Putting the Barn before the House: Women and Family Farming in Early Twentieth-Century New York by Grey Osterud (review)

Building on her 1991 book Bonds of Community: The Lives of Farm Women in Nineteenth-Century New York, Grey Osterud returns to the Nanticoke Valley of south-central New York State, this time with a focus on the early 20^th century. In Bonds of Community Osterud challenged the concept of “separate spheres” as a way to understand rural women of the 19^th century, arguing that they did not retreat to their own sphere and create a distinct woman’s culture, rather rural women pursued “strategies of mutuality,” striving to forge common culture and co-operation between women and men. Putting the Barn before the House, that develops this argument further, asks and answers the question: “What was responsible for the remarkable degree of gender equality and neighborly cooperation that [Osterud] discovered alive and well in the Nanticoke Valley?” (p. 5). The answers are complex and include the structure of an economy based on dairy farming where the labour of all household members was required. Sociological factors include the networks of kin and friendship that forged connections across lines of ethnicity and religion. But most important was the “mutuality” within farm families, reinforced by cooperation, and a culture of reciprocity among neighbors. Women were constrained by male dominance and by poverty, but they were not helpless, they were “authors of their own lives and agents of change in the economy and polity” (p. 23). Personal narratives, interviews with two dozen women over many years, are at the core, and are the greatest strength, of the book.

Part 1, “Gender, Power and Labor,” scrutinizes the widespread view that rural women were deprived and degraded by domineering husbands who put the needs of the farm before those of the family. Drawing on the remarkable story of one impoverished woman farmer she interviewed, Osterud challenges this stereotype, arguing that Nanticoke women “did not think of themselves as hapless victims of fate, whether it took the shape of a domineering husband or grinding poverty” (p. 46). Part 1 also examines how women came to live, work on and sometimes own farms. Osterud concludes that despite class and ethnic differences, and regardless of whether they inherited, married into or founded farms, women were not downtrodden and marginalized, but “respected partners in farming families” (p. 66).

The focus of Part II is how farm families coped with two interconnected socioeconomic trends: the shift toward specialized, larger-scale agriculture, and an emerging pattern of families combining farming with wage-earning. Two distinct classes of landowners emerged: large-scale specialized farms that hired labour, and small scale diversified farms sustained by families and wage-labour off the farm. Part III analyzes the division of labour and relations of power in farm families through extended personal narratives. Family patterns varied considerably; in some men held the off-farm jobs, while women cultivated the land, and in other families these roles were reversed. Yet whether on or off the farm, women continued to participate in income-producing labour, and they exercised considerable power and influence as business managers, and in making decisions about the intergenerational transfer of the enterprise. Immigrant (Ukrainian, Czech) families purchased small scale farms, and Osterud interviewed women from these as well as “native-born” families. All found ways to create “partnerships characterized by mutuality rather than marginality” (p. 170). A commitment to the family farm counteracted the “gender divisions and hierarchies of power that seemed to prevail outside their rural culture” (p. 169).

Part IV deals with how rural men and women organized to solve the economic and social problems they faced. They rejected capitalistic solutions and business models, in favour of producers’ cooperatives, drawing on the strong tradition of the Grange, and undertaking new forms of collective action. The result was a revitalization of rural society. The influx of newcomers of varied ethnicities and religions was accommodated through new and old...