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.
he specifically mentions the broad and meaningless term that accounts for like 97% of all farms, including multi thousand acre incorporated kingdoms with hundreds of employees and once included similarly sized cotton plantations with several hundred slaves.
the author has written multiple articles that appeared in various places (still online, searchable) about the broader topic of the book (state power and urban reformers manufacturing rural imaginaries) that focus more or less on the different ways these have wildly shifted our perception of what is and has historically gone on in the rural US, creating a myth requiring intense state support to maintain in a peripheral place. though it is crucial to the rhetoric of today's political posturing, it is one of the places that has been materially hollowed out as well and facing heightening contradictions.
I'd suggest reading at least this one. it's not very long.