this isn't new (2016 article by the author about their book - The 4-H Harvest: Sexuality and the State in Rural America by Gabriel N. Rosenberg, Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies at Duke University), but i was reminded of it lately and the popular misconceptions of the rural US and its recent history. i think people here might find it interesting.
The truth is that life on farms from the Atlantic Seaboard to California bore little resemblance to the nostalgic ideal suggested by contemporary imaginings of the family farm. Populations were transient, families were chaotic and broken, sexual taboos were flouted, and the romanticism of “Little House on the Prairie” pioneering collapsed on its first contact with the material realities of violence, deprivation, disorder, loneliness, and longing that better characterized the peripheries of America’s agricultural empire.
High morbidity rates, particularly during childbirth, meant that remarriage was common, and families might be composed of multiple primary couples or even the reassembled components of those pairs once severed by death or flight. Spouses often split over the decision to relocate. Other couples split and separately relocated as a solution to restrictive 19th-century divorce laws. As a consequence, casual, if quiet bigamists were commonplace in frontier communities.
Regardless, many settlers left families in the East and attempted to create new ones in the West. Constituting new families among the scattered and diverse population of the West often involved cross-class and cross-race marriages that would have been unthinkable in Eastern urban communities. Forced resettlement frequently shattered slave families and forced enslaved people to repeatedly reconstitute their families.
Rural people applied a make-do attitude not just to work and family, but to sexual intimacy as well. Camps, bunkhouses, lodges, taverns, and saloons were spaces rife with intimate and sexual relations that directly contravened dominant middle-class notions of sexual propriety: homosexuality, sexual barter and commerce, public and semi-public sex, and cross-dressing and gender fluidity.
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:speech-r::stupidpol:
totally. I've read other configurations the author has posted of this material, teasing the book and in one he talks about how these like urban, wealthy "progressives" were touring county fairs only to realize they were basically drunken gender fluid orgies for farm workers and their communities. the city people flipped out and went back to complain to government representatives about how this all had to be stopped.
it's not a coincidence that, around the same time, socialism had major clout in rural communities while urban capital was viewed with deep distrust, if not hatred.
it was in this context rural America was completely reimagined and reconfigured by the state and massive institutions controlled by capital via a complex social process that continues to this day.
I think a lot about how the rural US will change as the supports for that process are further cannibalized under neoliberalism. Franco used policies to drastically depopulate parts of Spain and there are parallels in the US, but it is happening slower and clumsier here as the natural resource base is less understood (historically) and broader/more complex.