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The decades following the Civil War saw a proliferation of reform ideas about rural life, labor, and family and gender roles. Clara Bewick Colby's "Farmers' Wives" was a particularly robust example of women's late nineteenth-century oratory that used a gendered analysis to inform audiences about barriers preventing farmwomen from achieving their full potential; it also offered solutions to those problems. Addresses made by Colby and others were foundational to creating a modern image of the farm wife. Read in context with women's oratory on similar topics, speeches by Colby and others illuminate the views of progressive rural women in the emerging middle class who worked to advance the lives of farmwomen.
RURAL Women's orATorY From The 1870s and 1880s illuminates how some women reformers defined problems and offered solutions for issues related to the conditions of rural women. Their talks were presented to sympathetic, often mixed sex, audiences at meetings of agricultural or educational societies and later published in meeting transactions, regional magazines, or newspapers. They reveal gendered analyses of farmwomen's lives employed by progressive rural women in the emerging middle class who intended to reform the sometimes difficult conditions faced by farmwomen. A close reading of the address "Farmers' Wives" (1880) given by clara Bewick colby (1846- 1916), amplified by oratory presented by other progressive rural women in the 1870s and 1880s, explores how these orators raised significant questions about farmwomen's labor and domestic culture as they strove to construct an image of farm wives as persons worthy of respect and reform.
Colby is representative of this group of progressive rural women who spoke about issues affecting farmwomen during this period. Although she later became instrumental in the American women's rights movement, colby's "Farmers' Wives" was delivered before she became politically active, and at the time of its presentation and subsequent publication, she was not associated with either women's rights or rural activist movements such as the national Grange or the Farmers' Alliance. Yet, she was concerned about the economic and social difficulties faced by rural women and leveraged her status as a collegeeducated woman married to a professional man to engage in a form of activism for women. her impetus for rural reform might have been driven by her childhood experience on...