Introduction
Interest in the problems of rural life is wide-spread, but it is too generally uniformed. City people praise a life close to nature but avoid the life itself. Alarmists predict the early depopulation of the countryside. Optimists count upon macadamised roads, telephones, rural free delivery and moving-pictures at the school-house to make the farming population happy and contented. Despondent citizena pre-dict a scarcity of food products and an early dependence upon Russia and the Argentine. Still others querulously ask why the urban unemployed refuse to accept large wages and a comfortable home as labourers upon the farms, or why the dwellers in tenements do not eagerly seek the soil and add to the national wealth. There is a zeal for agricultural education. Experiment stations, colleges of agriculture, agricultural high schools are being multiplied, and even in the common schools agri-enltural subjects are being introduced. There is a deep-ening conviction that if only agricultural knowledge and skill can be widely distributed, and if the young can be given insight and enthusiasm for farming pursuits, our problems will be solved. The demand for new forms of agricultural extension is growing. Farmers' Institutes are declared to be an out-grown device. It is insisted that experts must go to the farmers on their farms, that demonstration plots must be scattered throughout the countryside, that county agricul-tural advisers must be appointed to serve the farmers of the region. Club women of town and city are concerning themselves with the life of women and girls upon the farm. To many the difficulty now is not so much to keep the boy on the farm as it is to make rural life worth while for the girl. It is proposed, therefore, to supply the house with the results of an inventive skill which heretofore has been employed al-most wholly on the farm outside the dwelling. A more in-teresting social life for farm women, closer contact with neighbours and with the nearest market town, are being urgod. The extension of information about home decora tion, cookery, and other household arts is being made a part of agricultural education and University extension every where. All these conflicting ideas, suggestions, devices, neod the steadying of fact and of authoritative principles. What is to be the future of agricultural industry? Is it to be or-ganised on a factory system with large farms under expert management, or will the typical agricultural unit be the small farm intensively cultivated by one family? Or will these two systems be combined in different ways in different parts of the country How are questions of this kind to be determined? What are the influences at work? These are pertinent questions. The purpose of this volume is to provide in a clear and untechnical way the fundamental facts upon which judg-ments about past development, present tendencies and future growth are to be based. This volume ought to increase in-terest in rural problems and to make that interest more in-telligent. It is to be welcomed as an important addition to the literature of the subject. It brings together in com-pact and convenient form a mass of significant facts and it draws sane and careful inferences. Professor Gillette has shown a clear grasp of the subject and has given us a val-uable book which will be welcomed not only in school and college, but by the general reader.
Preface
Rural conditions are attracting widespread attention. Numerous articles and volumes dealing with country-lifo matters have appeared during the past few years. While many of the books issued are exceedingly useful hardly any of them could be considered a rural sociology. To consider together the various phases of the life of the rural com-munity and so to organise and present them that they shall convey a knowledge and appreciation of the problems of country life is surely a useful undertaking. The present modest volume is an attempt to do this. The writer's interest in rural matters was first aroused by Professor Charles R. Henderson's course on "Rural Communities" at the University of Chicago in 1900. A course of lectures entitled "North Dakota Sociology" was offered students of the University of North Dakota in 1908. But in order to interpret many local conditions a larger comparative study was necessary. This larger un-dertaking furnished the foundation for the present volume. In this volume it is sought to define the scope of rural sociology, to differentiate between rural and urban communi-ties, to distinguish the types of rural communities in the United States and to indicate the physical and social influ-ences which have produced them, to consider the movement of population from country to city and the nature of the moving conditions, to compare the advantages of country and city, to mark out the nature of the rural problem, to con-sider the improvement of agriculture, farm marketing, farm labour, and the farm home so far as they concern rural com-munity welfare, and to take an inventory of social institu-tions and indicate how they may be improved.
About The Book
Rural sociology is the study of social organization and social processes that are characteristic of geographical localities where population size is relatively small and density is low (Warner 1974). Thus, rural sociology can be defined as the sociology of rural society. Since rural societies do not exist in isolation, rural sociology also addresses the relation of rural society to the larger society. Therefore, it deals also with spatial organization and the processes that produce spatial allocations of population and human activities (Newby 1980, Newby and Buttel 1980). There is a temptation to equate rural sociology with American rural sociology because the latter is most thoroughly institutionalized and there are more practitioners in the United States than anywhere else in the world. While rural sociology, in its institutionalized form, originated in America, it has flourished in other regions of the world, especially since the end of World War II. No doubt this is due in large part to the "modernization" efforts in the many nations that gained independence since 1950. Outside North America, sociological investigations of rural society often are referred to as peasant studies, development studies, or village studies rather than rural sociology (Newby 1980). Moreover, some aspects of rural sociological analysis are closely related to other social science disciplines, such as settlement patterns with human geography, family and kinship systems with social anthropology, and land tenure and farming systems with agricultural and land economics.
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