|
|
|
Book Reviews
The Other Child Laborers: Growing Up on the Farm
| RINEY-KEHRBERG, PAMELA. Childhood on the Farm: Work, Play, and Coming of Age in the Midwest. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005. xi + 300 pp. Introduction, illustrations, notes. $34.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-7006-1388-9.
|
|
In 1870 a majority of American children grew up on farms; in 1920 a plurality still did so. Even though reformers and historians have focused on big-city children, Riney-Kehrberg describes a more typical childhood. Choosing the years 1870 to 1920 in states from Illinois westward, she depicts farm childhood as a "world of hard work, grammar-school education, and limited recreation" (1). Within this framework, Riney-Kehrberg builds an account that is gracefully written, full of the variety and textures of real lives. |
1
|
|
Work, as this book emphasizes, was the core experience growing up on a farm. Making excellent use of diaries, most by children ten or older and primarily from before 1900, the author lets children describe a daunting range of tasks in the house, garden, barn, and field. These tasks were sharply gendered in Anglo families, less so among German and Scandinavian immigrants. I once hazarded a calculation that a northern farm child age twelve averaged 1,753 hours of work per year, plus 516 schoolroom hours at 1890 attendance rates.1 Riney-Kehrberg's stories suggest I guessed a bit low concerning work. Despite some recognition that labor could overtax the young, the overarching assessment in Childhood on the Farm is simply that this work was unavoidable and essential to farm families' economic survival. Numerous illustrations supplement the writings of older children. Family photographs show prosperous younger farm children husking corn, gathering eggs, and tending farm animals, but also playing with pets, bicycles, and dolls. Perhaps because her sources focus on older children, Riney-Kehrberg says almost nothing about punishment. Did younger children simply recognize the functional necessity of work and comply readily, or did farmers sometimes spank and whip to discipline them and keep them at their tasks? |
2
|
|
Duty to family did not end with paid employment or at age twenty-one; this was especially, but not exclusively, true of young women. Combining diaries and letters of Rhoda Emery and her controlling mother, Riney-Kehrberg narrates the difficulties of building a teaching career for the daughter of a "cash-strapped farm family" (97). The homesick seventeen-year-old, who hated boarding round, conquered disciplinary crises and gained classroom confidence, but bought a buggy for her parents rather than a bicycle for herself. An older sister's insistence won Rhoda a year off at age twenty-three to earn a normal certificate, and with further education she eventually became a school principal. Rhoda never married and apparently continued throughout life to subsidize her parents and some of her siblings. Of course older youths, particularly boys, could also choose to flee their duties; their experiences would then vanish from archival collections of family papers. |
3
|
|
Recognizing the dangers of overreliance on documents generated by stable families, Riney-Kehrberg turned to records of Wisconsin public agencies to study poor, neglected, and abused children. Ironically, most were nonfarm children indentured to farm families on the assumption that agricultural labor taught good habits. Yet their experience on farms serves as a "proxy" for the "drudgery" of "disadvantaged youngsters born there" (180–81). A Children's Bureau study found that almost half the foster parents overworked the children or left them underschooled, though Riney-Kehrberg cannot say whether such treatment merely offended the investigator's reformist standards or exceeded normal rural practice. |
. . . |
There are about 452 more words in this article.
Please log in (or, if you are not yet an
authorized user, please go to the
User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
|
