Delanceyplace.com 10/18/06-Farm Girls go to the City

In today's excerpt--during the second half of the American nineteenth century, cheap land was less available, and expansion shifted from the country to the city, making the West more heavily urban than any region other than the Northeast. The cities had become a safety valve for rural discontent:

"As one historian has put it, for every industrial worker who became a farmer, twenty farm boys moved to the city. This is relatively well-known. Less so is the fact that for every twenty farm boys, there were in the late nineteenth century perhaps twenty-five or thirty farm girls moving from the rural to the urban West. ... Many studies of short-distance migration from country to city, throughout the world, confirm that young women predominate in these movements. ... One study of rural households found that among middling to poor farmers, only four in ten daughters as compared to seven in ten sons remained on the land.

"What accounted for the greater number of women choosing the city over the country? ... 'I hate farm life,' says a young wife in Hamlin Garland's Main-Travelled Roads, published during the 1890s. It's nothing but fret, fret, and work the whole time, never going anyplace, never seeing anybody ... I spend my time fighting flies and washing dishes and churning. I'm sick of it.' ...

"But perhaps even more compelling than the push of the country was the pull of the city, which represented the hope of a better life for many women. ... Union organizer Abraham Bisno declared 'The world is bigger than she knew and there are other ways of living than those she had been taught to accept.' ... After the working day, wrote one investigator, girls sought excitement at the dance halls and the theater, or simply by strolling the streets with their companions and enjoying the scene. ... [I]nto their marriages they carried a set of expectations very different than those of their mothers. ...

"[There was considerable fear that naive and innocent young country girls would be ruined by their urban experience. ... But things may have been worse down on the farm; according to a recent study of late nineteenth century women, many reported fleeing sexual abuse at home. ... Let us give these young urban pioneers their appropriate place, side-by-side with the forty-niners ... in the drama of the Great Migration."

Geoffrey C. Ward, The West, Back Bay Books, 1996, pp. 268-273.