Gender and the family labor system: defining work in the rural Midwest.

A common theme of Hamlin Garland's realistic short stories about the late-nineteenth-century Midwest was the difference in sexual divisions of labor in immigrant and Yankee families. Educated in American schools, daughters of immigrants in his stories often aspired to marrying a Yankee and no longer having to work in the fields. Julie in "Among the Corn Rows" expressed these ambitions:

This would not last always. Some one would come to release her from such drudgery. This was her constant, tenderest, and most secret dream. He would be a Yankee, not a Norwegian. The Yankees didn't ask their wives to work in the field. . . .

The daughter of German immigrants, Nina in "The Creamery Man" expressed a similar discontent:

She had suitors among the Germans, plenty of them, but she had a disgust of them--considered as possible husbands. . . . She knew that the Yankee girls did not work in the fields,--even the Norwegian girls seldom did so now, they worked out in town,--but she had been brought up to hoe and pull weeds from her childhood, and her father and mother considered it good for her, and being a gentle and obedient child, she still continued to do as she was told. . . .

In the body of his work, it is clear that Garland's attitudes toward the work of women were influenced by nineteenth-century ideals of womanhood and urban definitions of an appropriate sexual division of labor.(1) Yet observations that immigrant women worked in the fields more commonly than did their native-born counterparts are fairly common, and some historical work suggests their accuracy.(2) Clearly, more research must be done into how ethnic differences influenced definitions of the "appropriate" work of women, both in urban and rural settings.

But a larger issue also arises from Garland's stories. Both Julie and Nina envision their work within families--as daughters or wives--with the content of their work being shaped by their relationship to parents or husband. To analyze the labor of farm women, historians must confront the farm family as a primary organizer of women's work. Concepts used in labor history to analyze the industrial wage economy, such as the structure of the industrial workplace and processes of negotiation between "managers" and "workers," take on new forms in a rural economy rooted in a non-wage family labor system. The demographic characteristics of the family and the dynamics within patriarchal households become crucial factors in understanding the nature of farm labor and the organization of the agricultural economy. As women's historians build conceptual frameworks for crossing the barriers of public and private and connecting the structures of gender and class formations, an excellent testing ground for these conceptual frameworks can be found in the lives of farm women. The fundamental links between gender relations and capitalist transitions in the agricultural economy are inherent in the family labor system of Midwestern agriculture.(3)

Examining not only the sexual division of labor but also the ways in which farm women evaluated their work leads to reconsiderations of some important issues in women's history. Farm women (as well as men) had a diversity of attitudes toward the various types of jobs they performed on the farm,(4) and many farm women possessed an alternative vision of womanhood to that of the "leisured" and "refined" urban ideal. Rather than one definition of appropriate gender roles, there were many competing definitions, even within the rural Midwest. Second, the connection between "productive" labor (i.e. work in the dairy, henhouse or field that resulted in a marketable product as opposed to reproductive work done for the household) and equality in farm households must be reconsidered. The structure of the family labor system made personal ties the basis of economic life, and farm women's work and their evaluation of that work is inexorably linked to the relations of family and kin. The stories of these women suggest that the type of labor women performed is often less crucial to a sense of equality than is the quality of the relationship with her husband.(5)

To begin analyzing how the structure of Midwestern agriculture and the family labor system shaped the work lives of rural women in the first half of the twentieth century, I evaluated about 30 oral histories from Wisconsin, North Dakota, and Iowa. Many of the subjects discussed not only their own work lives, but those of their mothers and their daughters. The conclusions that I draw from these oral histories are generally representative of Midwestern family-farm agriculture and are apparent in a diversity of other sources, including diaries, family histories, and studies done by agricultural agencies and land grant colleges, that are a part of my broader study of gender, family farm agriculture, and the development of agribusiness. However, these oral histories do tend to emphasize smaller family farms more than larger commercial farms, family farms that were able to persist through the 1970s when the interviews were conducted, and those farm people who discussed women's work at length, thus apparently perceiving it as crucial to the farm enterprise.(6) The oral histories present an excellent counterbalance to studies done by agricultural agencies which tend to over-represent larger, more commercial farms and farm families that perceived women's labor as separate from the farm operation, as these agencies prescribed. Most under-represented are people on smaller family farms that could not or did not want to continue in agriculture. However, the oral histories do include samples of a few larger, commercial farms and families or family members who ultimately left farming.

These oral histories confirm some of the ethnic differences that Garland noted in the sexual division of labor. However, they also reveal other factors which structured the sexual division of labor on family farms. First, the natural cycles of the product specializations of the farm both shaped the labor process and the work culture of different parts of the Midwest. Second, family structures, such as family composition and stage in the life cycle, determined the availability of non-wage labor on family farms. Third, the division of work also depended on families' access to resources. This access was determined by the class status of the farm family and its community (this must be measured by considering a variety of factors such as tenure status, the size of the farm and the quality of its soils, and the availability of other familial and community resources) and the time period and general economic conditions in which the family lived. Finally, personal characteristics in addition to ethnicity, such as past work experiences and the relationships among family members, contributed to definitions of gender-appropriate work and created the context for farm women's labor.

