A New Heartland: Women, Modernity, and the Agrarian Ideal in America

Casey develops a complex and multi-faceted account of representations of rural women in literature, photography, periodicals, and other strands of U.S. culture in the first half of the twentieth century. She shows that attention to the position of rural women enriches and complicates our understanding of modernity. Such women are typically left out of debates about female experiences of modernity, accounts that are usually centered on urban experience; they are also sidelined in prevailing discussions of farming and rural life that center on men. The book unearths a rich history of representations of farm women that speaks to their ambivalent and often conflictual relationship to both tradition and modernity. Casey explains why rurality was such a compelling topic for women writers and artists and makes a strong case for the aesthetic and political complexity of representations of rural women's lives. Her argument has significant implications for both modernist studies and American studies. It breaks new ground in bringing accounts of rural life into explicit dialogue with theories of modernity, and in drawing attention to texts unearthed through Casey's extensive archival research.