I seem to learn a great deal about modern life in the toy store. On a recent visit to the American Girl store with my granddaughter, I saw this year’s featured doll who is a farm girl. It made me realize that the farm and farm life are mostly ancient history today. I was not raised on a farm, but in my childhood I could at least reach back and touch one through my grandparents. My generation may be the last one in which farm life is actually a part of the family, and not an idealized past.
My maternal grandmother was raised on a ranch in California, and I was always interested in her tales of ranch life, from playing in the orchards with her six siblings, to picking fruit, to riding in the pony cart, to raising ducks and chickens. Any drive in the countryside with her always involved her commenting on what was in the fields and whether it looked like good weather for that particular crop to mature. I learned how important the weather was, and how a whole year’s worth of work could be wiped out in one climate disaster.
My husband had grandparents who were still on a farm when they passed away. We visited them as newlyweds in rural Wisconsin, having lunch in an old clapboard farm house with the toilet facilities still in a shed in the back yard. At the tender age of five my husband had made a trip to this family farm where he got to drive the tractor, smoke an ‘asthma cigarette’ (I know) with his grandfather behind the barn, and fish in a nearby lake. My husband’s mother was raised on another farm with tales of various treasured pets, and swimming in the water tank during the hot Missouri summers.
My children know no one who has any ongoing connection to a farm, and my grandchildren certainly do not. I know that there are many farms still out there operating and feeding the nation, but they are not connected to society in the way they once were. What remains is a romanticized ideal of farm life which both my grandmother and my mother-in-law would find unrecognizable. My mother-in-law in particular left the depression-era farm as quickly as she could, heading to the city to live a new kind of life. To the end of her days she had no desire for antiques, which were simply old farm relics to her. She reveled in running water and other modern accoutrements and had no intention of giving them up. When asked about her girlhood, her tales always had a wryness about them as if her listeners could not really understand what it was like.
I am glad there is a doll honoring our national agricultural heritage, but I think that life is not all about fluffy baby chicks and adorable lambs. There is a note here of Marie Antoinette who, shortly before she lost her head courtesy of the guillotine, played at being a milk maid at the Petit Trianon, a fake rural setting within the confines of Versailles. For a little agricultural reality, and a look at the unvarnished agricultural heritage of the nation, one might want to read Giants in the Earth by Ole Edvart Rølvaag. The American Girl company will never make a doll of that book’s protagonist.