Fears and Fantasies: Modernity, Gender and the Rural-urban Divide

Description

Fears and Fantasies: Modernity, Gender, and the RuralûUrban Divide explores the ways in which fantasies about returning to, or revitalising, rural life helped to define Western modernity in the early twentieth century. Scholarship addressing responses to modernity has focused on urban space and fears about the effects of city life; few studies have considered the 'rural' to he as critical as the 'urban' in understanding modernity. This book argues that the rural is just as significant a reference point as the urban in discourses about modernity. Using a rich Australian case study to illuminate broader international themes, it focuses on the role of gender in ideas about the rural-urban divide, showing how the country was held up against the 'unnatural' city as a space in which men were more 'masculine' and women more 'feminine'. Fears and Fantasies is an innovative and important contribution to scholarship in the fields of history and gender studies. Contents......Page 7 Acknowledgments vii......Page 9 Introduction 1......Page 11 Chapter One Urban Fears and Rural Fantasies in the Early Twentieth Century: The Australian and Transnational Contexts 9......Page 19 Chapter Two “Very Decidedly Decadent”: The Birth Rate in the Rural–Urban Discourse 51......Page 61 Chapter Three Purity and Impurity: Venereal Disease, the Girl Problem, and the Rural–Urban Divide 83......Page 93 Chapter Four “The Modern Idea is to Bring the Country into the City”: Urban Reformers and the Ideal of Rurality 115......Page 125 Chapter Five The “Most Dependable Element of Any Country’s Manhood”: The Modern Rural Space and Masculinity 147......Page 157 Conclusion Modernity and the Reconceptualisation of the Rural–Urban Divide, 1900–1930 185......Page 195 Notes 193......Page 203 Bibliography 237......Page 247 Index 255......Page 265