Flawed Portraits: Ma Kettle and Misleading Representations of Rural Women on the Silver Screen

During the mid-twentieth century, motion pictures and television proved to be a powerful medium for constructing cultural perception.  American society’s view of rural women changed with the representations that filled screens.  The people of rural America (an ever shrinking populace) and historians may know differently, but for many perceptions became reality.  Taken as a whole the characters of the rural woman found in popular media tended to fall into one of two categories.  The first was the alliterative strong, silent, serving, saint.  She tended to be seen in service to her family and beyond moral reproach.  She was the example that kept or turned the hero back to the straight and narrow.  Character actor Beulah Bondi typified this rural woman trope across her career.  From early 1930s motion pictures to television’s The Waltons in the mid-1970s, Ms. Bondi repeated her performance as the saintly rural woman.  The second type is found in the form of Marjorie Main in the role of Ma Kettle.  First seen in the bestselling book and subsequent hit motion picture The Egg and I, Ma Kettle quickly became the face of rural women in America from 1947 to 1959 in ten releases.  Main’s character had fifteen children, was at the mercy of her husband, and was a rural bumpkin fish out of water played for laughs.

Taken together, these two character types became a common expression for secondary roles and societal importance in the perception of rural women by those outside of that world.