Women And Farming

Changing Roles, Changing Structures

Wava G Haney

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000008920
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Originally published in 1988, as part of the Rural Studies Series of the Rural Sociological Society, this is a collection of papers from the Second National Conference on American Farm Women in Historical Perspective, held in Madison, Wisconsin, on October 16-18, 1986. Includes the subjects of the impact of social and economic change on farm women; perspectives on the work of ethnic minorities and the Native American experience.

FARM WOMEN'S ECONOMIC ROLES

DOI: 10.4324/9780429267666-10

7 THE PARTICIPATION OF WOMEN AND GIRLS IN MARKET AND NON-MARKET ACTIVITIES ON PENNSYLVANIA FARMS

Carolyn E. Sachs

DOI: 10.4324/9780429267666-11

The extent of women's work on farms has been increasingly documented in recent years. Utilizing the categories of several theoretical perspectives, researchers have attempted to increase the visibility of farm women's work both in the past and in the present. The purpose of research on farm women has been to clearly understand the contributions of women to farm enterprises, to comprehend the lives of women on farms, and to gain information useful for the formulation of public policy. As Harding (1986) and other scholars of women's activities have suggested, feminist theory and research initially "began by trying to extend and reinterpret the categories of various theoretical discourses so that women's activities and social relations could become analytically visible within the traditions of intellectual discourse" (Harding 1986,645). Through our work, we have come to find that the interpretation of theories and the addition of new categories in an attempt to understand women's lives and gender relations have often distorted the original theories. At the same time, the revised theories often fail to fully explain the complexity of women's activities. As Rosenfeld (1985) has observed in her book on American farm women, the difficulty in predicting what a farm woman does may be due to the fact that women's roles are fluid, especially in periods of transition. Given the major changes in agriculture occurring at the present time, periods of transition are almost a constant for many farm families. Thus, the major purpose of this chapter is to critique the applicability of categories borrowed from three theoretical perspectives to a comprehensive understanding of women's work on farms. Drawing on a case study of Pennsylvania farm women and girls, the chapter will describe the complexity of women's work and illustrate the problems with using categories derived from traditional theoretical perspectives for understanding women's work.

THEORETICAL APPROACHES TO WOMEN'S WORK

Perhaps the greatest difficulty in documenting women's work in general and farm women's work in particular involves development of appropriate categories for analysis. Several theoretical frameworks have been used to explain women's work and the sexual division of labor. Reinterpretation of the categories of Marxist, neoclassical economist, and structural-functionalist theories of work have provided the background for understanding women's work. In attempts to describe women's work, Marxists have distinguished between productive and reproductive labor, economists have distinguished between market production and subsistence production and wage and non-wage labor, and sociologists have distinguished between work in the home and work outside the home. On U.S. farms, where households are generally the units of production and production is directed primarily towards the market, these theoretical categories are both helpful and distorting. In their daily lives, women often cross the boundaries of these categories. The invisibility and undervaluing of women's work in all three paradigms have created a need to develop new categories for understanding women's work.

The Marxist tradition

Productive ana reproductive labor are categories developed from the Marxist theoretical tradition to explain women's work. With the development of industrial capitalism, production increasingly moved outside the home and the role of the family became limited to the reproduction of the labor force. Prior to a feminist critique, Marxist analyses had focused primarily on productive labor; thus, women's reproductive labor was undervalued. In the past fifteen years, a number of scholars have attempted to assess the value of women's reproductive labor (Vogel 1973; Fee 1976; Macintosh 1979). Reproductive labor, primarily women's work, includes childbearing, child care, household work, ...