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Hard Women
© Johnson, Colin R., Jun 14, 2013, Just Queer Folks : Gender and Sexuality in Rural America
Temple University Press, Philadelphia, ISBN: 9781439909997
Rural Women and Female Masculinity
Mrs. Gudger [Allie Mae Burroughs] may have no work shoes;
more likely, she uses something cast off by her husband.
She worked barefooted most of the time, sometimes in her
slippers. She was enough embarrassed to be barefooted that
she may have wished to conceal or avoid the indignity before
us of using very old and broken shoes which were twice too
big for her. She was shy also of our seeing her in a sunbonnet.
I doubt that many headgears have ever been as good or as
handsome.
—James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
Some of the infants, children and adults in whom shame
remains the most available mediator of identity are the ones
called (a related word) shy. (“Remember the fifties?” Lily
Tomlin used to ask. “No one was gay in the fifties; they were
just shy.”) Queer, I’d suggest, might usefully be thought of as
referring in the first place to this group . . . ​t hose whose sense
of identity is for some reason tuned most durably to the note
of shame.
—Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling
F
ew images are as evocative of rural American life during the Great Depression as Walker Evans’s now famous photograph of Allie May Burroughs,
the “Alabama Tenant Farmer Wife” pictured in his 1936 portrait by that
title (see Figure 6.1). Along with Dorothea Lange’s equally famous “Migrant
Mother,” also from 1936 (see Figure 6.2), this iconic photograph hearkens back
to a time that is somehow always a place as well. Additionally, and not incidentally, as this chapter argues, both of these images portray women whose femininity seems somehow vexed, and both images carry a subtle trace of shame.
In Evans’s portrait, shame appears in at least two places: Burroughs’s furrowed brow and her tightly drawn lips. The first marker of shame—her furrowed brow—suggests a sort of pained discomfort with the experience of being
photographed. The second—a razor-sharp line that cuts across Burroughs’s
© Johnson, Colin R., Jun 14, 2013, Just Queer Folks : Gender and Sexuality in Rural America
Temple University Press, Philadelphia, ISBN: 9781439909997
Figure 6.1 Allie Mae Burroughs, also known as Alabama Tenant Farmer Wife, 1936,
photographic print, by Walker Evans (1903–1975). (U.S. Resettlement Administration
Photographs, Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-USZC4-8200. Courtesy of the
Library of Congress.)
face below her nose in neither a smile nor a frown—evokes the feeling of held
breath, as if she believed that a defensive closure of the body might somehow
help to stave off the camera’s probing, truth-seeking gaze. Notably, Burroughs’s
clenched lips also obscure her teeth, then as now one of the body’s most telling markers of class. Lest the point of Evans’s intended message about the foregrounded subject remain obscure, the wood siding against which he probably
© Johnson, Colin R., Jun 14, 2013, Just Queer Folks : Gender and Sexuality in Rural America
Temple University Press, Philadelphia, ISBN: 9781439909997
Figure 6.2 Destitute Pea Pickers in California: Mother of Seven Children, Age Thirtytwo, Nipomo, California, also known as Migrant Mother, 1936, a digital file from the
original negative by Dorothea Lange (1895–1965). (Farm Security Administration—Office
of War Information Photograph Collection, Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress,
LC-DIG-fsa-8b29516. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.)
© Johnson, Colin R., Jun 14, 2013, Just Queer Folks : Gender and Sexuality in Rural America
Temple University Press, Philadelphia, ISBN: 9781439909997
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intentionally positioned Burroughs repeats certain formal elements of her face,
including its dark horizontal lines and weathered look. Indeed, the particular
combination of elements in this portrait essentially obligates the viewer to wonder what Burroughs might look like—if only she could afford to apply a fresh
coat of paint.
For her part, the subject of Lange’s portrait “Migrant Mother”—a woman
whose name was Florence Owens Thompson—is somewhat more difficult to
make sense of simply because the historical record actively resists any easy reading of Thompson’s weathered skin and tightly knit brow as prima facie evidence
of deeply felt shame. In fact, whenever Lange was asked about the woman pictured in her most iconic portrait, the photographer often insisted that Thompson struck her as a remarkably willing subject, one who seemed surprisingly
unashamed before the camera’s lens. In a 1960 interview with Popular Photography magazine, for example, Lange described the scene of her fateful encounter with Thompson in this way:
I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by
a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five
exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not
ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirtytwo. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the
surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold
the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean-to tent
with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it.1
Clearly, part of Lange’s intention here is to amplify through narrative contextualization the sense of quiet, if deeply compromised, dignity that the iconic
image is generally thought to exude. And this makes sense. For Lange, as for
Evans, one of the primary reasons for turning to documentary photography
during the Great Depression was that she hoped that, by putting a face on the
poorest and most dispossessed U.S. citizens—particularly southern sharecroppers, migrant workers, and displaced farm families—she might increase public awareness about and sympathy for their undeserved suffering. Still, shame is
not absent from Lange’s photograph. If anything, it is merely redistributed away
from Thompson onto her children, both of whom turn conspicuously from the
camera’s lens.
In Chapter 5, I showed how the Great Depression afforded hundreds of
thousands of poor and working-class rural white men the opportunity to explore the pleasures of same-sex eroticism and gender nonconformity in the
homo­social world of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). I also noted the
significant irony of enrollees’ queer behavior, given the fact that the CCC was
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explicitly established for the purpose of conserving American manhood by imbuing an entire generation of dispossessed males with a sense of social purpose,
economic entitlement, and national pride. Here, I want to reorient the reader’s attention in the direction of poor and working-class rural white women
because, in many ways, their experience was the exact opposite of poor white
men’s during this period in U.S. history. If rural men were increasingly celebrated for their readiness to throw themselves headlong into the dirty, backbreaking physical labor characteristic of country life, rural women were openly
castigated for their willingness to do so, even under circumstances where their
physical labor made the difference between subsistence and starvation. If poor
white men who pursued their fortunes on remote rural byways or in Depression-era work relief camps throughout the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s seem to have
gained considerable license to do more or less as they pleased with their bodies, the bodies of poor white women who remained close to the land during
this same period were increasingly scrutinized and found wanting in light of
a definition of “femininity” that grew narrower and more prescriptive as the
twentieth century progressed. If rural men were publicly lionized for exhibiting
“manliness,” even in cases where such “manly” display took the form of crossdressing or participating in all-male beauty contests, rural women were explicitly shamed for doing so, particularly when their lack of feminine deportment
could be read as a sign of social or biological backwardness unbefitting a modern, progressive nation such as the United States.
