Beeconomy: What Women and Bees Can Teach Us about Local Trade and the Global Market

North America: The Great Experiment, Part 2: Women Beekeepers in Industrial Agriculture

North America The Great Experiment, Part 2 Women Beekeepers in Industrial Agriculture I think woman is by birth and training a natural gambler. —Anna Botsford Comstock, “Beekeeping for Women,” 1908 In his book The Fruits of Natural Advantage: Making the Industrial Countryside in California, scholar Steven Stoll suggests that five factors merged to create a highly industrialized agricultural landscape in North America at the turn of the twentieth century: unique land conditions, university research and extension, innovative farmers and orchard growers, an independent yet inextricable relationship between farmers and the federal government, and a solid hierarchy between owners and laborers that generally divided along class and racial lines.1 All of these factors played into a general agricultural trend in the United States to specialize in monocultural crops. Yet, invisible in the industrial agriculture framework were the honey bee and the many women who made and continue to make invaluable contributions to industrial agriculture. Women beekeepers benefited from well-timed opportunities offered by education, financial stability, smaller families, a wellconnected state-federal extension system, and an enhanced legal framework. Canadian women were granted the right to vote in 1918, 193 Beeconomy 194 and US women, in 1921. In these two countries, women beekeepers established their own careers, traveled internationally, earned university degrees, and redefined familial patterns. Mexico, which did not ratify the women’s suffrage movement until 1953, did not offer as much economic diversity for women beekeepers until recently, but it too has offered opportunities to women beekeepers. Twentieth-century women beekeepers took the quickly shifting ideals of femininity in stride. World War I offered women opportunities to become beekeepers because there was a federally supported market for honey and wax. A downturn followed in the 1920s, but in the 1930s and 1940s the United States and Canada fundamentally revised their feminine paradigm to make room for another wartime women’s workforce. However, a federal infrastructure supporting beekeepers did not materialize. Instead, cultural and demographic shifts from agrarian to urban landscapes meant a major decrease in beekeeping opportunities for women. Furthermore, as the postwar economy reverted to urban-based locations and large-scale agriculture , women were encouraged to become domestic, facilitating a return to the nineteenth-century true woman. The nuclear family model in the 1950s in the United States emphasized smaller families, a home in the suburbs, and a divorce from agrarian traditions. From the 1960s on, North American women beekeepers defy easy categorization. They are beekeepers, extension agents, artists, queen breeders, and pollination specialists. This chapter is arranged geographically until the 1960s, at which point it is organized categorically according to Stoll’s five factors—federal laboratories, university programs, unique land conditions, educated beekeepers and orchardists, and an exploitable labor force—to show how contemporary women have buttressed the industrial countryside with beekeeping. The chapter concludes with other initiatives that also are successful in North America. The open-ended structure is meant to reflect how women beekeepers can flourish when creativity, flexibility , education, and legal infrastructure are available to them. North America: The Great Experiment, Part 2 195 Industrial Agriculture THE EAST Anna Botsford Comstock: “Mother of the Nature Study Movement.” Anna Botsford Comstock could not be a better example of an accomplished beekeeper, extension agent, artist, and writer. Born in 1854, Comstock was best known for breaking new ground in environmental education, a relatively new topic in academe. Anna decided to attend Cornell University in 1874. She surmised that “Cornell must be a good place for a girl to get an education; it has all the advantages of a university and a convent combined.”2 But a convent Cornell was not. Botsford met her husband-to-be, John Henry Comstock, when she took his basic entomology class in 1874, and they remained friends through a series of engagements to other people. They married in 1878. Only two years later, John Comstock initiated the first entomology program in the United States at Cornell, and the marriage would define both John and Anna as leaders of a new scientific way of teaching about not only honey bees but other insects as well. The two formed a powerful intellectual team. In 1887 John Comstock began teaching about bees by issuing a hive to every student; the students were expected to tend to the hives using the lessons of class and practical observation. To provide a backdrop for the Comstocks ’ new programs, it...