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

Putting the Barn before the House succeeds on several levels. It successfully uses oral history interviews as evidence for a historical argument, and it argues plausibly that farm women in Broome County, New York, viewed themselves as peers and coworkers with their male relatives.

For thirty years, Grey Osterud has thought about the Nanticoke Valley, in south central New York, and the people who lived there, working on dairy farms and in factories. In the early 1980s she conducted oral history interviews with more than two dozen women and a few men who were born before World War I. From these interviews she has constructed her central argument: that men and women on the farms built relationships of mutuality and respect and that women, as much as the men, put the needs of the farm before the needs of housekeeping. A secondary emphasis is the symbiotic relationship between farm and factory, as many of the people who lived in rural areas gained employment in nearby factories, particularly the Endicott Johnson shoe factory, in addition to their farm work. Osterud also details a high level of community cohesion, with systems of mutuality among native-born residents and immigrants alike.

With the experiences of Nanticoke Valley residents, Osterud deflates the view held by many Progressive Era reformers that rural marriages were zero-sum games in which one partner lost power to the other. She also posits that women defined their sense of agency—″a woman′s acknowledging both her constraints and choices and taking responsibility for her actions″—in the ways in which they came to and left the farms: inheritance (their own or their husband′s), new establishment, and displacement (47).

Osterud uses evidence from oral history interviews as well as other archival sources to establish the narrative history of the Nanticoke Valley from the end of the Civil War to World War II, with a fairly familiar cycle of creation and decline, including petty production by women, cooperation, a farmers′ strike, futile efforts by rural reformers to insert their own values into rural women′s lives, and the rise of capital-intensive mechanized farming. The core of the book, however, is a series of interview analyses that illustrate certain points. In each case, Osterud quotes from the interview and then carefully teases out its meaning. For example, Elizabeth Sheldon Howard′s narrative serves as the basis for a discussion of the division of labor between herself and her husband. Howard describes her experiences milking cows and the family′s efforts in revitalizing a rundown dairy farm, and Osterud discusses the significance of Howard′s actions. The interviewee provides the raw material, and the author thinks through the response to probe for deeper meaning; Osterud uses this method successfully throughout the book. Three other interviewees tell of their experiences or those of their mothers with regard to men′s and women′s work. Five interview summaries detail partnerships with spouses and other family members, and six discuss combining farm work with wage work. Perhaps one of the most compelling narratives is that of a daughter whose mother fled the farm with another man. Osterud painstakingly unravels the tale of abandonment to discover that the mother left when her husband took the money she had saved from her earnings at Endicott Johnson to buy a broken-down horse. The mother had put aside the money to pay for the delivery of her sixth child. Osterud posits, based firmly on the evidence, that the loss of money, which was meant for the woman′s safety and that of her child, was a violation of autonomy that she could not bear.

Osterud′s work is well theorized, with thoughtful discussions of the interview process and interpretation. She is highly protective of her interviewees, changing their names in the narrative, and she argues that they...