Traditionally, the experience of feeling ashamed has not been the main
focus of most accounts of lesbian and gay life in the United States, in part because many historians have viewed their task as a recuperative one, aimed primarily at recovering lost stories about resistance and survival, stories that have
unquestionably done a great deal over the last several decades to equip members
of the modern LGBT community with a considerable sense of pride in what has
effectively become a shared past. Recently, however, a number of scholars have
begun to note that there are certain costs involved in using history as a tool for
uniting minoritized individuals under the sign of “pride,” including the fact
that doing so tends to route our attention away from certain historical subjects
and toward others. For example, theorist Heather Love observes:
In attempting to construct a positive genealogy of gay identity, queer
critics and historians have often found themselves at a loss about what
to do with the sad old queens and long-suffering dykes who haunt the
historical record. They have disavowed the difficulties of the queer past,
arguing that our true history has not been written. If critics do admit
the difficulties of the queer past, it is most often to redeem them. By
including queer figures from the past in a positive genealogy of gay
identity, we make good on their suffering, transforming their shame
into pride after the fact.2
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In other words, Love argues that when we prioritize acknowledging the debt
that history owes to those who struggled and suffered in the past because of
their failure to conform to gender and sexual norms, there is a strange way in
which we are arguably helping to wipe that debt clean by suggesting that the
struggle and suffering produced by gender and sexual normativity were somehow “worth it” in the end. Attending to shame, she suggests, may provide one
way through, if not exactly around, this ethical problem.
If theorists such as Love have argued that paying attention to shame can
help to keep us honest about the constitutive negativity of the queer past, they
have also suggested that doing so may help us to avoid the squandering of political opportunity in the present. For instance, because lesbians and gay men are
not the only people in American society who are accustomed to feeling shamed
by dominant culture for their failure to measure up to some normative vision of
the good life, designating shame rather than pride as the proverbial “bedrock”
of queer experience creates room for a much more expansive critique of normativity, one capable of contending with not only the harms that dominant culture
causes subalterns but also the harms that subalterns cause one another. One
example of such behavior is when well-heeled individuals who are otherwise
marginalized because of their gender, race, or sexuality close ideological ranks
with other economically privileged Americans against the supposedly ignorant
and uncouth poor.3 Another is when some members of a stigmatized group attempt to bolster their own respectability by disavowing as “nonrepresentative”
the supposedly bad behavior of other members of that same group. Hence, at
least in part, queer critic Michael Warner’s ongoing battle with certain advocates of “marriage equality” who have argued that granting lesbians and gay
men full access to the institution of marriage is the right thing to do, not because it would be fair, but because it would help to promote among the more
hedonistic and profligate subset of the lesbian and gay male population certain
time-honored “family values” that everyone should appreciate, including coupledom, monogamy, child-centeredness, and staying home on Friday night.4
Where the study of history is concerned, taking shame into account is also
important because shame has often tended to function as something like an affective leading indicator of gendered and sexual alterity, even under historical
circumstances where properly minoritarian gender and sexual identity categories did not yet exist, or were simply less available to be claimed then they are
today. That is, even now people tend to sense that there is something “wrong”
with them, at least in light of normative ideas about who or what we are supposed to be, long before they develop a self-affirming sense that they are lesbian,
gay, bisexual, trans, or whatever. They also tend to worry, often justifiably, that
everybody else knows that there is something wrong with them. This dynamic
of asynchronicity where knowledge about the self is concerned is at least part
of what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick was referring to when she argued that modern homosexuality is structured like an open secret: while it would perhaps be
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nice to believe that we are always the first people to know our own “truth,” the
fact is that others routinely assume such truths about us regardless of whether
we know them ourselves, or are actually willing or able to affirm them openly,
or proudly.5 Depending on how they are intimated to us by others, these assumptions can sometimes help ease our gradual embrace of the idea that we are
somehow different, and different in a fundamental and fundamentally meaningful way. But such intimations can also be embarrassing and humiliating
themselves, particularly when they include warnings about what might become
of us if we do not curb certain impulses and get ourselves back onto the proper
course. Often, such intimations also carry an implicit threat about the likely
consequences if we fail to do so.
As we shall see, poor white rural women like Allie Mae Burroughs and
Florence Owens Thompson grew up hearing a great deal about the precarity
of womanliness—the startling ease with which it could slip from a woman’s
grasp if she “let herself go.” They heard considerably less about how they were
supposed to maintain their grip on womanliness given the petrifyingly austere
circumstances under which they often lived. Nevertheless, rural women were
somehow expected to mediate between the realities of their everyday lives and
an increasingly prescriptive vision of American femininity that in no way resembled them. Indeed, one of the reasons why I am so interested in the shame
I see manifest in Evans’s “Alabama Tenant Farmer Wife” and Lange’s “Migrant
Mother” is that I believe it stems from the emergence of a rift in the discourse of
womanliness and femininity that began to appear around the turn of the century, reached its zenith during the 1930s, and probably still has not been fully
resolved in any meaningful sense. What is more, I see shame as a central organizing theme within the lives of women like Burroughs and Thompson—
women I characterize throughout this chapter as “hard,” both because their
particular historical circumstances made them rigid and because their gender
and sexual positionalities are profoundly difficult to make sense of in retrospect.
Of course, the figure of the “hard woman” is not unfamiliar, either to scholars who write about rural and working-class women’s experience or to those
who write about gender and sexuality in the United States. This type of woman
has been difficult to place, however, in part because she figures so prominently
in two narratives that seem to pull conceptually in opposite directions. On one
hand, she epitomizes the compression—or in some cases, merely the wearing
away—of the female-bodied subject under conditions of extreme poverty, dep­
rivation, and patriarchy. For example, in her performance piece cum autobiographical essay, Two or Three Things I Know for Sure, Dorothy Allison speaks
eloquently about the “hard women” of her rural southern youth—women whose
bodies and histories were marked, sometimes figuratively but often literally, by
the exhausting routines of working-class life and the damaging physical and
emotional abuses to which they were regularly subjected.6
On the other hand, and from a slightly different perspective, “hardness” in
women has also been associated in various contexts with a kind of expansion
© Johnson, Colin R., Jun 14, 2013, Just Queer Folks : Gender and Sexuality in Rural America
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of the female subject, or at least an expansion in the number of ways in which
the female body can be inhabited. Here I am thinking specifically about J. Jack
Halberstam’s work on “female masculinity,” but also about the myriad other
ways in which “hardness” figures prominently in the history of modern lesbian
and transgender identity formation even today.7 To those who are familiar with
the major currents in lesbian and trans history, the importance of “hardness”
will be obvious: from the “mythic mannish lesbian” of yore, to the mid-century
“stone butch,” to the genderqueer tranny boys and transmen of today, the trope
of physical, emotional, and sexual hardening runs like an iron thread through
much of the twentieth century.
