Preserving the Family Farm: Women, Community, and the Foundations of Agribusiness in the Midwest, 1900-1940.

Mary Neth and Sally McMurry tell the story of the Great Transformation of the rural north from self-sufficient, family centered farming to a heavily capitalized agriculture tied to distant markets and split from community and home. Their titles, McMurry's Transforming Rural Life and Neth's Preserving the Family Farm, reveal their differences. The positive effects and ease of the Great Transformation lie at the heart of McMurry's work while Neth's eye stays on the path not taken, the preservation for so long and against great odds of the family farm. In these well written, broadly researched, and at times lively studies, both authors detail the transition from family farms which earned cash from home production and specialized crops (e.g. cheese and wheat) to a capitalized country economy where connections between farm and community, between family and farming, among family, community and hired labor, and, in McMurry's case, the ecological connection among crops, animals and farm products, all decreased or dissolved.

The scope of the two books differs; McMurry details the change from home produced cheese, which occurred on relatively few farms, to centralized factory production. She argues that the essential characteristics of farm based cheese production replicated those of the butter made on almost every northern farm and anticipated buttermaking's disappearance from the family farm. Although McMurry enlarges her scope to include all northern farms, her case study consists of 475 farms in seven Oneida, New York, towns (or townships) and much of her data centers on New York state. Neth's study encompasses Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska and North and South Dakota with a special focus on Wisconsin, Iowa and North Dakota where different specialties prevailed: dairy, corn and livestock, and wheat. The centralized capitalization of cheesemaking occurred early; by 1885 factories produced over 90% of northern cheese. In contrast, Neth argues that throughout the first 40 years of this century, northern farmers resisted the pressure from government and agricultural business to extensively capitalize and mechanize their production. Only in the post-World War II era did the Great Transformation occur broadly across the agricultural north.

Both Neth and McMurry depict the old order as one of family farms where farming was the family's business, and the work of women, men and children was essential for farm and family survival. Here work and living, the worlds of men, women and children, and the concerns of family and community were not separate but intertwined. The family farm practiced a mixed economy in which specialized production brought cash income and, hopefully, profits while farm families buffered the risks of production for distant markets through self-sufficiency and community mutuality. Farming families raised and preserved much of the family food, made home essentials such as clothing and linens, repaired tools and machines, hauled water, chopped and carried fuel. At the same time, community social ties supported the economic transactions of work exchange, barter, sale and gifts. McMurry describes "competency" as the overall farm goal where value lay in sufficiency rather than profits or accumulation of goods. Here, as Neth says, the value of work, not ownership of consumer goods, undergirded saving and making do as a way of life; people distrusted the market and used "family and community resources to overcome the inequities and hardships of capitalist agriculture." (Neth, p. 5)

Why did farm families discard this system in cheesemaking and then some 50 years later more generally on northern farms? Economic developments beyond the home community in transportation, markets, pricing and labor were welcomed because they solved existing conflicts in the older order of farm cheesemaking. On the farm, women both carried the knowledge and skill of cheesemaking and did most of the work, including heavy lifting and use of scalding liquids. Exploitation of women formed the central argument against home cheesemaking: women's harder work was inherently unfair and harmful to their health, perhaps even drudgery. McMurry believes that most women supported the movement of cheesemaking from farm to factory because they sought a more equal distribution of labor, and some supported the masculinization of cheesemaking. Except for some later opposition by male farmers to standardization imposed by factories on their milk, the transition from home to factory manufacture of cheese ran smoothly, and in general women believed they benefited from the change.

Neth sees the transformation very differently: motivated by profits and a firm belief in capitalism, business and government united to change farm production and farm life. Government policy aimed at greater farm prosperity through the consolidation of farms to achieve economies of scale, greater mechanization of farming operations to eliminate farm wages, and increased purchases of consumer goods to reduce labor and increase amenities. These policies began with the enactment of the Morrill Act of 1862 which supported agricultural research, the establishment of the U.S. Department of Agriculture in the same year which promoted commercial agriculture, the Hatch Act of 1887 which created agricultural experiment stations, the agricultural extension service which educated farmers in modern agriculture, and the country life movement early in the twentieth century which studied and improved rural living. Farm people protested through farm organizations such as the Grange, the Nonpartisan League and the Farmers' Union, but the most sustained and widespread resistance came from individuals. Instead of following government advice, men and women worked together to maintain a farm which both supported the family and produced cash products. They limited farm and home consumer purchases and maintained community social and economic ties. Indeed, the telephone, the first most widely purchased consumer good, facilitated the ties of family and community. In the Great Depression of the 1930s farm families continued to rely on saving, making do, and mutual community help, but with farm resources needed to sustain these strategies shrinking, the decay of the system of family farming which occurred after World War II came in sight.

