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3 Women and Livestock The Gendered Nature of Food-Animal Production Old Macdonald had a farm, ee-eye, ee-eye oh And on the that farm he had a cow, ee-eye, ee-eye oh With a moo, moo here and a moo, moo there Here a moo, there a moo Everywhere a moo, moo A quack, quack here and a quack, quack there Here a quack, there a quack Everywhere a quack, quack Old Macdonald had a farm, ee-eye, ee-eye oh.1 “O ld Macdonald’s Farm” is a popular children’s song that portrays a highly nostalgic and romanticized image of traditional livestock farming. It conjures up a small-scale family farm where the farmer dutifully attends to his farm animals. The farmer is assumed to be male, and farming is presented as men’s work. Even today, the commercial production, marketing, and slaughter of livestock, especially cattle, continue to be predominantly, although not exclusively, a man’s world. However, the term “family farm” juxtaposes the personal and the public and brings into focus the interdependent nature of these two normally distinct, and largely gendered, spheres of modern social life. I show that women have played, and do play, a significant, albeit relatively unacknowledged, role in livestock-related farming contexts. By exploring in more detail why women are less likely than men to work with cattle, and the justifications put forward by my respondents to explain this pattern, I suggest that not only the production process but also the animals are gendered. Overall, this chapter provides an insight into a relatively under-explored aspect of contemporary agricultural life and an opportunity to think about how stereotypical notions of masculinity and femininity are expressed, justified, and contested in a range of commercial and hobby livestock-productive contexts. I 44 / Chapter 3 start this discussion by providing a historical overview of women’s roles in farming. Women have been, and continue to be, integral to the everyday running of small to moderate-size farms, but until the 1980s they were largely absent from agricultural research studies.2 When women were acknowledged, it was primarily in their role as farmer’s wife, mother, helper, and assistant (e.g., Brandth 2002a; Rosenfeld 1985). Up to the mid-eighteenth century, work on subsistence family farms could be divided into three areas: the fields, the barnyard, and the household (Osterud 1993, 19). The fields were primarily a male sphere of responsibility, but women would help during busy times, such as the harvest. The barnyard was a domain commonly worked by men and women, indicating that livestock farming seems to rely more on the joint input of men and women.3 Domestic and child-care chores associated with the household were predominantly women’s work. This fairly typical sexual division of labor reflected the physical arrangement of the farm. In the main, “Women’s labor centered on the house, men’s work on the fields . . . [and the] two met in the barnyard” (Neth 1995, 19). The reality was often messier than this neat schema. Although late-nineteenth-century agricultural reports in America depict working in the fields as “men’s work,” women often joined men. For example, “It was appropriate for women to work in the fields . . . during periods of labor shortage, in particular crops, or if they were black, immigrants or poor” (Sachs 1983, 20). The production of cotton and tobacco in the states of the U.S. South readily used, and was highly dependent on, black women’s labor. However, if at all possible, white women’s rightful place was considered the home. Given this racialized dimension, “The desire to keep white women out of the fields is not based on the presumption that women cannot perform agricultural labor; it is a matter of status for white men that they can keep their women in the home” (Sachs 1983, 25). Farmers’ wives and daughters were thus a versatile and crucial reserve of farm labor that could be drafted in during busy times of the farming year. This practice has been exemplified by a historical study carried out by Kathryn Hunter and Pamela Riney-Kehrberg (2002), who explored the type of farm work young women did in Australia, New Zealand, and the Midwestern United States during the period 1870–1930. They note that “rural girls were workers , although the exact nature of that work varied with family composition, location, stage of settlement, crop mix, and a number of other factors, particularly the...

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