Because Midwestern farms were primarily dependent on family labor, the categories of difference within families, sex and age, were the basis of labor organization. The sexual division of labor on farms can be viewed on a sliding continuum from a strict division of labor in which women are exclusively responsible for work in the house while men are responsible for all work outdoors, whether in barnyard or field, to one in which women participate in all aspects of the farm's labor. Farm people defined household work almost exclusively as female labor, and when men participated in it they were "helping out" women or no women were available to do the work. Poultry and egg production for household use or for trade in local markets was frequently women's work. Women also gardened, producing food for family use, and sometimes specialized in garden or fruit production for local markets. None of these tasks was seen as exclusively female labor; however, most farm women were responsible for this type of outdoor work. Working with animals was the type of farm labor that was the least clearly gender defined, whether feeding livestock or milking cows. Field work was the arena which was most explicitly defined as masculine labor, and women who worked in field labor often described it as "helping out." If a woman participated in field work, females in her family generally could and did participate in all other types of labor along the continuum.

Some ethnic differences do emerge when the women's descriptions of work are placed along this continuum. On the whole, in those interviews where women (or men) described the work of women in detail, women were very likely to work in the field or barnyard (13 in the fields and barnyard; 13 in the barnyard; 5 in just poultry/garden; and only 1 in just the house).(7) Women of German (7) and Norwegian (12) background clustered at the far end of the continuum participating in barnyard and/or field work. Women of English/Scots background (8) were scattered throughout the continuum with some doing field or barnyard work, some just working in poultry, egg, and garden production, and one working only in the house. Other women of Scandinavian background (3) described only their work with poultry, egg and garden production but not in the barnyard or field. Two Irish women worked in the field and the barnyard. Complicating this very rudimentary analysis were women of mixed ethnic heritage and marriages between ethnic groups. Would a German woman who married a man of English ancestry follow her ethnic work traditions or those of the women in her husband's family? This was a matter of negotiation between husband and wife that could be studied more thoroughly by using oral histories.

Ethnicity, however, needs to be analyzed in relation to other factors that shaped the work of rural women. The types of product specializations a farm family chose and the labor demands and work culture associated with that crop shaped the work of all family members. Because the family provided the labor supply for the farm, the work of men and women, girls and boys had to be coordinated and organized to complete the labor for the entire farm. The need for labor and the supply available in the family had to be balanced throughout the farm, and work in one farm enterprise helped shape that in others. Most of the farms in this sample were general farms with some specialization; all but two were under 240 acres.

In some regions product specializations shaped women's labor more than ethnicity. On those farms specializing in grain production, most in North Dakota, the highly mechanized harvesting, paired with community traditions of work sharing, led to less need for family labor, particularly that of women and girls, in the fields.(8) Nevertheless, these women clearly took responsibility for barnyard chores, particularly milking, which was primarily for family use (although some surpluses were sold). Some did detail their work in the fields. Most of the women on grain farms were Norwegian, but Germans, Irish, and English/Scots women follow similar patterns (the exception was Swedish).

Product specializations that were labor intensive often required the labor of women in field and/or barnyard. Dairying required work on a daily basis, in addition to the seasonal demands of grain or hay crops. These labor needs led to a more flexible definition of women's work across ethnic lines. In this sample, women on dairy farms were mostly Norwegian, but English/Scots women on dairy farms were also likely to participate in the barnyard and/or field work. The one exception was a Norwegian woman who married an English dairy firmer who owned a large operation and worked with his father and brother. She had grown up working in the fields on a tobacco farm, and so had little experience in dairy work. However, she developed a large poultry business, supplying eggs for a nearby hospital.(9) Following a similar pattern, tobacco farming in Wisconsin was also labor intensive, and required the work of women and girls in the fields (both cases were Norwegian), paralleling the importance of females in tobacco crop production in the South.

In contrast, women on hog/livestock farms in the corn belt show the most range on the continuum, some being extremely active in field and barnyard work while others worked principally in the house or with poultry. Those of German, Irish, and mixed nationality labored extensively in the field, especially at corn harvest, and often took responsibility for the milking and some animal care. Those of English/Scots ancestry were more likely to work in the house or with poultry. This evidence suggests that the diversified farming of this region enabled farm people to balance their product specializations so that they could divide labor according to ethnic definitions of gender-appropriate work. While the labor demands of some crop specializations seem to override ethnic patterns of the sexual division of labor, others permitted more distinct definitions of appropriate gender work.

Another crucial determinant in the work of women and the sexual division of labor is family composition. Unlike other work places and other systems of labor organization, in the family labor system, the sex of family workers cannot be completely chosen. Age clearly plays a role in the division of firm tasks, and takes priority over sex in the early years of the life cycle of farm children. In families where the oldest children were daughters, girls took on more diverse and less sex-typed labor. One Iowa farm woman recalled that, as the oldest child, she was "Dad's chore boy." While her sister helped her mother with household and garden chores, she drove horses, disked, and put up hay. After her marriage, she continued the full continuum of farm work, including milking cows, caring for poultry and trading eggs, gardening, and driving the tractor. As her husband stated proudly, "She can drive anything that will run."(10) Because the family served as the principal labor supply, the tasks of women often altered with changing family composition or over the family life cycle. Another Iowa farm woman did little field work as a girl because she had three brothers. However, as a married woman she had two daughters and, rather than cook for a hired hand, began to drive tractors.(11) Although women's labor was sometimes altered by the size of the farm, the crop selection, family composition or the stage in the family's life cycle, the work women did as girls often influenced the type of work they did as wives. In this group of oral histories, the sole woman to restrict her work to only domestic chores grew up in town and met her farmer husband when she was a teacher in a rural school.

