Transforming Rural Life
Dairying Families and Agricultural Change, 1820-1885
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 16307651 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Linda J Borish (corresponding author), Sally Mcmurry |
| Year | 1996 |
| Volume | 69 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 147 |
| Publication date | 1996-03-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The New England Quarterly (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0028-4866 • E-ISSN: 1937-2213 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/366310 |
| OpenAlex | W2011910532 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 8 |
One of the many changes that transformed 19th-century agrarian life was the shift in the dairy industry from home to factory butter- and cheesemaking. In the early 19th century virtually all such work took place on the family farm. But after about 1860, production began to move from farms to local crossroads factories. In this book Sally McMurry takes a new look at the underlying causes of this development and its implications for the dairying families who were the mainstays of northeastern agriculture. McMurry's work emphasizes the role of social systems, cultural values, material culture, and family dynamics. She argues that a key factor in the change was simply the resistance of women to the burden of home cheesemaking (many households produced thousands of pounds every season). When the technology and economic conditions permitted, the transition to factory production took place quickly, not because farm families made more money, but because taking the milk to factories helped resolve and domestic tensions. As a result, patterns of life began to change, freeing women for new tasks, encouraging increased reliance on the market economy and new cash crops, and emphasizing wage work, which in turn affected the reorganization of the domestic economy
Agricultural economics · Agricultural science · Agriculture · Archaeology · Biology · Economics · Geography · Socioeconomics · Sociology · American Environmental and Regional History · American History and Culture · Historical Economic and Social Studies
Agribusiness, the Family Farm, and the Politics of Technological Determinism in the Post-World War II United States
The Not-So-Great Cat Massacre
Not for Ornament
Women in the Service Industries
The problem of milk in the nineteenth-century Ontario cheese industry
American Rural Women and the Transformation of Dairy Processing, 1820–80
Farm and Factory
Between God and Market
| Citations per year | 0.25 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 1994 - 2017 (24) |
| Highly cited | No |