What has not received much attention, however—surprisingly, from my
perspective—is the set of broader historical and discursive currents in which
I would argue the trope of “hardness” in women originally took shape in the
United States, currents that eddied around the worked and weathered bodies
of early-twentieth-century rural and farm women especially—women who, as
a group, were routinely characterized as overly masculine, but who were often
also shamed by progressive-era social reformers and eugenicists for being excessively sexually reproductive.
It is precisely this tension in the way that early-twentieth-century rural and
farm women often found themselves positioned—as both overly masculine and
excessively sexually reproductive—that should make Burroughs, Thompson,
and other women like them particularly interesting both to students of lesbian
and gay social history and to queer theorists, and this regardless of whether
there is any historical evidence to suggest they were “lesbian” in the modern
sense of the term. Indeed, one of things that is so interesting about these women
is the extent to which they are always already assumed to be heterosexual even
though their gendered embodiment of normative femininity appears troubled,
and was very much thought to be troubled in their day, just as their sexuality was thought to be destructively out of control. In fact, part of the reason I
chose to begin this chapter with a discussion of Burroughs’s and Thompson’s
portraits specifically is that both are clearly countersigned by way of their commonly accepted titles with relational terms (“wife” and “mother,” respectively)
that have, to my way of thinking, too often served in historical study to establish the inclination of women’s desire in advance of any real evidence—though,
given the coercive nature of patriarchy, and given the fact that “Oh, God, oh
God, please don’t let me be pregnant again” was virtually a mantra among
women for centuries, I am hard pressed to understand how anyone could ever
have mistaken marriage or childbearing as iron-clad evidence of women’s sexual orientation in a modern sense.
Here I intend to argue against the practice of making such assumptions.
I also intend to argue that these women constitute a prime example of what
Heather Love might call “backward” historical subjects. For in many cases, it
was exactly their backwardness—their inability or stalwart refusal to change
in a rapidly modernizing world—that marked them, with steadily ­increasing
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severity, as “hard,” queer women, whose bodies and lives confounded the
emerging gender and sexual norms that were coalescing around them.
© Johnson, Colin R., Jun 14, 2013, Just Queer Folks : Gender and Sexuality in Rural America
Temple University Press, Philadelphia, ISBN: 9781439909997
Hard Women
Rural women have always posed a problem in the context of American culture.
On one hand, and to the extent that rural America is routinely been pointed to
as a wellspring of national vitality, especially during moments of nativist anxiety, rural women have often been praised for their traditionalism, industriousness, and fecundity. On the other hand, these same characteristics have also
tended to put rural women at odds with certain widely held beliefs about the
nature of femininity, particularly the profoundly sexist belief that femininity
does and should manifest itself in women as a weakened will, a trifling spirit,
and a fragile body steeped in sexual modesty. In many cases, Americans have
reconciled this tension by doing what they often do, which is to focus on their
ideals rather than reality. But at other moments, the harsh realities of rural life
and its effects on women and their bodies have intruded too aggressively to be
ignored. And when they have, it has typically been rural women themselves
who have been judged harshly, not their circumstances. Hence Lafayette S. Foster’s quip that he “thanked God” he had never seen “such a sight in my own
country before,” after glimpsing a barelegged woman digging for potatoes in
a field shortly after the American Civil War.8 That Foster was the acting vice
president of the United States at the time he made this remark, and that the
“foreign country” he was passing through by train was rural Pennsylvania, suggests just how much of an embarrassment poor rural women had become to the
national psyche as early as the end of the nineteenth century.
Historically speaking, there are a number of contexts in which rural women’s bodies and behaviors came under close scrutiny during the first few
decades of the twentieth century. These include, but are certainly not limited to,
eugenicist discourse, the rural hygiene and extension-based home demonstration movement, the rural and national press, and the burgeoning ready-to-wear
clothing industry. I begin by focusing on how poor rural women were often represented in eugenically inflected writing during this period because it is here
that we can really begin to see why it would be a mistake to limit our historical understanding of what constitutes “queerness” to nonreproductive same-sex
sexual activity. For poor women especially, being excessively reproductive has
often resulted in as much stigma as not being reproductive at all.
Let us turn our attention then to Our Southern Highlanders, travel writer
Horace Kephart’s widely read 1921 “survey” of everyday life in the Smoky
Mountains region of upcountry North Carolina. Typical of its genre, Our
Southern Highlanders purported to do for rural landscapes much the same
thing that urban slumming literature routinely claimed to do for the seedy underbelly of American cities during the same period. In addition to illustrating
an unfamiliar landscape, it sought to typologize that landscape’s inhabitants.9
© Johnson, Colin R., Jun 14, 2013, Just Queer Folks : Gender and Sexuality in Rural America
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In this context, gender mattered a great deal to Kephart, no doubt in part because the discourse of race was somewhat less available to him as a means for
marking difference in an era when formerly ethnicized distinctions between
various northern European groups were increasingly being collapsed into the
more general category of “whiteness.”10 The question, however, was what gender rural women should rightly be said to occupy.
Kephart was inclined to note that, in youth, at least, “Many of the women
are pretty.” Over time, however, he claimed that “hard toil in house and field,
early marriage, frequent child-bearing with shockingly poor attention, and
ignorance or defiance of the plainest necessities of hygiene, soon warp and age
them.” Indeed, according to Kephart, adult women from this remote region
of the country scarcely qualified as female at all. “At thirty or thirty-five,” he
claimed, “a mountain woman is apt to have a worn and faded look, with form
prematurely bent—and what wonder? Always bending over the hoe in the cornfield, or bending over the hearth as she cooks by an open fire, or bending over
the baby or bending to pick up, for the thousandth time, the wet duds that her
lord flings on the floor as he enters from the woods—what wonder that she
soon grows short-waisted and round-shouldered?”11 Disfigured, depleted, and
“worn,” these rural women were hard indeed—“drudges,” in the popular parlance of the day. However, Kephart went on to point out:
The mountain farmer’s wife is not only a household drudge, but a fieldhand as well. She helps to plant, hoes corn, gathers fodder, sometimes
even plows or splits rails. It is the commonest of sights for a woman
to be awkwardly hacking up firewood with a dull axe. . . . ​Outside the
towns no hat is lifted to a maid or wife. . . . ​To [the mountaineer] she is
little more than a sort of superior domestic animal.12
It is important to keep this characterization of rural women as members of
an inhuman species in mind because, sadly, it is something to which we return
later in this chapter. Suffice it to say for the moment, however, that Horace Kep­
hart’s depiction of rural women as masculinized, broken-down, baby-making
beasts of burden was relatively typical in the genre of early–twentieth-century
rural slumming literature.