Size and prosperity of farms also played a crucial role in the sexual division of labor. For example, the active participation of women on North Dakota grain farms might be due to the state's relatively late date of settlement and its relative poverty; of the Midwestern states North Dakota ranked second to the bottom in income and standard of living, with only Missouri, in which significant portions are more Southern than Midwestern, ranking lower. Kansas grain farms which were more highly specialized and mechanized might have had a different division of labor.(12) In general, among all of the women in the oral histories, those on farms of less than 80 acres were most active in the barnyard and fields while those with more than 240 acres were least active. Those farms between 80 and 240 acres show a diversity of arrangements, based on the needs of the farm and the preferences negotiated among family members. For example, two of the three women who worked in the fields on farms between 161 and 240 acres had grown up on smaller, poorer farms and were accustomed to working in all parts of the farm enterprise.

Farm economic conditions also shaped the ways in which farm families participated in the wage economy which, in turn, affected the division of labor on family farms. More prosperous farm families could hire male wage labor to replace female labor in the fields or female wage labor to lessen women's household or child-rearing work, making it easier to maintain a strict gender-division of labor. In contrast, poorer farm families often supplemented farm income with off-farm wage work. As family members moved in and out of the wage economy, remaining family members had to redivide on-farm tasks, encouraging a flexible sexual division of labor. The availability of male or female job opportunities in a region shaped these decisions, and wage work for married women was rare in rural America. None of the adult females in these households worked off the farm for wages; however, in this sample, wage work was also rare for the male head-of-household. In two cases husbands were mechanics or carpenters and their wives the "real farmers," and several adult men took off-farm WPA jobs during the Depression. More commonly, off-farm wage labor was a stage in the life cycle for both unmarried male and female youths, as they earned wages to assist their families or to save to begin their own farms or families. Male youths worked primarily as hired men or in seasonal farm labor; female youths found work as domestic/farm laborers or as teachers. While few of the families in this sample hired more than occasional seasonal labor when they operated their own farms, most worked for wages at some point in their youth.(13)

In addition to the general farm and familial structures, the economic conditions of a region in a particular time period shaped the work of women and girls. These oral histories reveal the generational distinctions in the experiences of farm women that often crossed ethnic boundaries. For example, women's work during the Depression is of crucial importance in the tales of family farm survival in North Dakota, no matter what the ethnic heritage of the family. Another example can be found in the autobiography of Era Bell Thompson. Thompson, a black woman who grew up on a North Dakota farm in the 1910s, described meeting the mother of a Native American friend. Her friend's mother did not speak English, and the daughter had to translate. Thompson reflects on this encounter:

Old Country, I thought. Only it wasn't Old Country: it was this country. Nearly all my friends were second generation; their parents spoke the mother tongue, wore the native clothes, had the ways of the fatherland, even the Indians. In a sense, I was second generation, too, only Pop had no other language, but in the ways of the world he was far ahead of me. My Latin and geometry didn't make any more sense to my father than they did to my friends' fathers. They didn't make too much sense to me.(14)

Thompson observed a generational experience: a separation from the past and a move into a "modern" world, perhaps not unlike Garland's daughters of immigrants who wanted to escape and "Americanize." But there is a clear difference.(15) Thompson relates a fondness for those old ways, and an understanding that the new did not always make much sense. This perception of generational change linked her, the daughter of a native-born African-American, not only to Native Americans and to Euro-Americans all coming of age in North Dakota as it passed from the frontier to a twentieth-century society, but also to others who fall between two cultures and do not fit easily into either. Testing such an insight historically could lead to both interesting comparisons of ethnic experiences as well as an analysis of generational changes in ethnic identities.

While understanding how the interplay of a variety of factors shaped the work of farm women, merely examining the sexual division of labor tells us little about how farm women viewed their work. This brings us back to Garland's daughters of immigrants and their desire to escape laboring in the fields. Despite Garland's view that women were eager to move out of the field or barn, oral histories reveal that definitions of what was acceptable as women's work and women's attitudes toward the more "masculine" types of work they performed were much more mixed. To some barn work or field work were not women's labor. For example, Lucille Hucke's father "didn't want to see women around the barn." Nevertheless, as a girl Hucke still brought in the eggs and gathered cobs for cooking, even though her mother had a hired girl. Emma Henderson did not "help with regular chores |daily work with livestock~ very much" though she recognized that many of her friends did chores because there were no boys in their families. "I think we felt sorry for them." This, however, did not mean that women did not work. As Emma's husband Walter quickly pointed out, "There was more women's work at that time. . . . It took more help in the house than it does today."(16) Because women's subsistence production in the household enabled farm income to be invested in other parts of the farm enterprise, leisurely ideals of domesticity were not the model even for farm women whose work most closely resembled urban, middle-class norms. Labor was a positive virtue for farm women, as in rural cultures in general, even when it was restrictively gender-defined.(17)

