Vermont Women on the Farm in the Thirties

What follows is an excerpt taken from the book Up in the Morning Early: Vermont Farm Families in the Thirties, Scott E. Hastings, Jr., and Elsie R. Hastings. The book offers a rich collection of first-person recollections of rural life in Vermont during the thirties.See our Vermont Folklore selection for more of Scott Hastings' fascinating portraits of Vermont Women on the Farm.

"Changes? Yes, we've seen changes we just couldn't imagine. And I know there's more to come in the next fifty years. But I can't envision that there'll be things these next fifty years that will save the labor as we've seen in these last fifty. Everything in the house was done by hand. Outside they plowed and milked and did everything by hand. Nobody does these things by hand anymore. Most people were working really hard to just get a living barely. If they could ever get money to buy the new equipment they were glad to get it! I had washed for three babies before I had any kind of a washing machine. With a gasoline motor 'cause there was no electricity. So I saved for a washing machine and all the neighbor women came to see it. So the salesman did the wash. And this little old lady says, "Grace, if you buy anything that will save you from rubbing the clothes on that old scrub board you'd better buy it." Well, we did buy it. It cost $ 185.00 and that was a lot of money in those days. My husband was more willing than I was because I thought that was just too much money. We used the machine four years and then electricity came in. That was in 1930. So we shifted motors. Put on an electric one and I used that Maytag for twenty years before I bought a new one."

--Grace Hutchinson of East Corinth, born in 1899

Source: Up in the Morning Early: Vermont Farm Families in the Thirties, Scott E. Hastings, Jr., and Elsie R. Hastings, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1992.

If you are interested in ordering this book, it is available in our Country Bookstore: History.