NEH Grants to Fund Faculty Book Research

Two faculty members have received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support book-length projects during 2003-04.

Janet Galligani Casey, visiting associate professor of English, will use the fellowship to work on “Fertile Grounds: Women, Modernism, Rural America,” a study of women and agrarianism in the United States from 1920 to 1940. Jordana Dym, assistant professor of history, will devote the year to “They Also Mapped: The Cartography of Western Travel Writers, 1750-1950,” an analysis of the relationship between travelers and maps over 200 years.

Casey, whose ongoing research focuses on labor and ideologies of gender, will use that perspective to frame her study of the American farm during the early years of the 20th century. Her book’s foundation is a selection of novels from the era written by and about agrarian women that challenge longstanding associations of Americanism with a masculinist control of the landscape. These include Weeds (published in 1923) by Edith Summers Kelley; Call Home the Heart (1932), by Olive Tilford Dargan; and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Now in November by Josephine Johnson, published in 1934. According to Casey, these novels “resist ingrained sentimental parallels between fecundity and the female form and force a reconsideration of ideas about gender and work. The rich variety of ways in which these texts subvert social, political, and epistemological patterns reveals that the farm, rather than being a static and conservative cultural setting, offers rich opportunities for sociopolitical critique.”

In addition to novels, Casey has researched the agricultural press. She has read the entire press run of The Farmer’s Wife, a monthly magazine published from 1908 to 1939.
The only national publication dedicated to rural women, the magazine was instructional (containing recipes and stories on the domestic arts) and also provided a forum for farm women to air their views about rural issues. Stories played on the tension between country and city living through themes that reinforced the notion of country life as a healthier, better environment for families. Other stories addressed gender issues by offering ideas for women to convince their husbands to commit more of the farm’s resources to women’s needs, such as indoor plumbing, or appliances like stoves and washing machines. Casey calls the journal “an invaluable resource for understanding the complex ideologies – of agrarianism, of gender, of labor reform – tendered to and absorbed by farm women of the period.”

The book will consider these fictional and nonfictional writings within the context of, among other things, the American Country Life Movement. According to Casey, the movement was symbolically spearheaded by the Commission on Country Life, appointed by Theodore Roosevelt in 1908. She explained, “The commission sought to improve rural standards of living and to modernize images of the rural American family in order to reinforce both an agrarian mythology and an economic fundamentalism based on the farm unit. When Congress refused to fund its recommendations, several commission members tried to implement its ideals on their own.” She reports that the Country Life Movement was indirectly responsible for the Smith Lever Act of 1914, which led to the establishment of the federal Department of Agriculture’s Rural Extension Service, something Casey calls “a controversial effort to ‘teach’ rural women improved methods of mothering and housewifery.”

Casey’s goal is to show that while social, political, and artistic influences of the period prescribed traditional roles for agrarian women, farm women had a complex set of responses to these expectations. “I hope to illuminate a coherent radical women’s tradition that reframes basic assumptions about modernism, feminism, and Americanism,” she said.

Historian Jordana Dym’s research on travelers and maps is designed to appeal to scholars as well as those for whom travel means a call to AAA for their trip kit. She explains, “Until the mid-20th century, travelers were as likely to create or commission maps to accompany their travel accounts, as to consult them for way-finding. Whether the maps produced were rough sketches for private journals or measured surveys for publication, they were important enough to travelers and their publishers to appear in most types of published travel accounts.”

Her book will be the first systematic study of map use and production by travelers who went from being seekers of knowledge to seekers of entertainment during an era when travel and publishing changed dramatically. All of these developments significantly influenced the maps that were produced.

Says Dym, “We think of maps as representing real physical space and use them to get to places. This is a relatively new idea. Maps weren’t always literal depictions of location – they used to be more representative instead of representational. They could be decorative items, or developed as an intellectual exercise, but weren’t used for way finding in their earliest days. Travelers often made maps as they went along a route, instead of using them to get to a location. And the role of the traveler in mapping changes as time goes by, from tourist, to diplomat, to businessperson.”

Dym loves maps. She pulls a book off her office shelf to study the old map published on the inside cover. The illustration sparks questions about the contrasts between border detail and interior generalizations, and the quality and quantity of topographical information provided. Her theory is that travelers’ cartography changed in alignment with political and cultural developments – and that the maps produced reflected this. “When travelers achieved independence from local guides, maps moved from the category of something produced by travelers, as a form of displaying knowledge, to something produced for travelers, for planning and way finding.” This change illustrates “the shift from ‘imperial’ projects of 19th-century travelers – to ‘cultural’ projects of 20th century tourists,” she explained.

Her research will encompass Europeans’ travel to North and South America, Asia, and Africa from 1750 to 1950. Maps created at this time increased knowledge of new regions and exerted political control over them. Once adequate topographical maps were completed, travelers’ cartography was directed toward new causes: commercial development, transportation, and communication. At this point (mid- to late-19th century), travel itself changed. Explained Dym, “Until the end of the 19th century, travel took large amounts of time. But after you move into the age of steam, travel becomes faster and more accessible.” People traveled more independently and the goal of travel changed, with the emphasis now on entertainment. Travelers now wanted cultural knowledge, having evolved from map producers to map consumers in an effort to acquire such knowledge.

Dym, a specialist in Latin American history, became interested in this topic when she wrote an article (published in 2000) on the changing attitudes of 19th-century travelers to Central America. During the summer of 2001, she examined the cartography of travelers to Central America while participating in an NEH Summer Institute on Popular Cartography and Society. Her research has enriched her LS II course on “Travel Writers and Travel Liars in Latin America, 1492-1900.” The forthcoming book “combines my current teaching and scholarship interests,” she said. “I wanted to explore more the idea of maps and how they have been used.”

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