On the other hand, many women viewed their labors in the barn and field not only as necessities but as a pleasure. Many of these women explicitly said that they "enjoyed" this labor or that they chose it. Iowa farmer Anna Phillips described her own and her daughters' varied work, including milking, separating, and churning; caring for eggs and poultry; feeding pigs and other livestock chores; shocking oats and picking corn; cooking and baking; housecleaning, and raising children. When the interviewer commented "Sounds like you and your daughters were busy," she replied, "yes we were, but we didn't think so then. You know you just sort of enjoyed doing it." Her oral history is filled with humorous stories of work and of interacting with her daughters through their labor.(18) Often a farm woman's positive view of her work was told in the context of positive family oral traditions of hardworking pioneer women of the past. The existence of these alternative models of "womanhood" need to be examined more completely and should lead to a reconsideration of the complete hegemony of middle-class urban ideals of womanhood.(19)

This reconsideration should also examine the relationship between these local ideals, the middle-class urban ideals, and the economic realities of farm women. For example, contradictions sometimes appear as women, trained by their pioneer mothers to work hard, began to train their daughters. One Iowa farm woman who described her own farm work in positive terms had a different attitude toward her daughters:

Neither one of them was ever farmers when they was on the farm. The least they seen the best they liked it. . . . I liked it, I was quite a farmer. More of a farmer than my husband. . . . I had to milk cows and do those kind of things, but I never expected my girls to do it and they never did. You know how when you have to do things when you're young, you think you ain't going to have your kids do it. They never had to. . . . Didn't like it, didn't do it good. Guess I never taught them.

Even when women enjoyed their work, they recognized that farm labor was difficult and time-consuming and often did not lead to large farm incomes. In addition, patriarchal practices of land inheritance often meant that daughters did not have direct access to the profession of farming. Their access to land, generally, depended on marriage. While mothers trained their daughters in farm skills, they often worked diligently to educate their daughters for off-farm employment as well. For example, Anna Phillips, who enjoyed working with her daughters, also encouraged her daughters' education because the family did not own their farm until after the daughters had grown: "I always helped my children a lot in school. I thought that was better than scrubbing the old kitchen floor, and keeping it so clean." Two of her daughters went to business school, and two to a normal school.(20) Even as mothers passed on their work skills to their daughters, economic conditions could and often did send quite different messages to daughters as they planned their future work lives.

Another assumption that needs to be tested is the relationship between "productive" labor and the status of women in the household. Often it has been assumed that if women's work was crucial to the family economy, or if women earned income, or if women participated in higher-prestige male labor, it was a sign of a more egalitarian family structure.(21) Because the quality of relationships is often expressed in personal documents, oral histories can be revealing sources for a reconsideration of women's labor and egalitarian families. Women's access to the fundamental resource of agriculture--land--came most often through men; their access to men was through kinship or marriage. Women's relation to the means of production came through a personal, individual relationship. Within the legal and customary patriarchal structures, the quality of that relationship had to be negotiated.(22) Egalitarian family structures were as likely to be defined by this relationship as by the type of labor women performed. Class and ethnicity, as partial determinants of the sexual division of labor, clearly play some role in the form egalitarianism or inequality take. If a woman principally did house and poultry work, she could be marginalized and excluded from knowledge of the rest of the farm operation or she could take a more equal part through keeping books, sharing decision-making, and dividing profits, with investments in the house approximating those in the "male" farm operation. On the other hand, when women were crucial to the labor force throughout the farm, exploitation would take the form of unending work with little reward, while egalitarianism could come with an active and balanced partnership of sharing resources, work, and decision-making.

Two examples of farm women whose labor on all parts of the farm were crucial to family farm survival, illustrate how the marital relationship affected the way women valued and experienced their work. Both women lived in North Dakota; one in Traill county in the eastern part of the state, the other in Mountrail county in the western part of the state. Both participated in the settlement of their region as girls, though roughly twenty years apart. The woman in Traill county was born in 1883, married in 1904, and lived on three quarter sections of land. The woman in Mountrail county was born in 1903, married in the 1920s and lived on one quarter section of land. In general, land in Traill county was of better quality, and the period of the 1910s was clearly a better economic time to start farming than the unpredictable 1920s. Both women and husbands were of Norwegian ancestry.(23)

The Traill county farm woman's oral history is filled with negative references to the state of marriage and the conditions of married women's work. Her father had died in 1891, and her mother remarried in 1895. The second husband was sick and "never amounted to anything." The three oldest girls (there were six girls in the family) had to work out. She began working for a wage at the age of fifteen. She described her mother and Scandinavian women as the "breadwinners," taking principal responsibility for the cattle and dairy products, while the men broke the prairie and worked in the field. She described her family's life after her father's death as "just hardship."

