Fertile Ground: Women, Modernism, Rural America
FAIN: FB-38348-03
Janet Galligani Casey
Skidmore College (Saratoga Springs, NY 12866-1698)
No project description available
Media Coverage
Micro: Region, History, Literature (Review)
Author(s): Terrell Scott Herring
Publication: American Literary History
Date: 6/18/2010
"'It's Up to the Women': Housework and Identity in American Life" (Review)
Author(s): Katherine J. Parkin
Publication: Gender & History
Date: 8/1/2010
Associated Products
A New Heartland: Women, Modernity, and the Agrarian Ideal in America (Book)Title: A New Heartland: Women, Modernity, and the Agrarian Ideal in America
Author: Janet Galligani Casey
Abstract: Modernity and urbanity have long been considered mutually sustaining forces in early twentieth-century America. But has the dominance of the urban imaginary obscured the importance of the rural? How have women, in particular, appropriated discourses and images of rurality to interrogate the problems of modernity? And how have they imbued the rural-traditionally viewed as a locus for conservatism-with a progressive political valence?
Touching on such diverse subjects as eugenics, reproductive rights, advertising, the economy of literary prizes, and the role of the camera, A New Heartland demonstrates the importance of rurality to the imaginative construction of modernism/modernity; it also asserts that women, as objects of scrutiny as well as agents of critique, had a special stake in that relation.
Casey traces the ideals informing America's conception of the rural across a wide field of representational domains, including social theory, periodical literature, cultural criticism, photography, and, most especially, women's rural fiction ("low" as well as "high"). Her argument is informed by archival research, most crucially through a careful analysis of The Farmer's Wife, the single nationally distributed farm journal for women and a little known repository of rural American attitudes. Through this broad scope, A New Heartland articulates an alternative mode of modernism by challenging orthodox ideas about gender and geography in twentieth-century America.
Year: 2009
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780195338959
Prizes
Gita Chaudhuri Prize (first recipient)
Date: 5/1/2011
Organization: Western Association of Women Historians
Abstract: The Gita Chaudhuri Prize is an annual prize that recognizes the best monograph about women in rural environments, from any era and any place in the world, published by a WAWH member.