In 2013 poet Sarah Heady went out to southeastern Nebraska for a writing residency at Art Farm, a program started by a woodworker who’d grown up in that farmhouse. While introducing her to the place, he invited Heady to poke around the attic, which was filled with turn-of-the-20th century magazines and newspapers. It was July on the prairie, and it was sweltering. “So I went up there and spent a long afternoon sweating and looking through these old magazines from the teens and twenties,” Heady says.
Mostly, she told me, she was drawn to the stacks of a magazine called Comfort, “which was like a Ladies’ Home Journal for rural women.”
Touted as “the key to happiness and success in over a million and a quarter homes,”[1] Comfort was a mail-order magazine published from 1888 to 1942 by Gannet & Morris out of Augusta, Maine. Primarily a means to advertise Gannet’s Giant Oxien, a snake oil cure-all, Comfort increased its circulation ten-fold in the first six years of publication, making it the first magazine in America to surpass one million subscribers.
The pages of the magazine were filled with articles and ads about domestic life, in some ways much like those that fill magazines marketed to women today: advice columns, beauty tips, and recipes, with a tinge of early-internet-esque information sharing. “People would write in with questions about what was wrong with their chickens or share recipes for food or fertilizer for the kitchen garden,” Heady says. More surprising for today’s readers might be the ads for things like pessaries, mechanical devices used to keep one’s uterus in place to recover after a prolapse, most common after a woman has had multiple vaginal births.
Heady left Art Farm with photographs of many pages of Comfort magazine and other similar periodicals. When she got home, she started experimenting with constructing poems from this found language and, eventually, many other primary and secondary sources about the settlement of the Great Plains. These experiments, interspersed with other lyric pieces, eventually became her second book, Comfort.
Heady has done other writing drawn from archival material, including an opera libretto. “I have an infinite appetite for that kind of text. Even if I do get bored, I still feel like I can’t stop. It’s very addictive. And fun to project onto. With found material one is always taking liberties, reading between the lines.” While today websites often indicate the handful of minutes an article will take the average reader, a single front page of an early 20th century newspaper was dense with text and might take a full hour to read—time Heady describes as filled with fascination and thrill. “Even if it’s not a super personal document—not a diary but a public document like a magazine—I still feel there’s a voyeurism to it, like excavating someone’s personal life. It’s intimate to read a magazine that’s about intimate things.”
In her first book, Niagara Transnational, Heady similarly used found texts as points of departure for poems. In that case, it was a thrift-store box of hundreds of mid-20th-century postcards all mailed to or from the same woman. The banal and seemingly superficial messages—“Having a fine time, see you next month!”—contrasted sharply for Heady with what she knew to be the massive upheavals occurring in American life at midcentury, the waves of rising consumerism and alienation and their resisters, including those fighting for civil rights.
Reflecting today on Comfort and what fueled her interest in the domestic lives of early 20th century European immigrants colonizing prairies that were already home to indigenous women and families whose lives weren’t legible to or valued by these immigrants, Heady—in her late twenties at the time she visited Art Farm—is candid about her own confusion:
“When I was at that residency, my personal life was a mess. I was very ambivalent about whether I wanted to be in a committed relationship and whether I would ever want children. Looking back now, I feel like there must have been something intriguing for me about this idea of domestication or settling. Settling the West and settling down. Settling for something. All the things that settling conjures. And, in the case of the white settlers, the violence inherent in the act of domestication or ‘subduing’ the wild land and its original stewards. If there is a speaker or a set of speakers in the book, one of their main questions is, ‘How can I be in a relationship and still feel like an individual?’ Which was, of course, the question that I was asking myself—like, is it fundamentally possible to do that?”
Heady explicitly addresses the violence inherent in these women’s lives as colonizers in the Acknowledgments to her book: “Comfort centers the experiences of white women who, through their settlement, participated in the genocide and displacement of the Pâri, the Očhéthi Šakówin, and other tribes of the Great Plains and the Midwest,” she writes. “In her book Upend, poet Claire Meuschke articulates the fallout that such participation can generate: ‘19th century colonial women / suffered nationally a leg paralysis / Western science called it psychosis / what about immobilizing guilt / organized resistance / the land not wanting you?’ Coming across this passage several years after writing Comfort, I was struck by how the underlying condition of settler colonialism explains the emotional landscape (unsettledness, discomfort) suggested by my book.”
One of the biggest emotional threads in the book is loneliness—in contrast with aloneness, which is not the same thing. These women, Heady reminds me, were brought West by their husbands to colonize the land as part of a solitary, putatively self-sufficient couple-unit that was inherently fraught.
“I was interested in what wasn’t being said in those magazines and in those postcards,” Heady says of both her books, which come under the banner of “investigative poetics.” “The complicity of white women who were conscripted into the colonial project for their essential labors of reproduction and homemaking is very clear. And also, these systems are alienating and harmful for the perpetrators even as they are benefitting from others’ oppression.”