Indeed, during this period, reports about rural and farm women’s “gender
trouble” seemed to surface everywhere, including the Washington Post, which,
in August 1923, announced in its pages that the “Middle West Farm Woman
of Today Is [the] ‘Man of the Family.’”13 What is ironic about this headline—
and what numerous rural women recognized as ironic at the time—is that they
actually had not done anything to earn the title “man of the family.” At least
they had not done anything new. Rather, what the story discussed was the ever-­
increasing significance of farm women’s relatively meager cash earnings in the
context of what agrarian historians commonly refer to as “the long agricultural depression” in the United States—a period that began with the wide-scale
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c­ ollapse of agricultural prices in 1920 and ended in 1941, only after the United
States entered World War II. Because the dire economic circumstances of the
rural United States during this period are often unfamiliar to people who tend
to think of the Great Depression as beginning a decade later, with the collapse
of the stock market in 1929, a brief survey of 1920s agricultural economics may
be in order here.
When U.S. agricultural prices collapsed in 1920, many rural farm families
scrambled to put more land into cultivation in an attempt to offset the overall
effect of depressed prices with larger harvests. To do this, American farmers
made huge investments in both additional land and new machinery, investments that almost tripled the number of acres under cultivation nationally.
Unfortunately, this massive increase in agricultural production drove the prices
of many crops even lower, which meant that, by the end of the 1920s, many
American farmers found themselves financially “upside down,” owing more in
rent or mortgage and loan payments than their crops were worth.
Given the credit-intensive way that farm finance works, it had already become common by 1923 for women’s non-cultivation-related farm and household labor—egg gathering, dairying, harvesting fruits from the family orchard,
baking, sewing, and washing—to yield the only real cash income that some
farm families would see over the course of a year. Hence, the Washington Post’s
somewhat glib, somewhat anxious description of midwestern farm women as
filling the role of the “man of the family.” To be sure, the grinding poverty characteristic of rural American life during this period was hard on everyone. But
as the Post’s barbed headline suggests, it was especially hard on farm women,
since it often refigured them in popular consciousness as usurpers of male prerogative and masculine privilege, a reputation that did nothing to ingratiate
rural women to most other Americans at a time when resentments and anxieties still lingered regarding the potentially destabilizing social and cultural consequences of women’s enfranchisement.
That having been said, it would be a mistake to assume that changes in gender ideology in the United States were merely a vague cultural reflection of economic changes. Indeed, as rural historian Mary Neth has clearly demonstrated,
shifts in the way that rural men and women related to one another shaped the
everyday realities of agricultural production during this period just as much as
they were shaped by them. Writes Neth:
By measuring manhood in terms of capital-intensive farm practices
and womanhood in terms of cultural uplift defined by new standards of
consumption, professionals assured that only those who practiced capital-intensive agriculture could meet these standards. Inefficient farmers were in important ways less than men, failures who were outside
respectable manhood. For women the class dichotomy opposed the
domestically efficient and cultured woman who had leisure because of
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technology to the drudge. Ideology bound this drudge image to negative class images of men. The drudge was overworked because she had
married an oafish, and probably inefficient, man who did not respect
his wife. A man’s respect for a woman, measured by her leisure, helped
denote manhood and womanhood. Thus, the removal of women
from production marked both the respectable woman and the professional farmer.14
© Johnson, Colin R., Jun 14, 2013, Just Queer Folks : Gender and Sexuality in Rural America
Temple University Press, Philadelphia, ISBN: 9781439909997
In other words, and to quote Neth once again, “Changes in gender relations did
not merely follow the industrialization of agricultural production; they were
crucial to creating it.”15
Out of Step with Femininity
More significant, perhaps, than the manner in which rural women were perceived by men—whether middle-class pseudo-sociologists such as Horace
Kephart or the newspapermen who ran the Washington Post—was the manner in which they were perceived by other women. Of particular importance,
I think, is the way other women perceived them in relation to newly emerging understandings of womanliness that began to take shape in the context of
the burgeoning U.S. consumer culture during the early twentieth century. Of
course, “womanliness” has long implied certain things in the context of patriarchal societies, most notably varying degrees of deference to male authority. But
increasingly, the capacity to claim womanhood came to depend on the ability
to inhabit properly and execute successfully an embodied style of gendered personhood commonly referred to as “femininity.”
Like most normative concepts, femininity is an inherently troubled one that
quickly runs aground on its own inconsistencies when closely examined. At
the most basic level, this is because the term typically operates in a manner
that is simultaneously descriptive and prescriptive: on one hand, “femininity”
supposedly names those qualities that are characteristic of what female-bodied people naturally are and do; at the same time, the term is used to refer to
a constellation of conventions that are clearly contingent in a social, cultural,
and historical sense—conventions that range in their extremity (and brutality)
from the practice of foot binding in imperial China, to “female circumcision”
(female genital mutilation) in certain parts of Africa and the African diaspora,
to whatever nightmare smorgasbord of inner-me-revealing surgical procedures
are being performed in femininity’s name on this season’s highest-rated television makeover show.16 The fact that there is a significant disjuncture between
these two aspects of femininity’s operational definition may very well explain
why feminist pioneer Betty Friedan felt justified in describing it as a “mystique”
in 1963.17 It may also help to account for why many people’s explanations of
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“femininity” tend to sound a bit like U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s famously subjective explanation of obscenity: they cannot tell you what
femininity is, exactly, but they know it when they see it.18 For American women
surveying their country cousins during the first several decades of the twentieth century, however, femininity’s definition was considerably less abstract and
elusive: it had to do with clothing.
