The Midwest Farmer's Daughter

From yesterday's gingham girls to today's Farmer Janes, The Midwest Farmer's Daughter unearths the untold history and renewed cultural currency of an American icon at a time when fully 30 percent of new farms in the US are woman-owned. From farm women bloggers, to “back-to-the-land” homesteaders and seed-savers, to rural graphic novelists and, ultimately, to the seven generations of farm daughters who have animated his own family since before the Civil War, the author travels across the region to shine new documentary light on this seedbed for American virtue, energy, and ingenuity.

Packed with many memorable interviews, print artifacts, and historic images, this groundbreaking documentary history describes the centuries-long reiteration and reinterpretation of agrarian daughters in the field, over the airwaves, on the printed page, and in the court of public opinion. Offering a sweeping cultural and social history, it ranges widely and well from Jane Smiley's Pulitzer Prize-winning A Thousand Acres to Laura Ingalls Wilder's proto-feminist commentaries for the Missouri Ruralist; from the critical importance of rural girls and young women to time-honored organizations such as the Farm Bureau, 4-H, and FFA to the entrepreneurial role today's female agriculturalists and sustainable farm advocates play in farmers' markets, urban farms, and community-supported agriculture. For all those whose lives have been graced by the enduring strength of this regional and national touchstone, The Midwest Farmer's Daughter offers a one-of-a-kind scholarly examination and contemporary appreciation.

Zachary Michael Jack teaches courses in rural studies, writing, and the environment as an associate professor of English and member of the Urban and Suburban Studies and Environmental Studies faculties at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois. The author or editor of more than twenty books, including Uncle Henry Wallace: Letters to Farm Families from Purdue University Press, Jack is a past nominee for the Theodore Saloutos Award for the year's best work in agricultural history and a runner-up in his class for the ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year Award. Jack is the seventh generation in his family to make a permanent farm home in rural eastern Iowa, where the Jack Heritage Farm was founded in 1855.