Fears and Fantasies: Modernity Gender and the Rural-Urban Divide explores the ways in which
fantasies about returning to or revitalising rural life helped to define Western modernity in
the early twentieth century. Scholarship addressing responses to modernity has focused on urban
space and fears about the effects of city life few studies have considered the 'rural' to be
as critical as the 'urban' in understanding modernity. This book argues that the rural is just
as significant a reference point as the urban in discourses about modernity. Using a rich
Australian case study to illuminate broader international themes it focuses on the role of
gender in ideas about the rural-urban divide showing how the country was held up against the
'unnatural' city as a space in which men were more 'masculine' and women more 'feminine'. Fears
and Fantasies is an innovative and important contribution to scholarship in the fields of
history and gender studies.
