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Wood entered the painting in a competition at the Art Institute of Chicago. The judges deemed it a "comic valentine," but a museum patron convinced them to award the painting the bronze medal and $300 cash prize.

The patron also convinced the Art Institute to buy the painting, which remains there today.

The image soon began to be reproduced in newspapers, first by the Chicago Evening Post and then in New York, Boston, Kansas City, and Indianapolis.
However, Wood received a backlash when the image finally appeared in the Cedar Rapids Gazette. Iowans were furious at their portrayal as "pinched, grim-faced, puritanical Bible-thumpers".

One farm wife in danger to bite Wood's ear off. Wood protested that he had not painted a caricature of Iowans but a depiction of Americans.

Art critics who had favorable opinions about the painting, such as Gertrude Stein and Christopher Morley, also assumed the painting was meant to be a send-up of rural small-town life.

It was thus seen as part of the trend toward increasingly critical depictions of rural America, along the lines of Sherwood Andersen's 1919 Wines burg, Ohio, Sinclair Lewie's 1920 Main Street, and Carl Van Vechten's The Tattooed Countess in literature.

However, with the onset of the Great Depression, the painting came to be seen as a depiction of committed American pioneer spirit.

Wood assisted this transition by renounce his Bohemian youth in Paris and grouping himself with populist Midwestern painters, such as John Stuart Curry and Thomas Hart Benton, who revolted against the dominance of East Coast art circles.

Wood was quoted in this period as stating, "All the good ideas I've ever had came to me while I was milking a cow.

This Depression-era understanding of the painting as a depiction of an realistically. American scene prompted the first well-known parody, a 1942 photo by Gordon Parks of cleaning woman Ella Watson, shot in Washington, D.C.