Dairy Tales: The Racial and Gendered Work of Cows in Children’s Literature

This essay offers a history of dairying through the stories told to children. As milk grew into a staple of the standard American diet and became a product attached to childhood nutrition, children’s literature created a system of representing the production and consumption of this product. Surveying dairy cows in twentieth-century children’s literature, including E. Boyd Smith’s The Farm Book (1910), Lois Lenski’s My Friend the Cow (1946), and Doreen Cronin’s Click, Clack, Moo: Cows That Type (2000), this essay identifies a system of representing dairying to children that creates a fantasy of milk production and consumption that formulates gender, race, and labor. On the production side, labor is made invisible through a process in which the reproductive labor of cows is rendered nonreproductive. On the consumption side, the ideal consumer target is the white child—a subject made to read and consume milk as unlabored and nonreproductive. Through a visual system that often depicts a white male farmer hand milking a Holstein cow, children’s literature represents dairy production in a way that elides racialized divisions of labor, the laboring maternal cow, and the calves born into this economy of reproductive labor. By paying attention to the peculiar anthropomorphisms of cows in children’s literature, I argue that these dairy tales are in concert with the cultural production of dairy—an economy that renders bovine maternal labor invisible and produces white childhood as its telos.