front cover of Every Farm Tells a Story
Every Farm Tells a Story
A Tale of Family Values
Jerry Apps
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2018
Jerry Apps details the virtues and hardships of rural living. 

“Do your chores without complaining. Show up on time. Do every job well. Always try to do better. Never stop learning. Next year will be better. Care for others, especially those who have less than you. Accept those who are different from you. Love the land.”

In this paperback edition of a beloved Jerry Apps classic, the rural historian captures the heart and soul of life in rural America. Inspired by his mother’s farm account books—in which she meticulously recorded every farm purchase—Jerry chronicles life on a small farm during and after World War II. Featuring a new introduction exclusive to this 2nd edition, Every Farm Tells a Story reminds us that, while our family farms are shrinking in number, the values learned there remain deeply woven in our cultural heritage. 
 
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front cover of Marriage and Modernity
Marriage and Modernity
Family Values in Colonial Bengal
Rochona Majumdar
Duke University Press, 2009
An innovative cultural history of the evolution of modern marriage practices in Bengal, Marriage and Modernity challenges the assumption that arranged marriage is an antiquated practice. Rochona Majumdar demonstrates that in the late colonial period Bengali marriage practices underwent changes that led to a valorization of the larger, intergenerational family as a revered, “ancient” social institution, with arranged marriage as the apotheosis of an “Indian” tradition. She meticulously documents the ways that these newly embraced “traditions”—the extended family and arranged marriage—entered into competition and conversation with other emerging forms of kinship such as the modern unit of the couple, with both models participating promiscuously in the new “marketplace” for marriages, where matrimonial advertisements in the print media and the payment of dowry played central roles. Majumdar argues that together the kinship structures newly asserted as distinctively Indian and the emergence of the marriage market constituted what was and still is modern about marriages in India.

Majumdar examines three broad developments related to the modernity of arranged marriage: the growth of a marriage market, concomitant debates about consumption and vulgarity in the conduct of weddings, and the legal regulation of family property and marriages. Drawing on matrimonial advertisements, wedding invitations, poems, photographs, legal debates, and a vast periodical literature, she shows that the modernization of families does not necessarily imply a transition from extended kinship to nuclear family structures, or from matrimonial agreements negotiated between families to marriage contracts between individuals. Colonial Bengal tells a very different story.

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Women’s Work and Family Values, 1920–1940
Winifred D. Wandersee
Harvard University Press, 1981

Changing occupational patterns during the 1920s and 1930s opened up new opportunities to women in a variety of fields. In a fresh approach to the history of women, Winifred D. Wandersee explores how the family, work, and family values took on new shapes during this critical period. By the 1920s, the increase in consumerism, encouraged by high production and mass advertising, had redefined the idea of an acceptable standard of living. For some, it was not possible to achieve this standard on the income of one wage earner, and women's employment outside the home became increasingly necessary. For most women, Wandersee shows, this trend to outside work was a reflection not of feminist ideology but of women's commitment to family values.

Wandersee finds that economic demands exerted even less influence on women than did societal and domestic demands. The proportion of married women who were gainfully employed during the 1920s, for example, was never more than 25 percent of all wives. Those who adapted to a joint economic and domestic role usually did so because their need was great, or their employment opportunity was favorable, or their value system stressed the material comfort of the family at the expense of traditional concepts of women's roles. Wandersee relates the experiences of these last two groups of women to the long-range changes in values and life-styles that have culminated in the American family of today.

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