A major difference in the two studies concerns the existence of viable alternatives. Seemingly beneficial options existed for farm families when factories replaced farm cheesemaking. Prospering local farmers invested in local cheese factories, farmers' wives found a new freedom in release from the work of home cheesemaking, and farm families produced and sold milk to the new enterprises. But when northern farms were transformed into large scale, heavily capitalized and mechanized businesses, alternatives were nonexistent for many. The extent of the devastation, then only beginning, is revealed in the 133 boxes of letters from people with last names beginning with A, B or C received by the Rural Rehabilitation Division of the Farm Security Administration between 1933 and 1945, mostly one page letters from people who were about to lose or had already lost their farms.

The Great Transformation brought the "defeminization" of farming. McMurry believes farm women replaced cheesemaking with local and broader community work, and at the same time redefined competency to mean comfort, consumerism and culture. In contrast, Neth details farm women's resistance to government efforts to take them off the farm and put them in the house. Here the parallel to government and church efforts to change Native American society is very close. Women continued to take pride in physical labor; to them working in the fields made them part of the farm enterprise. Farm women did not accept the concept of domesticity; instead they challenged the separation of women and workers. However, the tide was against them. Men gradually took over the skill of cheesemaking in factories while farm women turned to buttermaking and poultry. When these too disappeared into creameries and government-supported large-scale operations, farm women looked to off-farm work.

Although Neth includes women and community in her title and McMurry writes about cheesemaking which farm women dominated, equally poignant and perhaps less discussed is the loss male farmers experienced. Many were pushed from the land when they could not capitalize farm production or find labor and exchange opportunities in their community to sustain the old system. Those who negotiated the transformation found themselves isolated from their family, their neighbors and even the land itself. On former cheesemaking farms, men worked harder for fewer profits. And more often they worked alone. Male community bonds dissolved as labor moved to a cash basis. The neighborly social ties fostered by women no longer underpinned family farming. The work of men, women and children did not intertwine as it had, for instance, in producing cheese. More daughters left farm life. Wives and children worked apart at buttermaking and egg production while the male farmer produced fragmented, not integrated, farm products. In the end the machine came between the farmer, the family, the community and the land, eventually isolating the farmer in a tractor's airconditioned cab.

Neth objects to the Great Transformation on moral grounds. The government's policy, directly supported by agricultural businesses, rested on the consolidation of farms and heavy capital expenditures in land, machinery, feed, fertilizer, livestock, seed and other farm needs. The goal of government policy was an independent farmer tied to the market not the community. To the government, small farmers who could not make the change were ignorant and backward, a view that government professionals continued to hold in the 1930s when the depression clearly revealed the number of farmers who could not make the economic change. Blind to the fact that family and community made northern farming possible, government policy and officials willingly sacrificed small farmers, the labor of women and youths, and community exchange to enable large scale, capitalist farming to prosper.

Neither Neth nor McMurry, however, regard the capitalization of northern agriculture as inevitable. Although McMurry emphasizes the advantages of the Great Transformation, most notably the reduced labor for women, she too recognizes that under the old system "(t)hey farmed with greater consideration for the land and its productivity and tried to accommodate to natural processes, rather than to overcome them...." Neth agrees as she concludes, "From the past, before agriculture became 'modern,' come the visions that farm people had of integrating work and living, ways farm women sought to connect the needs of families, communities, and farms, and practices by which rural people together built flexible and adaptive human connections." Those values of the past may now guide a "'new agriculture,' one that can meet the needs of communities and the land more than simply the needs of production." (McMurry, p. 233; Neth, p. 273) In other words, sustainable agriculture.

Anne B. Webb Metropolitan State University