(00:00:00) I don't think that we're going to go back to being those good nurturing cookie baking non opinion articulating ladies that people like to convince us. Our grandmothers were our grandmothers were never like that. But since manually write history, they sort of Tidy it up a little bit and give us role models that fit their needs rather than others. Now the second sphere of change is obviously going to be agriculture. And agriculture by 1990 is impossible to predict all we know is that it's going to change and we know that the challenge is to see that farm women become active participants in shaping that change both in their own lives and in agriculture and not just letting it happen to you. There's no point in just reacting to it. Is there one might as well get out there and try to shape those changes. Now it seems to me at least that in beginning to shape the past or shape the future rather. It's useful to understand the past and this is how I got involved in studying Farm women. Now I knew Farm women were interesting. There's a lot of research on other women. We have professional women and working class women and women who don't work and women who do work and divorced women and women who refuse to get divorced even though it might be the smartest thing to do considering the circumstances, but nobody was asking about Farm women. And so this seemed to me strange because urban women have always said I'll be liberated through work and I'll explain why that's all right for them. But it seemed to me Farm women had always worked and it didn't seem to me that we were particularly liberated by all that Noble toil. So what about work was different in the two context. The other thing was that farm women always say, I'm not a women's libber then they say but in real off the list of standard demands for equal access to credit equal respect equal dignity and don't show me around anymore. And so I was interested in why it was always I'm not a women's libber and the but was exactly what you could hear on a Manhattan street corner by somebody who had a bad day with a bank. So I decided that I would do research on Farm women and I felt that since there has been so little written about Farm women. We didn't need to start with the sort of attitudinal survey which makes everybody sound alike. I needed to talk to farm women about their own lives certainly the areas that came out again and again on the tapes and the areas that concern Farm women are first of all work on the farm secondly farm management thirdly family relations. And finally public policy as it affects both farm and the family no work, of course is something that farm women have always done. Nobody even notices it right can remember my father wants and we sometimes have hired help. We're coming out of church where German Lutheran's Wisconsin Synod. Does that give you an idea we were serious people and we were coming out of st. Paul's have Angelica Lutheran Church of Tomah, Wisconsin, and the pastor says, good morning. How are you? Mr. Rosner? And he didn't really want to know he just want to shake hands and get to the next 300 Lutheran's behind us and my father said, oh, it's a terrible winter. I'm all alone this winter meaning he had no hired help and my mother who certainly cannot be confused with Gloria Steinem said doesn't occur to me you're alone this winter. No, this is fairly typical I think men farm and women help even when they do the same thing to Dairy Farmers are in a barn each with a milker. He's farming. She's helping know this this is amusing, you know, it would be amusing if it didn't have such serious consequences, but because women's work on the farm has been hidden from history the dignity the respect and the legal position that comes from being a person with an occupation has been denied to farm women to the extent of farm woman appears at all in the US Census. She appears as unpaid family labor. That's depressingly. Correct. When you think about it for very long unpaid family labor know. Why did this happen? Is it that all farm men are terrible male chauvinist pigs and they need their Consciousness raised by being sent to a retraining Center in western, Nebraska. No, I don't think it is. Actually I think it has to do with historical circumstances of the relation between rural and urban America. Farmers after all our business people and they have felt like business people for most of their history, but yet after the Civil War in this country. Business people started getting very very rich business started getting bigger and bigger and bigger and the wives of those business persons started doing less and less in their own home housework got easier and easier and a myth developed that a lady was someone who did nothing in the urban areas now and the person who's written about this best is a Minnesota Economist named thorstein veblen. He can't be too bad. He was Farm Boy from Minnesota. Some people say he's radical how radical can you be when you start out in rural middle west thorstein veblen wrote about how women were taken away from their work? (00:05:49) And they (00:05:49) proved that their husbands were powerful people by doing nothing and just dressing up and veblen has traced the change in how women dressed in first and sort of functional close and then increasingly and whalebone corsets high-heeled shoes bustles bouffant hairdos up to here. Now. What can you do with a whale bone corset