Especially during the 1920s and 1930s, when the production of women’s
ready-to-wear fashion finally began to approach in scale the production of men’s
ready-to-wear clothing, what a woman chose to wear and how she chose wear
it came to signify a great deal about the kind of person she was. If hand-sewn
clothing had for generations functioned as a physical testament to a woman’s
skill and the quality of her upbringing, store-bought clothing primarily reflected her sensibilities and tastes. Crucially, the ownership of stylish ready-towear clothing also reflected a woman’s direct involvement in the cash economy
and, in some ways, with modernity itself. To possess an article of ready-to-wear
clothing was therefore to possess some claim on a future that promised both
greater efficiency and greater choice through the miracle of standardized mass
production. By contrast, not owning ready-to-wear clothing, or wearing it improperly—say, in the wrong size, or for too many years in a row—came to be
seen as both a symptom and a cause of a woman’s inability to find complete satisfaction in her increasingly feminized social station. Thus, when Dora Russel Barnes, a “clothing specialist” from the Texas Agricultural and Mechanical
College in College Station, Texas, was asked to speak to a group of farm women
during the summer of 1926, she could assert unequivocally that “Much of the
self-consciousness and awkwardness of some of our women comes from illfitting and ill-designed clothes.” By extension, Barnes reasoned, “a new hat”
could be “more invigorating than a box of pills.” In a similarly homeopathic
vein, Barnes argued that “in order to keep young,” country women should “try
some new clothes instead of a bottle of medicine.”19
Traditionally, women’s historians have tended to characterize the twentieth century as a period of uneven, if nonetheless significant, progress where
women’s relation to clothing is concerned, and Barnes’s comments certainly
suggest why this has been the case. On one hand, clothing has functioned for
women as a vehicle for choice and self-expression in a world where they tend
to be gazed at more than they are listened to; we might even say that clothing has served as a tool for women’s self-fashioning. On the other hand, and
as I have already suggested, clothing also tends to be regarded as material evidence of women’s worth—physical proof of the extent to which they either do or
do not care about themselves or others’ opinion of them. Indeed, in the evolution from the excruciatingly wasp-waisted “Gibson Girl” in the late nineteenth
century, to the sudden emergence of the flapper as a popular stylistic referent
during the early 1920s, to the football-player-as-sex-kitten look popularized in
the 1980s by Joan Collins during her incomparable run playing Alexis Carrington, the bitch goddess of capitalism, on Dynasty, changes in women’s fash-
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ion have long been regarded by cultural historians as telling evidence—both of
dominant culture’s normative designs on the female body and, just as often, of
women’s capacity as agents to reappropriate and even leverage their bodies as
bargaining tools under conditions of patriarchy and compulsory heterosexuality. Some have even argued that consumer culture provided women with an
important entrée into twentieth-century public life—a reasonable claim, given
the fact that, as William Leach has noted, by 1915, “women were doing between
80 and 85 percent of consumer purchasing in the United States.”20
These treatments of women’s fashion have less to say about the women who
opted out of what would eventually come to be known as the “fashion industrial
complex” by making their own clothing, whether because they viewed clothes
making as a skill worthy of preservation, because it represented an important
form of thrift, or simply because they found mass-produced twentieth-century
women’s fashions unsuited to their needs. Women who farmed and women who
lived in cash-starved rural areas fell into all of these categories, and they complained bitterly throughout the 1910s and 1920s, first about the corseted waists
and floor-sweeping hemlines characteristic of the fashionable Gibson Girl look
and later about the delicate, diaphanous fabrics that became popular during the
flapper era.
This is not to say that rural women always had a choice, however. Regardless
of how impractical they may have found contemporary fashion trends, given
the demands of their everyday lives, farm women were increasingly forced to
purchase finished goods in shapes and sizes that worked marvelously for styleconscious female consumers in urban areas, but were completely unsuited to
the everyday conditions of rural work and life. For example, boots and high
shoes, which were practical enough for slogging through muddy farmyards
and had been a virtually universal staple in the wardrobes of most American
women during the Victorian era, lost favor among urban tastemakers beginning in the early 1920s. In their place, retailers began offering female consumers low-cut shoes. These, in turn, necessitated the wearing of comparatively
flimsy woolen or silk stockings. While such fashion trends were often regarded
positively as modern and decidedly liberating by wage-earning urban women,
they were met with considerable suspicion by farm women, who saw them as
entirely impractical.
What is interesting about fashion, of course, is that it is never merely a matter of taste or preference. To the contrary, it is normative by definition. Innovations that are initially experienced as liberatory by some consumers, especially
women, tend to be twisted into weapons for insulting, shaming, and humiliating those who will not—or cannot—conform to new standards of appearance and dress. In shoe fashion, for example, it is remarkable how quickly the
Victorian-era boot and high shoe went from epitomizing feminine stylishness
to serving as a mark of ungainly rural backwardness. Just witness the following commentary that appeared in the pages of America’s newspaper of record
in 1925:
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High shoes are seen now and then. A sensible housewife on Avenue A
comes out for her marketing shod neatly in a pair of gunmetal boots.
An old lady of Gramercy Park steps into a hired victoria with calfskin
concealing her ankles. And in those small-town centers for farmers’
purchases farm women tread the pavement in buttoned shoes or high
laces. . . . ​There are stores that make a point of keeping high shoes. They
usually fall in the crossroads class, be they situated even on a metropolitan street. Among their lamp wicks and linoleum they find room for
a few pairs of leather boots. More pretentious establishments and specialty shoe shops may have some pairs left over from other years—high
shoes have not been gone too long for that. And numbers of them are
still made to the customer’s order. . . . ​Interested only in comfort, they
ask merely for a style that fits, then wear it year after year. These customers are said to be for the most part aged, crippled, rheumatic, or sufferers from overweight.21
In other words, by 1925, to demand the same practical work boot or high shoe
that one had relied on for decades was to mark oneself as “aged, crippled, rheumatic,” “overweight,” or simply rural.