At the age of twenty-one, she married a man who had moved to North Dakota from Wisconsin in 1882 and who had "more money to fall back on" than did her family, and owned three quarter-sections of land. When asked if her life was easier after her marriage, she disagreed, saying that it was just as hard as before. Her husband was brought up to believe that "team work" was the only work for men, while women were to do all the rest. In addition to her labor on the farm she had eleven children (three of whom died). When her husband died in 1924, her oldest child was eighteen and the youngest under two. When asked if she ever considered remarrying, she said "I had enough of it, never again." Despite her friends urging her to leave the farm, a banker counseled her on ways to keep the farm and that was "the best advice" she ever had. Although raising her family through the Depression was arduous, the difficulties of those years were not described with the same bitterness of the earlier years. Her oldest children worked off the farm, while the youngest boy and two girls remained helping her on the farm. By the 1940s, the farm was "all cleared up." Despite her hard labor, farming with her husband clearly did not lead to an egalitarian marriage. Although her story assumes the necessity of hard labor, and her descriptions of her work often show pride in the skills, expertise, and income-earning ability of farm women, labor did not mean partnership.(24)

In contrast, the story of Ida, the Mountrail County woman, shows that hardship, poverty, and intense work demands did not necessarily lead to the exploitation of women. This oral history was with both Ida and her husband Oscar, and each participates in the story telling, filling in each others' gaps, presenting his or her own perspective even as she or he discussed the joint experiences they shared. As a girl growing up on the frontier, Ida worked outside helping her father while her sister did the work inside. Her mother earned income baking bread for bachelors on the frontier and selling milk. She also served as "nurse" for the area. Ida's memories are positive and reflect a happy childhood with pleasant stories of her mother and father, relatives, and neighbors.

Most of this interview focused on the couple's married life together, particularly on the 1930s. During the drought that devastated this region, Ida sold butter and eggs to pay for grocery bills, while Oscar worked for the WPA. She "raised a little bit" in her garden, "when it wasn't a blowin" and remade clothes until she had "nothing more to patch." Throughout their marriage, the couple worked in the fields together, she driving three horses on the sulky plow while he drove five on the gang plow. She preferred this outdoor work because she was "raised that way" and loved horses. He says with pride that his wife worked "just as good as any man," while she counters with a humorous story of him flying off of a horse into a manure pile. The two also milked cows, but switched to beef cattle to cut down on their work load. Together they shared the tragic death of a daughter in 1934 (they had one other girl and a son), a passion for the Nonpartisan League and the Farmers Union, and a shared community life (including barn dances and a Ladies Aid for the church that was not just for ladies but for the whole family). When one of his stories did not reflect her reality, she felt free to correct him. For example, he said that he spent $16 to join the Nonpartisan League even though they did not have anything to eat; she disagreed, saying that they did have enough food to survive. Her participation in all the work on the farm is never described as a burden, and surviving the hardship of the 1930s was remembered as a cooperative effort.(25) Despite the inequities of a patriarchal system, this couple negotiated a work relationship that they described in egalitarian ways. To evaluate the working conditions of rural women and their own evaluations of their work, then, new methods for understanding the dynamics of this relationship between "farmer/manager" and "wife/worker" need to be explored.

As we reconsider the work and valuation of work of Garland's immigrant women, new questions beyond ethnicity must be asked. Although "Americanization" was clearly a force among second-generation ethnics, and class "status" in the American context meant a strict gender definition of "appropriate" women's work, this does not mean that all farm women, even those of English background, shared this vision of womanhood. It is also clear that economics shaped their work lives. In "Among the Corn Rows," Julie is offered a life free of labor in the fields by her German fiance. He promised:

Now, if you'll come out there |the Dakotas~ with me, you needn't do anything but cook f'r me, and after harvest we can git a good layout o' furniture, an I'll lath and plaster the house and put a little hell |ell~ in the rear. . . . We're close to Boomtown, an' we can go down there to church sociables an' things, and they're a jolly lot there.

Despite this promise, historical sources indicate that Julie's new home on the frontier of the Dakotas probably would not mean much economic prosperity, though the possibility of just doing the "churnin' and the housework" as she requested may have been possible. Nevertheless, the negotiation of such a promise before their marriage may have boded well for a partnership for Julie. Her hopes as she left with him were high:

Her sullenness had given way to a peculiar eagerness and anxiety to believe in him. She was already living that free life in a far-off, wonderful country. No more would her stern father and sullen mother force her to tasks which she hated. She'd be a member of a new firm. She'd work, of course, but it would be because she wanted to, and not because she was forced to. The independence and the love promised grew more and more attractive.(26)

As we consider the work lives of rural women, it is crucial to analyze the fundamental structure of the family labor system, both its base in patriarchal structures and the possibilities for mutuality that could grow from the shared enterprise of the farm or the personal relationships of kin and marriage. Rebuilding our historical understanding utilizing the perspective of farm women, who experienced the rural economy simultaneously as workers and members of families and communities, promises to intertwine the public and private and make evaluation of patriarchal relations fundamental to any analysis of economic and social change.

ENDNOTES

I would like to thank the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities for funding a semester's residency at the Virginia Center for the Humanities which made this paper possible. I would also like to thank Nancy Grey Osterud, Jo Blatti, Kathleen Hilton, and Midge Eisele for their comments on this article.

1. Hamlin Garland, "Among the Corn Rows" and "The Creamery Man" in Main-Travelled Roads (New York, 1899), pp. 148-49, 225. Garland's attitudes toward women and their labor on farms are filled with contradictions. Many of his characters parallel his mother whom he portrayed in his autobiographies as overworked and weakened from years of labor. On the other hand, some female characters are strong and enjoy their work on the farm.

