I hunkered down in the library, ready to view a treasury of material I’d just found: Period magazines that catered to farm women as an audience.
If you’ve never had an opportunity to look through perfectly preserved period archives, I recommend it. It becomes almost ridiculously easy to let your mind wander as you imagine yourself as a contemporary, someone who read that publication as it came off the press, and for whom the content was meant. It gives a feeling of togetherness and solidarity with those people in that audience.
The day I started looking through The Farmer’s Wife magazine, I realized I’d found the research I was meant to do.
My first paper on this subject centered on fifteen years, 1911 to 1926, because I had a reliable guide for that period in Laura’s work for the The Missouri Ruralist. The second paper, from 1955 to 1962, looked at the Cold War years just preceding the start of the second wave of the feminist movement. Both gave me heady evidence that farm women considered themselves businesswomen; that they were the literate partners of their spouses on the farms; that they were well respected in their communities, and in fact, relied on that social capital to preserve their business reputations; and that farm women had always been working women.
I started to expand my research to other magazines, and I ran across a VERY familiar name.
Rose Wilder Lane.
There she was, in Saturday Evening Post, Country Gentleman, and Good Housekeeping. I found her in Ladies Home Journal, Sunset, and Woman’s Day. And I was dead certain I’d never read most of the articles I saw with her byline.
The Rediscovered Writings of Rose Wilder Lane, Literary Journalist, was born in that epiphany. Because if I, an avowed Laura-lover, hadn’t seen them before, it followed that others might not have seen them either. How could I possibly keep them all to myself?
Luckily, the editors at the University of Missouri Press agreed with me.
So, as I researched the fifty years of farming and mainstream magazines I used as the basis for my dissertation, I also compiled, transcribed and contextualized Rose’s work for a separate project. I defended my dissertation in November, 2005, and signed a contract for the Rose book in February, 2006.
It was a busy winter.
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