high-heeled shoes and a bustle? You can sit if you're extremely dexterous that is and you can show that your husband is such a powerful man that he can do it all by himself now is Babylon says when people started getting richer and richer and richer somebody had to be in charge of consuming but the industrial classes were too busy making money to consume after all men are out there working themselves into premature death. So they decided that their women should sit around and consume now, we're better suited for it. You have to admit say a man wants to dress up. What can you do with a man really? There's not much that you can add they can maybe have a big diamond ring, maybe a tie clasp that sort of gaudy maybe a fur hat but that one had it right the women were dressed up and as he said they became the equivalent of a lap dog. They became menials. They were just there as ornaments. They were there to be protected quote unquote from life. And in the process women were denied the dignity that they'd always had in America as useful workers household workers. Perhaps maybe work on the farm maybe work outside the home but workers the sort of woman who had made her own candles spun her own cloth made her own quilts preserved her own meat grown her own vegetables and that was denied to women. So in light of this history, you can see why urban women who've been denied the Dignity of working demand the right to work again and why they say they'll be liberated through (00:07:51) Labor. (00:07:53) No, all of this is going on and farmers are identifying with this emerging group of very wealthy people. These are after all the real Progressive Americans and farmers are identifying this yet. A farm is not like us steel. We know that there is a difference very few Farms run without women very few men even offered to farm without women. The middle west was settled in part by Farms headed by women as the men went off further west in search of Adventure Amusement Prosperity yet farm and I think became ashamed of the contribution that women made not because we didn't do it well, but because they didn't want to admit that they weren't as rich as those men who were forcing their wives into whalebone girdles. And so a curious kind of attitude developed around Farm women's work Farm into wanted to prove they could do it all by themselves that they were powerful people. The farm woman was then put in a double bind. She was expected to work like a farmhand in private and act like a banker's wife in public. Now, it's pretty hard to sort of shove yourself into a whale bone girdle when you've been out, you know shocking corn or you know shocking grain hurting the cows. It's really pretty hard to keep a manicure in place when you have been shoveling silage which used to be fed. It's difficult, but I think the attempt was very much a part of Rural America between say 1890 and the Great Depression men became ashamed of their dependence upon the labor of their family. Instead of saying we will have our own culture. We will acknowledge what are women do they denied and devalued Farm women's work and that is a burden. We're just getting out from under and that is a place where I think Farm women have been helped by their Urban sisters urban women are now saying work is dignified. I demand my right to work. I demand the joy of going to my law office at 6:00 a.m. Staggering home at midnight. I feel so free. So liberated this may not all be rational. But the change in American culture that has dignified the work of women is a change that can only help foreign women now the 1980s, I think we'll see a car coming together of rural and urban women around the issue of the Dignity of occupation the Dignity of work the right to be reimbursed for it. Work however will not simply be drudgery. I can't imagine a farm woman in the 1980s who offers to just drudge on while her husband manages the business the farm woman who worked all her life toiled on the farm in the household taking care of Hired Hands all the things that farm women did of another era and who didn't find out that she was a wealthy woman until her husband had the thoughtfulness to die before her and the estate was finally revealed to her that kind of model of the farm wife. I think is over and the stories we still hear of people whose mothers didn't know how to write a check when dad died people whose mothers didn't know that they had enough assets that mother could have had a new dress that kind of neglect I think is getting to be a thing of the past. Farm women are professionals and they're really guarding themselves at professionals women are now in the egg schools a third to a half of some of the colleges of Agriculture have women in them. I feel that when Texas A&M has women studying Agriculture and Texas A&M has not Fallen to the grown by this revolutionary change. We have made a permanent change in American Life the Paradox is that they're in the egg schools and very at the time when the chance of becoming an operating Farmers almost nil and they're going to end up working in agribusiness it for the government historically women have been denied access to those professional qualifications, which in this century were increasingly important for male Farmers this again devalued their work and separated them from farm management. It seems to me that the colleges of agriculture in this country. Have a great deal to live down and to make up To farm