Farming Women and the State in North America

Farming women in North America have rarely been given full consideration in all their complexity in scholarly literature. Narratives have most often chronicled and identified men as farmers, landowners, and members of farming organizations. The works reviewed in this essay probe those historical silences and speak to women's experiences as agriculturalists, landowners, and active, engaged members of farm-oriented organizations to reveal the impact of gender, identity, and ideology on the formation of agrarian life.

Drawing from cartoons, films, photographs, and personal correspondence, Nancy K. Berlage's 2016 work Farmers Helping Farmers adeptly weaves an exploration of local farm and home bureau organizations into a sociopolitical study of the American Farm Bureau Federation. As organizations that worked closely with university-trained home and farm demonstration agents employed by the Cooperative Extension Services of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), farm bureaus circulated knowledge to rural communities informed by such new disciplines as agricultural economics, rural sociology, home economics, veterinary medicine, child science, and public health. Berlage productively complicates this narrative by considering women's roles in farm and home bureaus as spaces where they too could discuss farming concerns, child welfare, personal health, and gender ideals and expectations. Beyond this, farming women recognized that due to labor saving technological innovations, their roles in the home "reduced them to a position of relative powerless domesticity" (11). Berlage reclaims this narrative and discusses the ways in which women accessed and claimed space within farm bureaus to assert their honed form of authority. Farming women deeply entrenched themselves in farm bureau culture as architects of its national and local work. This astute assessment is also found in Jenny Barker Devine's 2013 study, On Behalf of the Family Farm. Both Berlage and Barker Devine explicate how farm women, as members of farm and home bureaus, engaged in "associationalist politics," which allowed them to manipulate understandings of maternalism and domesticity as they deemed necessary to empower themselves.

According to Berlage, women asserted their identities as wives, mothers, and farmers through the farm bureau. Gender, science, and farm work were not mutually exclusive. Rather, women co-opted agricultural and scientific language, heretofore meant for men, and reconstructed it in ways that shaped farm bureaus' agendas and, hence, their own. In chapters four and five, Berlage focuses on female-centered "home bureaus," which were "similar to and had a complex relationship with farm bureaus" (123). Within these organizations, women combined science with the "Home Bureau Creed," thereby extending and legitimizing their reach into local communities. By doing so, they employed a strategy that was both "separatist and integrationist" (124). Their efforts were further informed by the federal government's passage of the 1914 Smith-Lever Act, which created the cooperative agricultural extension service, headquartered at agricultural colleges, and placed home demonstration agents, trained in the domestic sciences, in rural communities. The federal government's unfortunate disregard for rural women, subcategorizing them within the agricultural extension service, led to the formation of home bureaus. Home bureaus, however, grew along with the rise of home economies. Some land-grant colleges began to offer "domestic economy courses" and some institutions, like Cornell University, hired women to organize and teach them (128–29). They were particularly concerned about utilizing the professionalization of home economics to preserve farm families and stem the tide of outmigration to urban areas. The Smith-Lever Act's passage granted home economics credibility and connected home economy professionals to farm bureau women. Both, as Berlage astutely argues, were "locked into a system led by male extension agents and administrators" (130).

Some bureau women, however, cleverly navigated gendered boundaries and organized independently. New York Home Bureau Federation leaders, for instance, carefully mediated concerns about...