"Aunt Nellie" offers advice to farm women, 1912-1918

Advice to Farm Women

Nellie Kedzie Jones was a nationally recognized pioneer in home economics who brought down-to-earth and good-humored advice to rural farmwomen through her columns in The Country Gentleman from 1912 to 1918, written while she and her husband ran a farm in Marathon Co. Particularly vivid advice came in the form of a series of articles she wrote as letters to an imaginary young niece named Janet from her "Aunt Nellie." Janet, with her husband Ben, had supposedly just moved to an old farmhouse from the city and desperately needed advice on how to handle the overwhelming work burden. Jones's basic message was that a farm wife must spare herself in any small ways she could contrive so that she did not change into an overworked piece of farm equipment. At the urging of her editor, Jones assembled the printed columns into a book manuscript. Though never published, the manuscript, with her editorial comments, is provided here both for its intrinsic merits as advice on running a farm and for its ability to show how a series of journal articles could be transformed into a printed book.

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