women there is no reason that tax-supported public institutions should have been treated like Men's Clubs. There is a difference after all between the Elks and Iowa State or at least there ought to be by denying women access to production technology training to farm management techniques women became shoved into that sphere of Agriculture, which was drudgery and their claim to make decisions to know what was going on in their Farm to be a partner in management was denied by the fact that they didn't have a piece of paper form Cornell or Texas A&M. This era I think is over and we are beginning to put those schools in perspective as useful but not as the last word and certainly should not have had the impact on Farm women that they have had now if blind Grant professors weren't bad enough and this whole kind of professionalization of farming but left women out. We come back to the other way that farming is different from many occupations, which is that nobody Farms alone. Everybody Farms with a family and making decisions in a family context takes all the tact and charm and patience and self-control that anyone can muster family life is of course wonderful, isn't it? We all agree on that couldn't be better. We love our relatives like to see them come delighted to see them go. But the thing is that you see if you're a plumber or a professor, you're not usually in business with them. Are you you just sort of deal with them outside of your occupation, but Farms come with families attached in most cases. It's often said at least in Wisconsin that the only way to get a Farms to marry it or inherit it we know off that in many cases. Perhaps most cases the land comes down to the husband's. This means when the wife goes to the farm. She's an outsider. They're all related by blood they may hate each other but they've got blood in common and the young woman who comes into that situation is a can only by contract and now what's happening in rural areas. They look at the young life and they say she's going to have to sign a marriage contract that if she divorces our son she can't have any of it and you hear the most, you know, lovely saintly ladies who are pillars of ladies Aid or the altar Society just insisting that their poor dear sweet little son was led Away by an 18 year old siren who was after his land to some extent this attitude is always there. The wife is the outsider and the husband goes home to Mom for a cup of coffee and to discuss business and I have had women in their 70s. Become Furious and bitter is they tell me about their years as a young Farm wife when they were out there milking while pregnant. And he was over having coffee with mom talking about the marketing situation and the financial position of the farm and also how Furious they were that nothing was ever sorted out the only piece of advice I ever offer Farmers about how to run their operations and I wouldn't presume to advise anyone on anything else, but the only piece of advice I ever give people is put it on paper. Grandma will not provide in her will don't trust grandma. Women are in charge of making kinship situations work, but it's impossible to make them work in many cases when it's all linked up with businesses that may be worth $750,000. They might be worth three million dollars. Who knows but to me that's a lot of money and people are not at their best when we are talking heavy money like that we have now the emergence of not only these kinship mechanisms that transfer land so that mother never owns therefore you never have to pay tax associated with that transfer but we have the emergence as Farmers Farms get larger a Brothers corporations and brothers Partnerships in which the males are the partners in law or the corporate stockholders in law. Now this legal fiction doesn't seem to keep women out of the barns or out at the fields. It's simply keeps them out of the family corporate or partnership meetings. A lady from Wisconsin burst into tears at a public meeting when she told me about the following arrangement in her family. They have a family Corporation dad and his sons she and her children work every day. They milk a hundred and twenty cows in this family Corporation and they plan to expand to 250 the corporate bylaws read she found out accidentally when she read a copy of the corporate bylaws that her husband had had never shown it to her corporate bylaws read that when her husband dies if he precedes her in death, she must sell his stock. She could never hold it. She must sell it to his brothers at 1976 market value. Love and devotion are no substitute for business. And business is no substitute for love and devotion. But I submit that just because one's name is on a corporation one's relationship with one's husband can only change for the better. It certainly doesn't make one less female to be a corporate stockholder. I should have thought that all those women who retain their femininity well working at a farrowing house would be quite capable of being very feminine indeed at meetings of the family Corporation seemed so much easier in that sphere. Women men have made labor contributions to their Farms management contributions to their Farms. But they are denied the recognition for these contributions partly by the cultural history that's preceded us and partly by the tortuous turns of kinship. Yet I think in a sense. This is perhaps getting better. After all, that's fear of life. Which