"Reap What You Sow!" How the Michigan State Grange and Its Grange Visitor Gave Rural Women an Opportunity to Realize Their Truest Selves.

This article examines the explorations for the period 1877-81, looking for recurring themes that might serve as both a reflection of and a window into the thoughts and feelings of Michigan women Grangers and thus, by extrapolation, rural women more generally. The Order of the Patrons of Husbandry, more familiarly known as the Grange, arose from rural conditions during the post-Civil War depression. In 1866, Oliver Hudson Kelley, originally from Boston and a some-time Minnesota farmer, was commissioned by President Andrew Johnson to travel throughout the South and survey conditions among the farmers there. Although Kelley was obviously a Northerner, he found that his membership in the Masons, an organization whose numbers were on the ascendance, earned him ready access and acceptance among southern farmers. He was struck by the rural people's social, economic, educational, legal, and political isolation. Further travel and experience convinced him that these conditions were not regional but had parallels throughout rural North and Midwest, as well as the developing West, in addition to the South. This was a period in which the embryos of unions were starting to develop to advance the interests of urban labor.