\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAlso have you noticed the traditional skills that men are supposed to have are mostly all things that only come up for specific situations, like changing a tire when the tire goes out, fixing the house when it needs to be fixed, fixing the car when it won\u2019t work, and the traditional skills expected of women are things that have to be done everyday and always, like doing the dishes, cooking, and taking care of children.
Men\u2019s work is a solution to a problem and when it\u2019s done it\u2019s done. Women\u2019s work is a never-ending tide of tasks that must be accomplished every day.
\nI was gonna say\u00a0\u201cIt\u2019s different in agriculture\u201d but then the massive amount of Sarah Taber I\u2019ve been listening to lately all landed on my head at once because oh wow, the gendered division of labour in farm households is fuuuuuuucked uuuuuup.
\nPlease elaborate. I\u2019m genuinely curious.
\nOkay so!
\nMen\u2019s work on farms is generally genuinely gruelling and thankless. No question. Yeah, it\u2019s a lot more seasonal and rhythmic than women\u2019s work, but it\u2019s totally not easy.
\nA lot of farms basically divide gendered work as inside work/outside work. There\u2019s work you do in/around the house (women\u2019s work), and then in the outbuildings and fields (men\u2019s work).\u00a0
\nAnd like, I know this is sexist and that men\u2019s work is given way more prestige, but also, as a disabled woman who grew up on a farm, it made a lot of intuitive sense to me. The closest explanation I can find for my gender literally is\u00a0\u201cfarm wife\u201d. It\u2019s not just an aesthetic, it\u2019s a philosophy and a social role.
\nHowever.
\nIn the 1980s the\u00a0\u201cFarm Crisis\u201d started, and set the new status quo for agriculture. Basically, farming stopped being as profitable as it used to be; it became incredibly hard for independent farmers or family farms to stay in business. You couldn\u2019t just harvest a reasonable crop, sell it, and turn a profit; you either had to farm an incredibly fuckoff huge amount of land, hire incredibly cheap exploited labour, or find new and different ways to add value to your product.
\nA lot of the new ways to generate profit\u2013for example, turning raw produce into homemade jellies and pies; marketing directly to restaurants; transitioning to organic, sustainable, or non-GMO produce; leaving the farm and getting a stable non-agriculture related job\u2013have primarily fallen to the woman\u2019s role. Business plans, marketing, accounting, and networking are indoor jobs, so a lot of the boring or repetitive parts of them got handed off to women.
\nBut what Dr Taber talks about on her podcast is that she\u2019s a crop scientist; she travels to tons of different farms and does quality control inspections. And when she goes to farms, she sits down with the\u00a0\u201cmanagement team\u201d (a farmer and his wife, usually) and goes over their business model.
\nAnd what she sees, over and over, are farms where the male farmer considers himself\u00a0\u201cthe farmer\u201d, because he drives the tractor and does the Very Important Manly Essential Parts of Farming, and his wife is\u00a0\u201chelping\u201d, as in, she does all the frivolous extra bits that aren\u2019t too physically strenuous.\u00a0Except\u2026 the wife is essentially running the business.\u00a0She\u2019s the one who does the books, the marketing, the administration, the record-keeping, makes sure they meet the organic certification requirements, and is the one actually able to answer all the questions necessary for an inspection or audit.
\nAnd no one is allowed to acknowledge that the wife is in charge.\u00a0Because even though, in today\u2019s political climate, the man who drives the tractor is much\u00a0easier to replace with hired help than the woman running the business, he is The Farmer and must be respected as such. (Dr. Taber recounts the elaborate pantomime that happens during her inspections, where she asks a question, the male farmer muses about it, his wife prompts him,\u00a0\u201cIt\u2019s on page 2, isn\u2019t it, honey?\u201d and the male farmer then answers,\u00a0\u201cYeah, page 2.\u201d)
\nThis IS changing\u2013there are more and more farms where men are stepping into\u00a0\u201cwomen\u2019s work\u201d, and women are stepping up and claiming the status and authority they\u2019ve traditionally been denied. But there\u2019s also a toxic culture in farming that really, truly believes that only men who drive tractors are Farmers, and therefore no outside opinions\u2013no little wifey with her cute little farmer\u2019s market stall, no crop scientist, nobody\u2013need matter.
\n
This is interesting and one of the interesting things about it is that as a take it\u2019s pure - not pejoratively but literally - bourgeois feminism.
In that it\u2019s an analysis of yeoman farming, the classic petit bougie form mixing capital and labor, that derives \u201cthe woman is the real farmer\u201d from \u201cthe manager/paperworker who interfaces with the market is the real farmer\u201d. And then proclaims this superior to a \u201cthe man is the real farmer\u201d derived from \u201clabor is the source of all value\u201d
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