The Transformation of Rural Life: Southern Illinois, 1890-1990.

In this personal yet analytical narrative, anthropologist Jane Adams investigates how and why farm life in Southern Illinois has changed in the last century. Most of the story's contours are by now familiar to historians of rural America; the value of the book rests in the careful, even affectionate, elucidation of the contours of change in a specific locale.

Adams avoids both romanticizing the past, in which the reality of hard work is ignored, and the dominant, high-tech model of capitalist agriculture uncritically accepted. Instead she asks: what has been gained, and what lost, with the transformation of agriculture? And she considers what alternative paths might have been followed.

The analysis focuses upon seven farms in Union County, using census material, tax records, oral histories, local newspapers, and buildings to tell the story. Around the turn of the century, farms were both self-sufficient and produced for the market. This balance depended upon the existence of thriving neighborhood communities, in which people aided each other in all manner of activities, from threshings to funerals. Work was seasonal; farming was diversified. Adams argues that farmers were "remarkably slow in adopting new technologies" (p. 81) early in the twentieth century, because they understood implicitly that too much involvement in a market economy would jeopardize their networks of kin and neighbors. Attractive as this hypothesis is, it needs more documentation; Adams herself, for example, points out that high prices in the period reduced the need for increases in productivity, thus implying that farmers were motivated as much by prices as by fear for kin networks.

As agriculture slowly commercialized, landownership became more concentrated, and more people fell into tenancy and wage labor. This of course is a familiar trend, one which occurred all over the nation at different times and at different rates. Within this context, everyone worked endlessly. Men and women performed different tasks, and women's labor was probably more intensified than men's with the transition to a cash economy. The Great Depression both accelerated and reversed these trends, according to Adams: more and more people were impoverished, but this resulted in a "great levelling" (p. 143) of class structure. The New Deal and then the war changed the agricultural landscape forever, introducing a greater role for government and ensuring the dominance of its agricultural-establishment wing of educational and extension operations. The postwar revolution in transportation and marketing forced farming families to scramble to adjust. Many specialized, and many farm wives found wage work off the farm to compensate for the loss of dairy and poultry income. The local economy changed, now relying upon government services, and community life disintegrated.

Adams argues that it was not until this postwar period that Union County farm people adopted a modernizing mentality, according to the Foucaultian sense in which time, space, and movement are divided into discrete units and reconsolidated in different ways. She uses domestic space as her example, showing how in the 1950s and 1960s Union County families reorganized their homes from a loose collection of undifferentiated spaces, to a much more tightly organized set of discrete areas.

In her concluding reflections, Adams thoughtfully considers whether the transformation of rural life could have taken any other shape, one which might have preserved some of the virtues of the old ways - especially communities - while still providing the benefits of such innovations as labor-saving technology. She argues that had the government been willing to intervene in the land market, and had farm women been considered full partners in agriculture, things might have turned out differently; but, this vision, while attractive, is a hazy one, and not entirely persuasive.

The Transformation of Rural Life fits squarely within a recent trend in rural history to focus upon the transition to capitalism, broadly construed to encompass not only technology and prices but social relationships as well, including those of class and gender. The timing and impact of the transition have been much debated; Adams's assertion that in Southern Illinois it did not take place until the postwar period echoes arguments of historians such as Pete Daniel for the American South. Where women's work is concerned, Adams continues arguments (made by Nancy Grey Osterud and others) that work was central to women's identities. Where the use of landscape as document is concerned, Adams begins admirably, but could have expanded significantly to discuss out-buildings and farm layouts at a minimum, perhaps larger physical and social landscapes as well. The Transformation of Rural Life offers a provocative update to John Faragher's Sugar Creek, as it takes up just a few decades after Faragher leaves off, beginning, one might say, with Faragher's proponents of "conservative change." All in all, this book can be summarized as a familiar story, told with exceptional sympathy and care.

Sally McMurry Penn State University