Desperate Farm Wives: Gender, Activism, and Traditionalism in the Farm Crisis

The year was 1985, and the farm crisis was at its peak. Farm profits had declined by some thirty percent since the beginning of the decade, and projections indicated that as many as 250 farms would be foreclosed upon every day of the year. A number of states were well on the road to losing around one third of their total number of farms, an acceleration of the already potent postwar trends of rural depopulation and decline. Nineteen eighty-five was poised to be a make-it or break-it year for a large number of small and medium-scale farmers across the United States. The Farm Bill of 1981 was set to expire and Congress was beginning to prepare legislation to replace it. For farmers and their advocates across a swath of rural America that still stretched almost coast to coast, the 1985 Farm Bill was a legislative last stand, a final chance to save family farms through price supports and other beneficial federal policies.

Congressman Tom Daschle (d-sd), the head of the Democratic party’s farm task force, was not willing to leave the fate of the Farm Bill to mere legislative chance. The savvy Democrat invited key witnesses to testify to legislators at this critical juncture. These star witnesses were Jessica Lange, Sissy Spacek, and Jane Fonda. The three were not an altogether improbable choice. All three had produced and starred in movies about the stresses on farm families in the past year—Lange had a central role opposite her partner Sam Shephard in the film Country; Spacek produced and starred in The River; and Fonda developed and starred in the made for television film The Dollmaker. The three films, together with Places in the Heart, came out in 1984 and dealt—Country and The River more explicitly than the other two—with the farm crisis. In the hearing, a tearful Lange told attendees, who were packed to standing room only, that “it is heartbreaking to witness their anguish as they watch their lives stripped away … as they watch their boundaries disappearing, the boundaries which describe their work, their land, their family, their faith in this country and their faith in God.”¹ Lange based her conclusions on what she described as “countless hours” speaking with farmers over the course of the past few years.

Spacek, Lange, and Fonda were the latest stars in a drama that had played out in countless venues across the country, as farmers, grassroots activists, politicians, and—with increasingly frequency—celebrities mobilized in the name of preserving the “family farm.” The three activists tread a fine line between their onscreen roles as farm wives and their lived experiences as self-appointed spokeswoman for American farmers. Their testimony and the characters they portrayed reveal the powerful dynamics, not just of political action but also of gendered mobilization, at work during these dramatic years for rural America. Their onscreen portrayals highlight a cultural consensus shared between Hollywood elites and grassroots farm advocates, an image of rural womanhood that was at once deeply traditionalist and intensely modern. This image of farmwomen was not arbitrary, but rather a powerful, deliberately crafted trope that enabled activists to dispel negative stereotypes of rural life while still appealing to deeply conservative elements that viewed women’s activism as potentially threatening. Through this lens, women’s role in the farm crisis was simultaneously contingent and entrepreneurial, a phenomenon seen over and over in cultural representations as well as in the self-presentation of women farm activists. The desperate farm wife, as portrayed by the actresses—and by their real-life counterparts—may have offered a paradoxical image of traditionalism and gendered activism, but it also provided a rhetorical claim for the legitimacy and significance of rural life—especially at a time when its very existence seemed to hang in the balance.

It was the very severity of the situation that brought the three stars to Capitol Hill. According to Mark Johnson, press spokesman for the House Democratic Committee, the idea for the all-star agriculture hearing came from Rep. Tony Coelho (d...