If American farm women had one complaint during this period in U.S. history, it was that they were so overworked from sunup to sundown that they
scarcely had time to think about anything besides how they were going to make
it through from breakfast to dinner, day in and day out. Therefore, it seems
likely that many farm women simply ignored the scandal swirling about their
poorly shod feet. They were certainly aware of their growing disgrace, however,
because they were reminded of it wherever they went. During the summer of
1919, for example, one Mrs. B. L. testified openly to her own feelings of shame
and embarrassment over the state of rural women’s footwear in the pages of the
Indiana Farmer’s Guide after a memorable incident at a local farmer’s meeting. “I saw at our meeting beautiful silk, satin and georgette crepe dresses worn
with the most unsightly shoes I ever saw,” B. L. opined. She continued, “Some of
these shoes were run over, heels worn down on one side, and some actually had
mud and dirt from the stables on them.” As if this were not humiliating enough,
B. L. went on to report overhearing two young women say, “You can always tell
farmers by their dirty shoes—they hardly ever shine them.” “Now of course,
this does not apply to all farmers for some of them are as neatly dressed as they
could possibly be,” B. L. noted politely. “But as a rule, we do not pay as much
attention to our shoes as we should. . . . ​I know just as well as any farm woman
does how much mud, dust and weeds we have to wade through sometimes, but
we can have clean shoes to wear when we dress up and go away from home.”22
It is perhaps worth noting that, although she was a farm woman herself,
Mrs. B. L. did not expect her concerns to be particularly well received by fellow
readers of the Indiana Farmer’s Guide. “I suppose the editor will not publish my
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article,” she concluded, “or if she does it will probably bring such criticism that
she will not want me to write another.” What this comment suggests is that, by
the summer of 1919, many farm women were already well aware of their reputation for being dirty and generally uncouth. They were apparently also sufficiently sick of hearing about it that B. L. could reasonably assume that her
missive might never make its way into print. Ultimately, B. L.’s letter was published, but not without a rejoinder of the sort that she fully expected. “When it
costs from $7.00 to $12.00 to get a plain pair of shoes for an adult,” wrote Florence Albright, the editor about whom B. L. spoke, “it is very probable that we
can not [sic] all have new shoes when we want them, but,” Albright continued,
“we can shine our old ones and greatly improve their appearance.” Still, like
many rural women during this period, Albright continued to believe that the
“problem” with rural women’s appearance had literally been manufactured by
a burgeoning ready-to-wear clothing industry that was far more interested in
cultivating a particular variety of markedly feminine consumption in America’s growing cities than in catering to the practical needs of hard-laboring, cashpoor farm women. “Sometimes, we think we are almost unjust to women when
we ridicule them,” observed Albright, “for what are the poor women to do? The
style makers decide on some new fad, the manufacturers pick it up and put simply nothing else on the market, and women must have clothes so they must
buy these extreme styles. It is not always possible to secure a dressmaker, and
women must depend upon ready-to-wear garments. But when a skirt is narrower
around the bottom than it is at the belt line, it is time for women to protest.”23
If early-twentieth-century debates about rural women’s shoes seem trivial to us today, it is only because we live in era when labor outsourcing has
made shoes widely available to most Americans as relatively inexpensive consumer goods. Throughout much of history, however, and indeed throughout
much of the world even today, shoes were thought to say a great deal about their
wearers—not about their idiosyncratic tastes, but about their station in life (see
Figures 6.3 and 6.4). Given their exorbitant cost, many people considered themselves lucky to have shoes at all, regardless of whether they fit particularly well.
Until very recently, poor Americans have certainly never enjoyed the luxury of
purchasing obviously impractical shoes simply because they appreciated their
style, something Florence Albright was quick to point out during the summer
of 1919. At best, they were fortunate to own one good pair of shoes that could be
worn on special occasions, if not for decades, at least for years.
Despite their sometimes vociferous protest that they were being coerced
into adopting a modern style of womanliness that created greater inefficiency
and therefore made farm life even more difficult, rural women continued to
be harangued for their preferences in footwear—preferences that were increasingly judged as being decidedly out of step with the standards of modern fashion and, by extension, with the standards of modern femininity itself. Indeed,
so extreme did national concern over rural women’s notoriously worn and
© Johnson, Colin R., Jun 14, 2013, Just Queer Folks : Gender and Sexuality in Rural America
Temple University Press, Philadelphia, ISBN: 9781439909997
Figure 6.3 A destitute sharecropping family living in Mississippi’s cutover bottoms.
A second frame focused specifically on the women’s dirty, ill-fitting shoes and the
children’s bare feet. (Farm Security Administration—Office of War Information Photograph
Collection, Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-USF33-011566-M3. Courtesy of
the Library of Congress.)
Figure 6.4 One of the more prosperous members of a Women’s
Extension Club proudly sporting stockings and fashionable but
impractical shoes, Pietown, New
Mexico, 1940. The photograph’s
original caption reads, “At this
meeting recipes for canning vegetables[,] fruits and meats were
discussed.” (Farm Security Admin-
istration—Office of War Information
Photograph Collection, Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress,
LC-USF34-036630-D. Courtesy of the
Library of Congress.)
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muddied shoes become that William Marion Jardine, Calvin Coolidge’s Secretary of Agriculture, actually dispatched home demonstration agents to twelve
counties during 1926 to lecture farm women on “foot hygiene.” No trivial undertaking, these lectures reportedly came complete with “such illustrated materials as slides, X-ray pictures, photographs of good and bad shoes, and the ills
resulting from wearing the wrong kind,” all furnished at considerable expense
to the American taxpayer by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.24
© Johnson, Colin R., Jun 14, 2013, Just Queer Folks : Gender and Sexuality in Rural America
Temple University Press, Philadelphia, ISBN: 9781439909997
The Ugly Truth
Shoe fashion was not the only area in which rural women were found wanting
by urban tastemakers. Similarly disparaging comments about rural women’s
attire were made so regularly in the mainstream American press during this
period that one group of farm women in Nebraska actually lobbied Congress
to pass a law banning the sale of impractical clothing in the hope that doing so
might restore some degree of respect for the daily challenges they faced while
also decreasing the torment they suffered at the hands of Jazz Age tastemakers.25
If farm women’s drudge-like appearance was alarming because it marked
them as overly masculine and therefore out of step with increasingly standardized norms of womanliness and femininity, it also represented a potential crisis for heterosexual romance and desire. Middle-class women had long been
encouraged to secure their place in society by making themselves attractive to
men. During the early decades of the twentieth century, however, such counsel
was increasingly extended to farm women as well. Often this advice was delivered via the women’s interest columns that began to suffuse the rural press during this period. In other cases, farm women found themselves admonished in
person for failing to make themselves sufficiently attractive to men. In so doing,
critics warned, rural women were inadvertently responsible for undermining
the institution of marriage and imperiling the stability of the traditional rural
households they claimed to prize.
