize without disrupting
their traditional way of life; they wanted what we might
call conservative modernization.
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All of which helps to explain why Hazel
Parkinson looks pleased, but not enthusiastic, about her
new electric range. It also explains why the filmmakers
spent so much time, money and energy insuring that the Power
in the Land would be both beautiful and respectful
of the traditional, hard-working patterns of farm life.
The film had to convey the impression that modernization
could be accomplished without destroying tradition. It had
to emphasize the positive aspects of modernization--improved
health, better opportunities for education, more leisure
for everyone, less physically taxing labor-- while simultaneously
ignoring the negative aspects, which were very much on everyone’s
mind during those Depression years: the deskilling of work,
the devaluing of manual labor, less need for children to
respect and learn from their parents; less need for parental
co-operation and co-ordination. Farm men and women knew
about these negative aspects, they knew from listening to
the radio, from reading their newspapers, from corresponding
with friends and relations who had moved away. Power
in the Land had to work hard to counter those negative
messages about modernization.
Like Hazel Parkinson who couldn’t
bring herself to smile unabashedly (and who, one of her
grandchildren recalled, went right back to using her wood
burning stove after the film crews had departed) American
farmers were going to be a skeptical audience for the REA
message. Power in the Land needed to be beautiful—and
to honor the special qualities that conservative farmers
cherished about their way of life--in order to be persuasive.
[
v ] These surveys of rural women’s
attitudes are discussed in Jellison, Entitled to Power
and in Kline, Consumers in the Country. Both books
have tables which demonstrate that rural households most
resisted the appliances which would alter household work
patterns the most. The two most popular appliances on farms
in the 1930s were, significantly, irons and radios.
Ruth Schwartz Cowan is a professor at the
University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. She is an historian
of science, technology and medicine, whose scholarship focuses
on many aspects of the relationship between technological
change and gender. She is the author of several books and
many articles, including More Work for Mother;
The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth
to the Microwave. For more information, see her web
site at http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/hss2/hss/faculty/fc_cowan.html
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