Review of \u3ci\u3eFertile Ground, Narrow Choices: Women on Texas Cotton Farms, 1900 - 1940\u3c/i\u3e By Rebecca Sharpless

The examination of farm women\u27s experiences offers new perspectives on American agricultural communities. Rebecca Sharpless adds to our knowledge with this book on the women who worked the cotton fields of the east Texas Blackland Prairies in the first four decades of the twentieth century. The six chapters about family relations, housekeeping, food production, field work, communities, and the decline of the rural population spare no detail of poverty, racial discrimination, or the hopeful but constant and unrewarding migration of tenant families. Written with warmth, Sharpless\u27s account is not at all romantic or sentimental. The organization suggests patterns that framed the lives of farm women everywhere, but the rich detail drawn from oral histories and personal interviews creates a clear picture of cotton farm life and women\u27s roles distinct from those of women in other types of agricultural economies. The appeal of Fertile Ground, Narrow Choices nearly obscures some flaws. Sharpless tries to include the perspectives of white landowners and white, African American, and Hispanic tenants, but it becomes evident quickly that the resources do not adequately address the history of African American tenant families; and Hispanic tenant families are nearly invisible. Though landownership makes a great difference for these women, the stories of landowning women are entwined with those of the tenants, resulting in the blurring of class and race distinctions that were not only more visible, but often painful to the women of the tenant classes. Sharpless\u27s chapter on women\u27s field labor is her best. Here she demonstrates that women\u27s field work enabled tenant families to make a living, unveiling as she does so the ways women justified field work and violations of the gender concepts of their own race and class. This labor is portrayed in an apparently static economy, however. The reader with a general understanding of agricultural history will ask how a fluctuating farm economy and changing agricultural technology affected women\u27s lives on cotton farms, a matter raised only briefly in the final chapter. Detailing relationships among women of varying social groups, Sharpless reveals the bonds formed between women who could seldom count on finding the same neighbors down the road from year to year as well as the racial and class barriers that prevented women from offering friendship to one another. This perhaps is the characteristic that distinguishes cotton farm culture in the Blackland Prairies from other farming groups: multiple layers of division along lines of race and class in spite of ties of gender in a common economy and community. Sharpless concludes with an assessment of migration to towns and cities. The children of tenant farmers and landowners found city life and paychecks more appealing. Their parents often moved to town at retirement as well. In spite of new opportunities to earn money, there was also a sense of loss, which Sharpless mentions but does not elaborate. She seems to favor the move to the city as relief from the hardships of cotton farming and the crop-lien system, but gives little consideration to the difficulties of urban life and work

Review of \u3ci\u3e Consumers in the Country: Technology and Social Change in Rural America\u3c/i\u3e by Ronald R. Kline

Ronald Kline examines the acquisition and use of automobiles, electricity, telephones, and radios among farm families from the early twentieth century to 1960. He builds his argument around the tension between farm folk and the forces of urbanization in cities and towns, federal agencies such as REA and Extension Services, and corporations that manufactured and sold various technologies. While purveyors of machines and energy expected they would initiate urbanization of rural social and economic relationships, and that farm families who adopted them would therefore become modern, farmers resisted both the technologies and the assumptions of urbanization until they found the new gadgets useful enough to justify their expense. Even then, farmers befuddled the agents of directed change by incorporating the new technologies into existing patterns of communication, household and farm spending, and labor organization

Book Review: Profiting from the Plains: The Great Northern Railway and Corporate Development of the American West

A former colleague of mine once remarked of James J. Hill, with some emphasis, that he was a great man! This statement seems subject to some qualifications, which my colleague did not provide, but which Claire Strom offers in Profiting from the Plains. Hill, the empire builder, was a great man with many shortcomings, not the least of which was his conception of himself as a great man