2. Ethnic differences in the work of rural women, or in rural settings in general, are only beginning to be tested by historians and sociologists. See Kathleen Conzen, "Historical Approaches to the Study of Rural Ethnic Communities," in Ethnicity on the Great Plains, ed. Frederick C. Luebke (Lincoln, 1980), pp. 1-18. Literary sources, such as Garland and the novels of Willa Cather have described differences in the work of native-born white women and immigrant women, as have studies done by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA): see Carolyn Sachs, The Invisible Farmers: Women in Agricultural Production (Totowa, NJ, 1983), pp. 16-20. However, USDA studies must be used critically became of institutional biases against immigrants and acceptance of urban, middle-class definitions of appropriate gender work. See David Danbom, The Resisted Revolution: Urban America and the Industrialization of Agriculture, 1900-1940 (Ames, 1979), pp. 27-31, 62-63, 113-14; and Mary Neth, "Preserving the Family Farm: Farm Families and Communities, 1900-1940," (Ph.D dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1987). The contrast of immigrant women working in the fields with native-born white women working only in the household is so accepted as stereotype that it requires testing: see Conzen, "Peasant Pioneers: Generational Succession among German Farmers in Frontier Minnesota," in The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation, eds. Steven Hahn and Jonathan Prude (Chapel Hill, 1985), p. 226. Most historical and sociological studies of ethnic differences have focused on inheritance patterns and compared German and Yankee households: see Conzen, "Peasant Pioneers;" Sonya Salamon, "Ethnic Differences in Farm Family Land Transfers;" Rural Sociology 45 #2 (1980): 290-308; and Sonya Salamon, "Ethnic Origins as Explanation for Local Land Ownership Patterns," in Research in Rural Sociology and Development, ed. Harry K. Schwarzweller (Greenwich, CT, 1984), pp. 161-86. Salamon has developed two types of farmers, entrepreneurial (Yankee) and yeoman (German), and has found that German persistence is tied to subsistence activities and extensive use of family labor. See, Sonya Salamon, "Ethnic Communities and the Structure of Agriculture," Rural Sociology 50 #3 (1985): 323-40. Although she does not define these two types of farms by their sexual division of labor, the yeoman type would require increased and more diverse activities of wives and daughters. Salamon's findings are based on studies of Illinois during the 1980s. My data suggest that the corn belt may have been more open to diverse organization of labor and would allow ethnic differences to be more pronounced.

In studies of Kansas in the period of settlement, sociologists have found similar patterns for German farmers, but found that patterns of native-born whites were more diverse, with some being "entrepreneurial" and others "yeoman." See Jan L. Flora and John M. Stitz, "Ethnicity, Persistence, and Capitalization of Agriculture in the Great Plains during the Settlement Period: Wheat Production and Risk Avoidance," Rural Sociology 50 #3 (1985): 341-60; and Cornelia Butler Flora and John Stitz, "Female Subsistence Production and Commercial Farm Survival Among Settlement Kansas Wheat Farmers," Human Organization 47 #1 (Spring 1988): 64-69. Since "yeoman" farm practices have been found in many regions among native-born white Americans of the nineteenth century, factors other than ethnicity clearly need to be considered in further studies. See, for example, Steven Hahn, The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850-1890 (New York, 1983); Mary Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865 (Cambridge, 1981); and Nancy Grey Osterud, Bonds of Community: The Lives of Farm Women in Nineteenth-Century New York (Ithaca, 1991). In "Female Subsistence Production," Flora and Stitz tied subsistence activities to the work of women and girls. The presence of women and girls corresponded to a greater diversity of activities, including cheese and butter production, potatoes, chips and bones sold as fertilizer, more livestock and poultry. Fieldwork by women was suggested by some of the data but did not seem substantial. They argue that Yankee families who persisted after this time period follow a similar pattern of subsistence, suggesting that Yankee women also participated in a wide range of activities in the Great Plains, a finding that corresponds to the activities of North Dakota women in this study.

Ethnic differences in women's work among those not of European ancestry has largely been analyzed in a context of racial difference rather than in comparative perspective with the work of other farm women or in the context of the structure of agriculture. Some exceptions are Jacqueline Jones, "'Tore Up and a-Moving': Perspectives on the Work of Black and Poor White Women in the Rural South, 1865-1940," in Women and Farming: Changing Roles, Changing Structures, eds. Wava Haney and Jane B. Knowles (Boulder, CO, 1988), p. 124; Delores Janiewski, "Making Women into Farmers' Wives: The Native American Experience in the Inland Northwest," in Women and Farming, pp. 35-54; and Joan Jensen, "Canning Comes to New Mexico: Women and the Agricultural Extension Service, 1914-1919," New Mexico Historical Review 57 #4 (1982): 361-86.

3. See, for example, Susan Porter Benson, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Manager, and Customers In American Department Stores, 1890-1940 (Urbana, 1986). See also, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, "Socialist-Feminist American Women's History," Journal of Women's History 1 #3 (Winter 1990): 196-99.

4. Oral histories reveal a great deal of diversity in the particular jobs that women or men liked to perform on the farm. For example, one woman might love sewing or baking while another expressed negative attitudes toward those chores. The variety of labor on the farm meant that most farm people would have some chores that they found tedious and others that were enjoyable.

5. Because the fundamental structure of the farm was the family, the relationship of the workers to the head of the family ultimately shaped the way women and children felt about their work. This parallels the relations of workers/managers or slaves/masters, but the shape relations take is quite different because of the ties of kinship undergirding the family farm labor system.

