The history of women in U.S. agriculture reveals a fundamental contradiction: women's work has always been integral to farming, yet women have been excluded from controlling farms. Farm women's ambivalence about their situation reflects this contradiction. In the early twentieth century, some farm women complained that men were reluctant to invest in household improvements, such as running water, and that men seldom assisted with the physically heaviest domestic chores. Many women worked alongside men, preferring the seasonal cycle of outdoor tasks to the repetition and confinement of housework, taking pride in their strength and skill, and enjoying the companionship of shared labor.
Native American women alone enjoyed a social status commensurate with their centrality to the economy. Before the European invasion, farming yielded the bulk of most peoples' subsistence. Women cultivated corn, beans, and squash, crops known as the "three sisters." Women usually worked together and controlled both access to land and the distribution of produce. Men helped to clear new fields and participated in rituals to ensure the soil's fertility.
European settlers brought different systems of farming, property holding, and gender relations to North America. Agriculture was based on animal husbandry as well as the cultivation of crops; adult men owned, bought, and sold land as a commodity; women were subsumed within male-headed families. Most European Americans divided agricultural tasks relatively clearly between men and women, although the allocation of specific tasks by sex varied based on the peoples' places of origin and settlement. Men were responsible for the field crops and woodlot, women were responsible for the garden and poultry, and men and women shared responsibility for the cattle. At planting, haying, and harvest, women "helped" men in the fields. When men were away or disabled, women took over men's customary tasks.
Enslaved African American women who labored on plantations producing crops sold on the world market had different experiences from white women who worked on family farms. Planters required women to labor as field hands, regardless of whether they were pregnant, nursing, young, or old. Sometimes women worked together, but often they worked in mixed groups. Many women could keep pace with men in the tobacco, rice, and cotton fields.
Emancipation led to significant changes in African American women's work, although the Southern economy was still based on plantation agriculture, and ex-slaves were not granted the "forty acres and a mule" that they believed would bring economic independence. Refusing contracts that required them to do wage labor in gangs, African Americans insisted on farming in family groups as tenants and sharecroppers. Freedwomen spent more time raising food for their families and less time cultivating staple crops than enslaved women did.
The U.S. agricultural economy underwent a profound transformation during the nineteenth century. Despite uneven development and considerable resistance, farmers became integrated into capitalist systems of production and distribution. In the early stages of commercialization, expanding markets for butter, cheese, and poultry enlarged the economic opportunities available to farm women. Eventually, however, women became marginal to many commercial farm operations, producing the family's subsistence instead.
In the twentieth century, women of color have been employed by corporate agribusiness as seasonal wage laborers. In the West, Native Americans, Asian Americans, and Mexican Americans harvested crops, but racial discrimination prevented many families of color from owning land.
Rural women have actively resisted threats to family farming as a way of life. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, women joined farm organizations such as the Grange and the Farmers' Alliance and gained experience in political debate. The Grange extended membership to women on an equal basis with men and, after persistent lobbying, supported women's suffrage; women also served as traveling speakers in the Farmers' Alliance. In the early twentieth century, farmers' pressure on the government and land-grant universities led to the formation of the Farm and Home Bureaus and the Extension Service. In contrast to the mixed groups that farmers themselves controlled, government-sponsored agencies dealt with rural women and men separately. Only 4-H, the youth organization, was gender integrated.
Joan M. Jensen, With These Hands: Women Working on the Land (Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, McGraw-Hill, 1981); Nancy Grey Osterud and Joan M. Jensen, eds., American Rural and Farm Women in Historical Perspective (Washington, D.C.: The Agricultural History Society, 1994); Rachel Ann Rosenfeld, Farm Women: Work, Farm, and Family in the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985).
Grey Osterud
See also Labor Unions:
United Farm Worker;
Native American Cultures;
Native American Women;
Plantation System.
