Farm women of the twentieth-century South have been portrayed as oppressed, worn out, and isolated. Lu Ann Jones tells quite a different story in "Mama Learned Us to Work. Building upon evocative oral histories, she encourages us to understand these women as consumers, producers, and agents of economic and cultural change.
As consumers, farm women bargained with peddlers at their backdoors. A key business for many farm women was the "butter and egg trade"--small-scale dairying and raising chickens. Their earnings provided a crucial margin of economic safety for many families during the 1920s and 1930s and offered women some independence from their men folks. These innovative women showed that poultry production paid off and laid the foundation for the agribusiness poultry industry that emerged after World War II. Jones also examines the relationships between farm women and home demonstration agents and the effect of government-sponsored rural reform. She discusses the professional culture that developed among white agents as they reconciled new and old ideas about women's roles and shows that black agents, despite prejudice, linked their clients to valuable government resources and gave new meanings to traditions of self-help, mutual aid, and racial uplift.
Marti takes a detailed look at the women of the Grange from 1866 through the early 20th century. He deflates some of the claims that have been made for the order's liberating influence, but still takes that influence very seriously, exploring the opportunities for sociability and cooperation that fostered sisterhood and encouraged women to pursue their distinctive interests. From the promise of equality made by the founders, to the role the Grange played in promoting equal suffrage, women's roles are fully analyzed in relation to both mutuality with men and sisterhood with each other.
In Ireland, family farming is one of the last preserves of male dominance, in which women's concerns are overlooked. Based mainly on interviews with farm women, O'Hara's study identifies the ways in which they challenge their apparent subordination.