6. These oral histories were drawn from more extensive work completed for my dissertation and forthcoming book; Neth, "Preserving the Family Farm." In reexamining these oral histories, very few actually contained information on ethnicity, the sexual division of labor, size of farm, and crop specialization. Often interviewers assumed the sexual division of labor and asked men about "men's" work and women about "women's" work, rather than structuring the questions to find out what actual practices were. The oral histories were drawn from the following collections: Century Farms Oval History Project (hereafter ICFOHP), Iowa State Historical Society; North Dakota Oval History Project (hereafter NDOHP), North Dakota State Historical Society; Rural Women's Oval History Project (hereafter RWOHP), State Historical Society of Wisconsin; and Wisconsin Agriculturalists Oral History Project (hereafter WAOHP), State Historical Society of Wisconsin. Essays examining the uses and extent of rural oral history collections are Nancy Grey Osterud and Lu Ann Jones, "'If I must say so myself': Oral Histories of Rural Women," Oral History Review 17 #2 (Fall 1989): 1-23; and Lu Ann Jones and Nancy Grey Osterud, "Breaking New Ground: Oval History and Agricultural History," Journal of American History 76 #2 (Sept. 1989): 551-64.

7. It may be that those who chose to talk about women's involvement in the farm's labor were more often in families in which women's "appropriate" work was less strictly defined. A survey of 10,000 farm homes in the North and West, done by the USDA in 1920 found it slightly less likely for women to participate in such a wide range of activities. Household and family maintenance was clearly women's domain (94% sewed, 97% did their own laundry, 97% baked). Eighty-nine percent cared for poultry and sixty-seven percent maintained a garden. While sixty-six percent made butter, only forty-five percent milked cows (93% washed pails and 75% cleaned separators). Only twenty-six percent of those surveyed cared for livestock (outside of milking) and twenty-two percent worked in the field. The survey probably contains some bias toward bigger farms and those with "progressive" attitudes, including middle-class ideas of appropriate gender work. Florence E. Ward, "The Farm Women's Problems," United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Department Circuit #48 (November 1920): 3-11. See also, Joann Vanek, "Work, Leisure, and Family Roles: Farm Households in the United State, 1920-1955," Journal of Family History 5 #4 (Winter 1980): 422-31.

8. There is some contradiction between these oral history sources and diary sources of grain farms. Women in oral histories largely talk about their community work (cooking for the large threshing crews) during the threshing rituals rather than any labor they might have done during the harvest before threshing. Diary sources suggest that women did work on binders and in the fields preparing the grain for threshing. For an analysis of threshing rituals see Neth, "Preserving the Family Farm," Chapter Five. The availability of community resources, such as exchanged labor, clearly altered the work lives of farm women and should be included when historians analyze the sexual division of labor in rural America.

9. Isabel Baumann, WAOHP, Tape 809A. For a more detailed analysis of her work and its relation to her political activism, see Mary Neth, "Building the Base: Farm Women, the Rural Community, and Farm Organizations in the Midwest, 1900-1940," in Haney and Knowles, Women and Farming, pp. 339-55.

10. Gerald and Fay Goodwyn, ICFOHP, OH4-29. Fay Goodwyn's ethnic background included Scots, Irish, German and Dutch. Gerald Goodwyn was English/Irish. Her family contained four girls and one boy, who was the youngest.

11. Myrna Bogh, ICFOHP, OH4-23. Bogh was of German ancestry.

12. See Neth, "Preserving the Family Farm," Chapter 5.

13. Other wage work for men included serving in the military, working for the railroad, working at a cannery, and teaching. Women had a much narrower range of options; the only other job mentioned among these interviewees was working in a village restaurant. Eight of those interviewed were trained as teachers. Another seven worked out as domestics or as farm labor. Half of the teachers were of English background. Four of those who worked out as domestics were Norwegian; only one was English. In addition, another five mentioned staying in the home to care for ill or elderly relatives. For a more detailed analysis of off-farm work for farm youths and its relation to consumer culture, see Mary Neth, "How You Gonna Keep 'Em Down on the Farm," (Paper presented at the Fourth American Farm Women in Historical Perspective Conference, Davis, California, 27 June 1992).

14. Era Bell Thompson, American Daughter (1964; reprint, St. Paul, 1986), pp. 147-48. The relationship between language, education, and the connections among various local cultures, regional cultures and national culture and institutions would be an interesting area for investigation in the twentieth-century Midwest. See Eugen Weber's Peasants Into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914 (Stanford, 1976), pp. 93-94.

15. As both Garland's stories and Thompson's reminiscences indicate, education was important to introducing new attitudes about gender. The relationship between education, class, and the attitudes and economic opportunities of farm women could be an interesting study. Although education might take women away from the farm, many rural women used their education to become teachers in rural schools, stay close to the home farm, and continue to assist their families by working on the farm during the summer.

16. Lucille Hucke, ICFOHP, OH4-63 and Walter and Emma Henderson, ICFOHP, OH4-82. Hucke's ethnic heritage was Scots and Welsh; Henderson's Dutch (though her husband was Norwegian and Scottish).

17. For a more detailed description of these attitudes see Mary Neth "Farm Women, Gender-Based Work, and the New Agriculture, 1900-1940," (Paper presented at the Seventh Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Wellesley, Massachusetts, June 1987).