In the face of this alienation, Comfort magazine provided its readers a way of connecting. Though the timeline would be nearly unbearable to those of us accustomed to the speed of the internet, the magazine effectively hosted message boards that invited readers to write in and await a response from another woman offering advice and companionship. For women paradoxically isolated and deeply enmeshed in a traditional partnership, trying to create something in this new place marked by violence and uncertainty, the companionable voice of another woman experiencing similar circumstances even at a distance—was comforting.
The pages of Comfort magazine were filled with the multisensory language of materiality and domesticity: kinds of plants, kinds of food, and the verbs of making stuff. This, says the poet, is what found its way into the pages of Comfort, her book. During the seven-year wait between finishing Comfort and seeing it published, Heady gained insight in the form of marriage and parenthood that embedded her more deeply in the demands of domestic life shared with the readers of Comfort magazine a century ago. The temporal and psychological space between writing the poems and reading them again today with a toddler in her arms allows Heady to see her own words—and the words of Comfort magazine—through a different lens:
“Now that I have a child, the materiality of things is so much more real. Even though I will never truly understand what it is to be in the role of housewife or farm wife, the drudgery of childcare, the sleeplessness, the constant cleaning and cooking—all that has become so alive to me. At the time of writing Comfort, I was just playing and speculating. And now I have the tiniest window into the true endlessness that is women’s domestic work.”
When visual artist Mierle Ukeles became a mother decades ago, she felt profoundly the demands of cleaning and its prominence in motherhood. From scrubbing the gallery steps to becoming first the self-proclaimed— and later the formalized-though-unsalaried—artist-in-residence of the New York City Sanitation Department, Ukeles made the invisible labor of maintenance the subject of her work. As feminists like Sylvia Federici have long argued, the labor that brings a check home is visible, while the maintenance of domestic life—still today done largely by women—is undervalued and often unpaid.
Reflecting on the idea of “bottomless maintenance,” Heady says, “You do the work and yet there’s nothing permanent that remains of it. It has to be done again later this afternoon, and then it starts all over again tomorrow. The baby throws food on the floor, you pick it up, he throws it again, you pick it up again.” The repetitive nature of domestic work was amplified for isolated rural households. Though most American cities were electrified by 1920, as late as 1932 only 10% of rural Americans had electrical power, reifying an already present economic and experiential divide. Comfort magazine touted time-saving domestic tips and appliances, but—just as with so many devices the market offers to us today—many simply gave women more time to fill with more work.
On a farm, there is both a diurnal cycle and a seasonal cycle related to cultivation and to the experience of living in a harsh landscape like the Great Plains, says Heady, who structured Comfort in three sections: “Sunup,” “Day,” and “Dusk.” “Especially in the prose poems that are very dense and have layered lists of actions, part of the idea is to evoke the relentlessness of those cycles—which are also beautiful because they put humans in touch with the earth.” Early morning, midday, and dusk have their distinct energies and domestic demands, and over the course of the book the reader moves from a domesticated state into a wild one. “Sunup is when things are getting established: arriving in this new place, putting down literal roots; the daytime is like, okay, this is the middle of what we’re doing. We’re established, but I’m starting to wonder, is this okay or not? And then dusk is when the speaker or speakers—the multiplicitous mass of women who make up Comfort—sort of wander off into the wild darkness and give up the constraints of that setting.”
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The colonizing of the American plains and western states was purposeful and enduring, serving an array of political and nation-building interests that included arming European settlers to fight insurgent indigenous peoples. Between the passage of the Homestead Act in 1862 and 1970, well over 270 million acres of land were claimed 160 acres at a time, with genocidal impact at a scale that can be hard to conceive of today. To gain a deed for the land sold by the government for $1.25 per acre, the homesteader had five years to build a dwelling and show evidence of cultivating the land. These were the conditions upon which the European migrants into these Plains states could claim ownership to land already home to other people, which demanded that the migrants not see those others’ lives as equal to their own.
Heady’s poems invite us into this collective story at an intimate, uneasy domestic scale, that of women making home in a harsh and patriarchal setting in which one’s daily labors were often grueling, repetitive, and at odds with the intrinsic characteristics of the environment. “The isolation and disease of the settler colonial role is interesting to me—the unarticulated pathologies of whiteness and patriarchy operating and accruing behind the everyday lives of individuals who were part of these big historical projects and movements like the colonization of the West,” Heady says. “In the foreground are the individual lives of white people making home in an unfamiliar landscape, while in the background, loudly silent, is the destruction of peoples and ecologies.”
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Deirdre Visser is a curator, educator, visual artist, and woodworker in San Francisco’s Mission District. She is the author of Joinery, Joists, and Gender: A History of Woodworking for the 21st Century (Routledge, 2022), the first-ever history of women and gender non-conforming folks who work in wood.
[1] Mott, Frank Luther (1957). A History of American Magazines, 1885-1905, Vol. 4. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press. p. 365-366.