In retrospect, the appeals that were made to farm women to spend more time
on grooming and the improvement of their physical appearance seem familiar
enough. They are simple variations on a theme that has haunted women and
girls for generations: be pretty or else. As the feminist philosopher Simone de
Beauvoir noted, “It is understandable that the care of her physical appearance
should become for the young girl a real obsession; be they princesses or shepherdesses, they must always be pretty in order to obtain love and happiness;
homeliness is cruelly associated with wickedness, and one is in doubt, when
misfortunes shower the ugly, whether their crimes or ill-favored looks are being
punished.”26 In the context of early twentieth-century rural America, however,
the homely shepherdesses in question were rumored to be guilty of far more
than garden variety wickedness or petty crime. According to some people, they
were responsible for extinguishing what we would characterize as heterosexual
desire itself. Indeed, during the 1920s especially, the censure that rural women
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received for their supposed failure to conform to emerging standards of female
beauty reached heights of intensity that were almost apocalyptic in tone.
For example, in December 1926 Blanche Chenoweth, head of the Household Arts Department at the Teacher’s College of Indianapolis, stepped up to a
podium to address a group of midwestern farm women who had assembled in
Chicago to attend a conference sponsored by the American Farm Bureau. After
welcoming the women, Chenoweth proceeded to launch into the subject she
had been invited to speak about: hygiene and its relation to farm women’s happiness. Her message to those in attendance was brief and unequivocal. “Carelessness in dress,” Chenoweth informed her audience, was “one of the cardinal
sins.” She then went on to insist, with proselytizing zeal, that “many a husband’s
unfaithfulness after marriage can be traced to his wife’s sloppy attire around
the house.” As if their poor fashion sense wasn’t bad enough, Cheno­weth also
informed the members of her audience that they were, generally speaking,
quite fat: “The average diet on the farm is richer than in the city home and the
farm woman’s greatest fault is a stout figure.” With this in mind, she implored
farm wives to “take better care of their diets, their faces and hair, to use proper
creams and cosmetics and,” perhaps most importantly, “to forget their worries
because ‘worries make unpleasant facial lines.’”27
It is difficult to know how Blanche Chenoweth’s hectoring comments were
received by American farm women in 1926. Reports of her address that appeared
in Chicago newspapers the next day include no mention of any objections from
listeners nor any signs of indignation on the part of those in attendance. Quite
to the contrary, most reports exude a quiet sense of gratitude and appreciation
to the domestic scientist for having brought such an important issue to the fore
of public consciousness. Still, no one likes to be told that they are “stout,” unkempt, or haggard looking. They certainly don’t like to be given reason to fear
that their spouses might secretly find them unattractive or even disgusting because of something as trivial—and frankly unavoidable in the context of laborintensive farm work—as a calloused palm or a mud-stained skirt.
Yet, these are precisely the sorts of messages that farm women routinely
received from various quarters during first half of the twentieth century. Indeed,
between about 1900 and 1940, women who lived and worked in rural areas
found both their bodies and their dress closely scrutinized by a broad array of
interested parties, who worried increasingly that the heavy lifting and hardscrabble existence that characterized rural life were not only offensive in light of
emerging standards of middle-class femininity but also actively destructive to
these standards. Additionally, as Blanche Chenoweth’s comments suggest, this
supposed decay of rural women’s femininity also posed something of a problem for the national social order because it threatened to litter the American
landscape with abandoned, misshapen, and in some cases, manly women with
no future as wives or mothers—unloved, unlovable castoffs, whose regrettable assignation to the margins of respectable society might ultimately be traced
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back to their own failure or refusal to “take better care of their diets, their faces
and hair, to use proper creams and cosmetics.”28 In hindsight, of course, Chenoweth’s counsel to the farm women of America—her impassioned plea for
them “to forget their worries because ‘worries make unpleasant facial lines’”—
seems ironic at best, if not downright cruel, given the fact that just ten years
after her Chicago speech, the whole of the United States would find itself in the
depths of the Great Depression, and the “unpleasant facial lines” that worry
cause would become the emblems of an era.
At some point during the first few decades of the twentieth century, women
who lived and worked in the nonmetropolitan United States were presented
with a choice: be modern or risk being labeled a backward, manly drudge. Many
rural women attempted to comply with this gendered imperative to the best of
their ability. But there is also evidence to suggest that some rural women—particularly those without the financial means to do so—either resisted such mandates or simply gave up trying, recognizing that, under the conditions in which
they lived, being hard was the best that they could do.
This resignation did not come without its costs, however. Increasingly, to
be a rural woman in the United States was to be a woman steeped in shame—
shame about one’s body, shame about one’s clothing, shame about one’s myriad failings as wife and mother, shame about pretty much everything. Thus,
when the Department of Agriculture surveyed 55,000 American farm women
in 1915 in an effort to determine what might be done to improve their lot, the
mitigation of shame figured prominently in their responses. Indeed, even some
farm men felt compelled to respond to Secretary of Agriculture David Franklin
Houston’s questionnaire, noting how disproportionately rural women suffered
under conditions of rhetorical persecution fomented by advocates of modernization. “The farm folk are treated with contempt and ridicule,” one farmer
observed in the pages of the New York Times. “Scarcely a daily paper or periodical of any kind but caricatures and pictures the farmer as old ‘Hayseed,’ with
a make-up that is disrespectful and not true. . . . ​This affects the women and
girls. That’s the reason the girls go to cities and clerk in the 10-cent stores and
other mercantile establishments.”29
These, then, are the early-twentieth-century rural-to-urban émigrés about
whom lesbian and gay historians have written so much—women who, I would
argue, already brought with them from the countryside extensive, if peculiarly
configured, experience with emerging discourses of gender and sexual normativity—discourses that would diverge over the next three decades in such a way
that they would eventually come to mark the manly, or “hard,” woman as always already “lesbian” and the sexually reproductive woman as always already
“heterosexual.” During the first half of the twentieth century, however, neither
one’s claim to womanliness nor one’s claim of sexual normalcy was ever entirely secure if one lived on a farm or in a rural area, especially if one lived there
poorly, as so many women did.
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Conclusion
Although gender and sexuality have arguably emerged as objects of serious
scholarly analysis because of feminists’ insistence that both of these aspects of
human experience matter in a historical sense at least as much as any others,
there seems always to be a danger of doing epistemic harm to women whenever
we attempt to write about the history of gender and sexuality at the same time.