18. Anna Phillips, ICFOHP, OH4-46. Phillips' ethnic heritage was German and French.

19. Historians have already begun to examine different definitions of "womanhood" based on class: see Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860 (Urbana, 1987); Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia, 1986); and Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, "Disorderly Women: Gender and Labor Militancy in the Appalachian South," Journal of American History 73 (September 1986); and race: see Elsa Barkley Brown, "Womanist Consciousness: Maggie Lena Walker and the Independent Order of Saint Luke," Signs 14 (Spring 1989); and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill, 1988). Critiques also need to be developed based on region: see Elizabeth Jameson, "Women as Workers, Women as Civilizers: True Womanhood in the American West," in The Women's West, eds. Susan Armitage and Elizabeth Jameson (Norman, 1987). Rural women have also had distinct views of "womanhood": see Joan Jensen, Loosening the Bonds: Mid-Atlantic Farm Women, 1750-1850 (New Haven, 1986), pp. 114-28.

20. Amy Bilsland, ICFOHP, OH4-62. Phillips, Century Farms. Bilsland's ethnic heritage was German, but she was adopted by an English family. Another example of pairing teaching farm skills with promoting education is in the oral history of Ida Gullickson. Gullickson saw herself as "privileged" because she was able to both work outside with her mother and to attend school and get a teaching degree. She was the youngest daughter, and the family was finally secure enough to afford this luxury. Even then she completed the three year normal course in two years because it was "hard on the folks" to pay for it. Mrs. Ida Gullickson, NDOHP, TR17-0984. Gullickson was Norwegian.

21. Because women's historians were first interested in the impact of industrialization on urban women, the status of rural women became a static position from which to judge this change. In this narrative, industrialization led to a loss of productive work for middle-class women. By comparison the work of rural women was productive and the necessity of this work for farm survival gave women status within the family. See, for example, Gerda Lerner, "The Lady and the Mill Girl: Changes in the Status of Women in the Age of Jackson," Midcontinent American Studies Journal 10 (Spring 1969): 5-14; and Nancy Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: Woman's Sphere in New England, 1780-1835 (New Haven, 1977), pp. 6, 21-22, 50-51, 62. As a critique of this narrative developed, historians began to emphasize the patriarchal nature of the farm family and the legal and customary limitations rural women experienced. Studies that focused on the frontier argued that the shift to more settled agriculture or to urban life undercut these patriarchal structures. See Mary Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class, 18-59 and John Mack Faragher, Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie (New Haven, 1986). Again the emphasis on transition simplifies the dynamics within the rural household. Ryan turns her attention to the urban setting while Faragher assumes that women could gain no power through their work and equates a decline in work with an increase in status, though his examples show that farm women may have had different attitudes toward their work. See Sugar Creek, pp. 208-209. Historians who focus specifically on farm women are more likely to stress both the inequalities and the possibilities of mutuality: see Jensen, Loosening the Bonds and Osterud, Bonds of Community. Studies of twentieth-century farm women have tended to focus on the loss of productive work caused by changes in technology and the absorption of women's work by industry. Again productive work is generally assumed as an indicator of equality in the farm family and relations within the family are rarely analyzed adequately. Exceptions are Corlann Gee Bush, "'He Isn't Half So Cranky as He Used to Be': Agricultural Mechanization, Comparable Worth, and the Changing Farm Family," and Sarah Elbert, "Amber Waves of Gain: Women's Work in New York Farm Families," both in To Toil the Livelong Day: America's Women at Work, 1780-1980, eds. Carol Groneman and Mary Beth Norton (Ithaca, 1987), pp. 213-29, 250-68; and Deborah Fink, Open Country, Iowa: Rural Women, Tradition and Change (Albany, 1986).

22. For a theoretical discussion of the origins of patriarchy and the role of sexual relations with men as determinants of women s class status, see Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (New York, 1986). See also, Fox-Genovese's discussion of the importance of the "household" for rural southern women in Plantation Household, pp. 37-99. "Productive" labor and access to a separate income could give farm women another lever in this negotiation.

23. Another factor that distinguishes these two women is clearly family size. The dates of marriage also fall on either side of what historians have noted as the change to a more companionate style of marriage in the early twentieth century. Most of these studies note that rural families are an exception to these trends; however, none focuses on rural families enough to test these generalizations. These oral histories indicate that companionate and hierarchical marriages exist in both the late-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. While this small sample does not undercut the generalization that such a shift occurred, it does illustrate the need for further investigation. On the shift to companionate marriage see Peter G. Filene, Him/Her/Self: Sex Roles in Modern America, 2nd ed. (Baltimore, 1986), pp. 124-47; Paula Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s (Oxford, 1977), pp. 53-118; Christopher Lasch, Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged (New York, 1977); Steven Mintz and Susan Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life (New York, 1988), pp. 107-32; and John Demos, "Images of the American Family, Then and Now," in Changing Images of the Family, eds. Virginia Tufte and Barbara Myerhoff (New Haven, 1979), pp. 43-60. Filene and Fass examine the gender differences in defining the new "companionate" marriage and point to the process of negotiation that had to occur between women and men within these families.

24. Kate S. Olson, NDOHP, TR16-0983.

25. Oscar and Ida Craft, NDOHP, MN11-0656.

26. Garland, Main-Traveled Roads, pp. 160, 163.