wrote one
farmer. "In later years he had a model T truck." The money made by the
women was theirs to keep, for running the house and personal expenses,
and the austerity or comparative comfort of a farmstead was often the
direct result of the energy and efficiency of the farm woman.[56]

The rural woman's place was respected and secure on the farms of fifty
years ago. The farmer might consider himself the overall manager but he
recognized his spouse's vital contributions. "Mutually they both decided
to make things go and they did go," wrote one 1930s farm boy of his
parents. "Mother did not feel inferior to father and she never felt that
he expected her to feel so."[57] If the woman's role and duties were
firmly set in this rural society, then so was her status.

An additional responsibility was that of caring for children, but in the
farm family this was more clearly a joint obligation of the father and
mother than in families in which the male parent left home to work. Too,
children were more closely tied to the family as a working unit; they
felt both the necessity of aiding their parents with the running of the
farm and the pride of contributing in a real sense to the family's
well-being. Of course, farm children attended school, but they also
shared the pattern of their parents' life. With father and mother they
awoke in the early hours of the morning to help with barn or household
chores: "It didn't make any difference how small they were, they got up
at six o'clock."[58] Many learned to milk before the age of ten. On
weekends, summer holidays and after school, they were also expected to
help on the farm. Both boys and girls performed the unending job of
gathering firewood for the kitchen stove. Carrying water was another
constant chore which often fell to the family's children, for as late as
1940 nearly 40% of the county's homes still lacked running water.[59]
Farm youngsters learned to drive a team and ride horseback at an early
age, and this enabled them to take a horse to be shod, fetch a mower
section from the general store, or run other unexpected errands.
Margaret Lee stated that as a girl she used to hitch up a mule and buggy
each Monday to take the family's laundry to be washed by a local Negro
laundress, and pick it up again on Thursday.[60] Girls also helped with
the dishes, fed chickens, and cooked while boys tackled plowing,
threshing and animal husbandry. One woman recalled the special
satisfactio