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.
Maybe I’ll put some links together about Michael Pollan’s (NYT food lib) fawning for Joel Salatin (Libertarian Psycho) but it’s a good Rabbit hole. “Maintenance Phase” and “Farm to Taber” both had good episodes, and I think the website of disgruntled former Interns from Polyface is still up.
please post the link to the disgruntled intern site! I was once one a starry-eyed one myself. not at Polyface, but other places many years ago in the southeastern US run by various megalomaniacs.
now I am in a position where I can steer young people in my orbit away from shitheads like him, but it's all informal and I would love the opportunity to reach out to whoever is curating that to amplify the voices of farmworkers taken advantage of by assholes relying on that hype machine.
Testimonials from Three former aprentices
Maintenance Phase Episode
thanks for sharing this. still working my way through. providing them with known-to-be-contaminated water and the mythology of "you'll get sick because you're working so hard for the first time in your life" is fucking legit criminal and evil.
i worked for some real narcissistic assholes, but nothing like that. if someone had done that to me and my coworkers I would've smashed their fucking hands and knees with a hammer. I'd do it in front of witnesses. I'd take the ag assault and eat the 2-4 years for it. I don't give a fuck. that shit cannot be allowed to stand and that motherfucker should wince with every step he takes and every tool he grasps for the rest of his life.
I've heard rumors of assholism about Polyface and their model is certainly set up for hardcore exploitation, but this is some high octane bullshit.