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By Root 928 0

relation to another world. Yokels, hayseeds, and cabbageheads, they were called. Some promoters of rural life, as much as they understood the necessity of the expansion of electric lines into the countryside, were apprehensive about the changes in expectations it might bring. They saw electricity as part of "this jazz-industrial age [full of] white-lighters, never satisfied, but excited, [who] just don't want to get away from the white lights, out close to themselves, more or less alone." But most farm families had no such apprehensions and grew to resent the absence of electricity—an absence that was obvious every time they visited a city or heard from friends and relatives living in one. Rural free delivery brought catalogs and magazines to their homes, and with them ads for electric irons and washers as well as electric lights. Although electricity still could not be explained, the electric life was idealized—electricity as the good fairy. The women in the ads were washed and made-up, and they wore the fashions of the day, complete with earrings and high heels. They stood as straight as dancers as they delicately pushed a vacuum cleaner with one hand. The modern kitchens in the ads were entirely free of clutter and were white, brilliant white: the enamel electric stovetops and ovens and the built-in cabinets gleamed—no trace anywhere of the soot and ash that farmwomen struggled with daily.

But it was about more than ease and cleanliness. General Electric ads equated the electric life with being a good wife and mother. An advertisement from 1925 declared: "This is the test of a successful mother—she puts first things first. She does not give to sweeping the time that belongs to her children.... She does not rob the evening hours of their comfort because her home is dark. To light a room splendidly, according to modern standards, costs less than 5 cents an hour.... Certainly no household drudgery should distract her, for this can be done by electricity at a cost of a few cents an hour." The desire for such modern things meant nothing to a farmwoman. Even if they could be acquired, without central station power they were useless. This was a new kind of isolation.

Perhaps it wasn't the things themselves that many women most desired, but the free time. "The thing [the farm woman] needs in this day and time is electricity. Then when her house is lighted, her cream separated and churned, her washing, ironing, and sweeping, her sewing machine run by the same power, and she relieved from the drudgery of washing and filling lamps, lifting and washing jars, pans, and all these other hard old things, she can have some time for a social life and the improvement of her mind," commented one farm wife. Another said, "We would like to have a chance to live as the city sisters, and not be made to live as a peasant or slave." For both men and women, above and beyond the farm work, they desired simply to be included. This was especially true of the young, who would claim that "everything had already happened before we found out about it" and that "we were back in the woods compared to the rest of the world."

Whether in Texas, Pennsylvania, Iowa, Maine, Alabama, or Colorado, for those waiting for electricity through the twenties, thirties, and forties, there was only time, and waiting for time after. Or perhaps in the later years, the voices hardened even more, for time had passed, and as daylight waned and the last chores were done, the life that had spread across fields and woods during the day drew inside. Dark staked its boundary, large and elemental. Families gathered around the kerosene lamp on the table. What had once seemed "the kind of oil people had dreamed about for centuries" had become the symbol of obsolescence and of isolation from the future. "Kerosene light," James Agee wrote in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, "is to electric services what foot and mule travel is to travel by auto and airplane, or what plowed clay is to pavement, and ... these daily facts and gulfs have incalculably powerful and in many respects disadvantageous