On one hand, drawing too much attention to handpicked examples of women’s
sexual agency runs the risk of directing attention away from the much longer
history of women’s sexual oppression under conditions of patriarchy, while on
the other hand, dwelling too exclusively on the ways in which women have been
oppressed because of their gender makes it seem as if gender is all that women
have ever really had.30
Taken as a whole, this book undoubtedly errs more significantly in the latter direction than the former. And yet I think it is worth pausing for a moment
to consider what the experience of American farm women during the first several decades of the twentieth century might teach us about the relation between
gender and sexuality. For instance, it seems to me that the sort of harassment
that rural women were subjected to during this period helps to illustrate why it
is often difficult to separate gender and sexuality when discussing women’s historical experience.
Historically speaking, one of the forms of privilege that sexism confers on
men is the license to do whatever they choose sexually—with whomever they
choose—just so long as they do nothing to betray their principal obligation
under patriarchy, which is to maintain control over power and resources by
asserting various forms of authority, including moral authority, over women
and children. In other words, it is one of patriarchy’s properly historical effects
to afford men much broader access to various forms of sex than women, even
despised forms of sex. There are still limits to the sexual license that men enjoy
under patriarchy, of course. And there have certainly been moments when patriarchy has swooped in to police male sexual behavior before it gets out of hand,
a point I return to in the Conclusion to this book. But on the whole, men have
been afforded greater access to what Alfred Kinsey often referred to as “sexual
outlet” than women have because men afforded such access to themselves.
By contrast, patriarchy has traditionally deprived women of similar license,
not so much by isolating them from sex, but rather by “soaking them” (Denise
Riley’s phrase) in various forms of gendered normativity that have historically
had built into them the powerful ideological conceit that part of what it means
to be a woman is only ever to have the kind of sex that men want to have, and
only ever at their behest.31 For American farm women during the first half of
the twentieth century, what this meant was that normalcy and abnormalcy were
read onto them through the scrutinizing and policing of their gender. In other
words, it is not so much that men have sexuality and women gender, a point that
women’s historians have been actively contesting for several decades; it is that,
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under conditions of patriarchy, everybody has sexuality and gender—they just
tend to have them in the ways that benefit men by accommodating male sexual
prerogative. This is not to suggest that American women have never challenged
male prerogative; they most certainly have. But it is to say that careful attention
to the manner in which women’s gender has been discussed and policed can
sometimes yield extremely important insights into the history of women’s sexuality as well, especially under circumstances where the alternative is simply to
take the archive’s relative silence about the matter of women’s sexuality on face
value as evidence of nothing at all, which it clearly is not.
If the historical archive is silent, or at least comparatively mute, on the subject of rural women’s desires, it is not because they did not have them. It is,
rather, because the men who traditionally maintained that archive seldom felt
obliged to stop and ask women want they did or did not want. Instead, men told
women what they should want, often in terms that betrayed both the depth of
their prurience and complete disregard for the degree to which women were
forced to struggle, day in and day out, for their survival in the backbreaking,
hardscrabble world of early-twentieth-century farm life. As evidence of this we
need look no further than the pages of the Herald Gospel of Liberty which, in
1926, delivered its startlingly definitive answer to the question of what American farm women wanted most: “They want pink underwear,” the publication
asserted in no uncertain terms, “and they want it made of silk. Of course they
do. . . . ​[A]ll women want something of the sort.”32 And perhaps they did. After
all, sexism and heteronormativity do have a way of wearing one down over
time, just as years of heavy lifting and backbreaking stoop labor performed in
muddy, sun-drenched fields tend to.
In this chapter, I have written primarily about poor and working-class white
women because there seems to have been some sense that their attenuated claim
to womanliness and femininity could be saved with some effort, despite their
“hardness.” By contrast, dominant culture has seldom demonstrated a similar
investment in cultivating womanliness or femininity in women of color. If anything, femininity has either been projected onto entire racialized groups, as has
historically been the case where Asians and Asian Americans are concerned, or
has been placed so entirely out of reach that women of color literally have had to
remind people that the term “woman” applies to them as well.33 And yet, however narrow this chapter’s focus may be in light of all of these considerations, I
think we can learn something very important by considering the historical experience of the hard women discussed here: white, often poor rural women of
the sort Dorothy Allison has written about so powerfully. Referring to herself
and the other hard women in her family, Allison says:
Let me tell you about what I have never been allowed to be. Beautiful and female. Sexed and sexual. . . . ​The women of my family were
measured, manlike, sexless, bearers of babies, burdens and contempt.
My family? The women of my family? We are the ones in all those
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­ hotos taken at mining disasters, floods and fires. We are the ones in
p
the background with our mouths open, in print dresses or drawstring
pants and collarless smocks, ugly and old and exhausted. Solid, stolid,
wide-hipped baby machines. We were all wide-hipped and predestined.
Wide-faced meant stupid. Wide hands marked workhorses with dull
hair and tired eyes, thumbing through magazines full of women so different from us they could have been another species.34
Until we begin to embrace the broader history of “hardness” in women—
until we begin to understand how and why Allison and the other women in
her family would come to experience themselves as being so different from
the female bodies depicted in magazines that they seemed as if they “could
have been another species”—I would argue that we are going to miss a lot, in
terms of our understanding of rural and working-class women’s experience in
the United States. We will undoubtedly also fail to appreciate queer criticism’s
potential to challenge punishing forms of normativity, including those forms
of normativity that have been responsible for making rural and working-class
women like Allison feel not only ashamed, but inhuman.
If queer theory is a theory of how people find one another, as Lauren Berlant
and Michael Warner have provocatively suggested, then it may, in fact, be the
perfect tool for the job—partly because today’s queers may actually need their
shame for reasons addressed earlier, but also because it seems to me that women
of the sort I have been discussing in this chapter deserve whatever kind of queer
solidarity we can extend to them, even if they turn away in fear or disgust from
the “modern” notion of homosexuality, something theorist Heather Love has
reminded us queer subjects are occasionally known to do.35 For if Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick was right—if the term “queer” names not only the counter-heroically
abject but also anyone “whose sense of identity is for some reason tuned most
durably to the note of shame”—then I find it difficult to think of many groups
that more qualified for inclusion under its auspices than hard women. Surely
the many indignities that have been heaped on poor and working-class rural
women under the intersecting oppressions of heteronormativity and patriarchy—surely the shame they have been made to feel for a century at least as
“measured, manlike, sexless, bearers of babies, burdens and contempt”—has
earned them a place, dishonorable though it may be, in our queer company.