On Behalf of the Family Farm: Iowa Farm Women's Activism since 1945

Chapter Four: Because Somebody Had to Do It: Women, Families, and the National Farmers Organization

ChaPter fOUr Because Somebody Had to Do It Women, Families, and the National Farmers Organization dUring the late winter Of 1958, Luella Zmolek’s husband, Don, announced that he was going to a “farm meeting.” Don had never joined an agricultural organization or even expressed interest in farm politics, but Luella was so caught up with her chores that she did not stop to question him. The following day, when Don attended another meeting, she began to think it was a little bit strange. She and Don had been married for nearly thirteen years and, along with their three daughters and three sons, had enjoyed several prosperous years on an eighty-acre farm in Black Hawk County, Iowa. In 1955, however, after commodity prices fell dramatically, their eighty acres and purebred Angus herd were in jeopardy. She and Don found work in Cedar Falls, Iowa, to provide for the family, but working for wages was not a long-term solution. So, in 1958, after Don had attended the two meetings, he approached Luella with a copyof the NFO Reporter, theofficial newspaper of the National Farmers Organization (nfO). Intrigued by the nfO’s plan for collective bargaining in agriculture, Luella reasoned that if they worked to improve commodity prices, she could quit her job and devote herself entirely to the farm. At twenty-five dollars, membership dues seemed high, but she told Don they should give their money to “anyone who would try.”1 Midwestern farm women like Luella Zmolek found their expectations for farm life, marriage, and family disrupted by rapid modernization and economic instability. Along with their husbands, many placed their hope in new, specialized farm organizations that emerged after 1945 to promote specific production and marketing methods. By joining these groups, women began to imagine new forms of community based on personal experience. In a period when communities defined by geography, ethnicity, and kinship were slipping away, organizations like the nfO played a pivotal role in the development of agrarian feminisms by promoting politicized, public identities for farm women. In the same period when Betty Friedan posed “the problem that has no name” towhite, urban, middle-class housewives and attacked institutional sexism, farm women of the American Midwest also developed feminist approaches to a much different but similarly unexplained 86 • ChaPter fOUr “farm problem.” Most farm families experienced depopulation, economic uncertainty, and modernization as an endless progression of personal decisions . They believed that the ultimate outcome reflected their character and ability, with devastating consequences for those who failed. Formed in 1955, the nfO provided an explanation for the crisis in agriculture that permitted its members to shift the blame and identify their daily struggles as part of systemic social and political inequalities in American society, lifting the burden of blame from individuals and placing it on the system. The nfO also promised that farmers could obtain consistent and faircommodity prices through collective bargaining. Just as Second Wave activists acquired a feminist consciousness through participation in movements for peace or civil rights, membership in the nfO did not necessarily present a venue to challenge sexism, but it provided a transformative experience that linked women’s legal, political, and social rights directly to the well-being of the family and their farm. Identifying corporations, food processers, and financial institutions as outside threats to their way of life allowed women to mute social feminisms and formulate early manifestations of a politics of dependence that emphasized women’s vital roles in times of economic urgency. In contrast to the rhetoric of rural uplift supplied by the Farm Bureau and the Farmers Union, women harnessed a newly emerging narrative of rural decline that required solutions far more complex than the better housekeeping promoted within social feminisms. Members of the nfO held fast to gendered divisions of labor, but they also understood that economic conditions and the demands of the organization required families to rethink those boundaries. Framed within a militaristic rhetoric that upheld women as Rosie-the-Riveter-type figures, this idea was represented in terms of families, especially women, who were sacrificing individual aspirations to work on the farm, in town, or in nfO offices only “for the duration,” or until they secured higher prices.2 Women’sexperienceswiththenfO duringthe1950sand1960sunderscore the significance of work, family, and activism when tracing the development of agrarian feminisms that permitted women to quietly question patriarchy while defending gendered divisions of labor and the integrity of the nuclear family. Women challenged the male-dominated power structures within corporations...