Rural America Has Urban Family Forms

If you turn off Illinois State Route 14 to get to where my cousin grows corn and soy, you drive through a solar farm before you get to the homeplace. It isn’t hard to understand why even glacier-flattened farmland is used to produce electricity rather than crops when you glance at estimated returns here and here. But an even more modern approach to farming is in the works: the University of Southern Illinois, Carbondale is working on agrivoltaic facilities, where crops and energy are harvested from the same plots.

I thought about four generations of my Southern Illinois family when reading new research from Shelley Clark, Matthew M. Brooks, Ann-Marie Helou, and Rachel Margolis. Their work uses rural/urban differentials in family behaviors to suggest that population change results more from economic structures than from cultural values and ideational beliefs. Let me show how that played out for one family.

My grandfather’s sister gave birth to her only daughter, Kay, in 1944. Her doctor told her if she got pregnant again, she would die. He also told her that if he could, he would throw every birth control pill into the Mississippi river; nonetheless, he made them available to her. It isn’t surprising that a rural doctor in 1944 loathed birth control pills: he may have been traditional, and they certainly weren’t safe: even the version approved by the FDA in 1960 has gotten much safer since. 

But it is surprising that a rural doctor was able to give his patient the pill before it was approved. Think about it. The first progesterone was synthesized just three years before my aunt needed it, and her doctor was enough connected to provide an actual (illegal) product to a patient. Clark and her co-authors described how some rural scholars have theorized that rural areas will always lag behind urban areas, while others have come to suggest that the explosion in connectivity with the internet and other devices will result in rural areas being less culturally different. I suggest that maybe rural areas have been well-connected for longer than we give them credit. Communications are a tool for ideological convergence, and even weak ties are known to sociologists as being the best for spreading information.

Kay married a farmer and stayed on the family farm. Her son got a BA in agriculture, and he lives on the homeplace next door to his mom and dad. Does he sound very traditional in a rural sort of way? Well, he didn’t marry a farmer’s wife. Marrying a woman who would live on a farm at all was a challenge in the 1980s, and his first wife, a speech therapist, had to commute regardless of where she lived. That marriage was short and childless. In his 40s, he married a woman who already had a child; they didn’t consider having any together.

I suggest that my cousin’s participation in what demographers call “new family forms” was propelled by the changing economy more than erosion of traditional rural values. Maybe his first marriage would have been short anyway because the divorce revolution in the 1970s had contributed to destigmatizing divorce, but I can’t help but wonder if he might have had better “match quality” in his first marriage if his “marriage market” had been larger (i.e., if there were more women who wanted to live in rural Southern Illinois). While ideology may have been part of it, I am siding with Clark and her coauthors’ contention that the economy seems more influential. 

My cousin’s twice-married-no-kids profile may sound like that of an urban guy, but Clark and her team empirically showed that new family forms are present to the same extent in rural and urban areas of the United States. Fertility is at the same level, and cohabitation now occurs in rural America more than urban America (Clark et al. explain this by lower education levels: it is harder to meet American economic standards for marriage in rural America).

Clark and her coauthors do not argue that culture and values do not matter, just that they seem secondary to economic structures. For example, rural folks are more religious, but their higher-than-urban cohabitation rates and nonmarital birth rates are explained by their greater poverty. One place the researchers suggest that values might still matter is gender roles: gender equity can contribute to fertility because dual-earner couples can have children more easily if the man is leaning in at home. Women in my family have described their men as the “outdoorsy” type; that could be a gentle way of admitting that they don’t do a lot at home.

So what is it like for rural Americans who, as a group, lean conservative but don’t display conservative family forms? The researchers, whose survey-based numbers can’t speak to this question, suggest:

In-depth qualitative studies would be especially valuable because rural American and Canadian families might be experiencing considerable tension between their family ideals and their family behaviors, potentially fueling frustration and resentment. To the extent that rural cultural values place greater importance on marriage and, especially, on raising children in two-parent married households, individuals in rural areas may be experiencing what Sobotka (2008:171) described as an ‘apparent paradox’: although ‘individuals often embrace values that can be characterized as rather traditional, they also frequently manifest family behavior associated with the [second demographic] transition, such as nonmarital childbearing, high partnership instability, and high prevalence of long-term cohabitation.’ 

They add: “Nonetheless, the assumption that ‘family values’ are stronger in rural areas and have not changed along with increasing cohabitation and nonmarital fertility rates warrants further direct study.”

What will the future look like? I asked my aunt what is going to happen to the family farm, and was surprised to learn that despite being 80, she doesn’t have a plan. Her son is going strong at 55 but has no heirs. Her daughter’s only child, whose husband currently works for an Amish farmer, may provide the only way for the farm to stay in the family. Or maybe the homeplace won’t need a farmer because it has a solar manager. I’m guessing solar managers or agrivoltaics technicians look more like urban types than their farmer counterparts who are already displaying “new” family forms.

Laurie DeRose is a senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Catholic University of America, and Director of Research for the World Family Map Project.