is now totally private which can be changed by her ringing one's husband is pretty small, isn't it? And what women seem to be understanding in the 70s and I'm sure into the 80s is that women must participate in public policy if they are to protect their family and their farm and if they are to get some of these problems straightened out in the end, you know, there's no sense reforming your husband's character, even if he becomes the aide-de-camp to Gloria Steinem a feminist ideologue who's articles appear in moves Magazine on a monthly basis. There's very little he can do about some of these problems when I was born. My dad could just put my name on the farm deed and nobody cared. You tried to put your kid's name on a farm deed. Just write it on they care. They really do care if you try that. It you know say that you're in a form of property ownership, which is not advantageous to you. And your husband says we're not going to have this. There's nothing he can do there's almost nothing. He himself can probably do he can make it worse by these kind of Brothers Partnerships and corporations on it, but he can't solve the problem women have begun involved in shaping Farm policy both as it affects women and as it affects the farm now in doing this They have not been able to work in many cases through the established Farm organizations. The farm organizations are linked to government they are the entry point. They are the transmittal belt of information but too often the meetings of farm organizations are considered the same thing as a night out with the boys. There's nothing wrong with a night out with the boys. Everybody needs it. We need a night out with the girls. They need a night out with the boys. But why should when we have a night out with the girls? It's just that we go. We have a few beers. We talk We complain we go home. They go have a night out with the boys and they formulate National foreign policy. This is not right if they were doing a better job at it one could perhaps a that would be fine. But none of those organizations have had a fresh idea in 30 years. And so one might say it is no silly of them to throw away half of their intellectual Talent women have gotten involved in policy through their own organizations American a group women women involved in farm economics United Farm wives to name just a few It's not that they really wanted to be women's libbers. They all say I'm not a women's libber but and the but they got tired of many of them having been activists and other Farm organizations for a long time. Was that even when they were permitted to get involved in these Farm organizations. They were only permitted to get involved in certain ways. What is of course public relations Product Promotion. It's important women do it. There's no reason to stop doing it. But when it comes to holding office of a policy shaping sort that's different. In other words. I think one of the changes in the 1980s is that we all see that the old idea that somehow you live on your farm and you're safe from the currents of the larger economy, which my family had is gone what happens in the economy what happens to energy prices the rate of inflation are crucial and farm women protect their families. By getting out of the house and off tractor and into the public policy Arena whether you do it through the established Farm organizations Women's Farm organizations, whether you do it by being involved in Party politics, whether you just do it as a concerned individual is up to you, but it does seem that we have a duty to get involved not in a sense that selfish out women out there sort of seeing to their own future you do it for your children you do it for your husband's and you also do it for yourself. There's no reason that we should take this nice lady business so far that we never do anything for ourselves. No, The issues that faced Farm women then continue to be a certain set of issues facing women. Can women have credited their known name can they pay social security and get benefits not just as a spouse, but if somebody was an occupation can they have those options? Not every woman wants a credit card in your own name, but some do and it should be there. But even if all these Equity issues were solved. The farm issues still remain don't they and women have got to get involved in those? With farming revolving around people borrowing operating Capital against their appreciated real asset every year. And credit coming now at something approaching a 22 percent rate when you can get it at all with Energy prices skyrocketing and with Production Technologies based upon a non-renewable fossil fuel source. Certainly. There's a great deal to get involved in. These issues were shape agriculture in the 1980s. There's no question that things will change our option I think is to shape them actively to do our best to try to shape the future. We want and your view of the future may be different than mine and maybe different from your husband's but you can still love each other. The only alternative to that is to just sit there and let it happen to you know, there was another time in history where Farmers felt that things were going very badly indeed. They were all going out of business. And with the women got involved in. This was the populist movement in the Great Plains, Texas, Georgia in the 1890s. And one of the women who was very involved in that was Mary lease who is the mother of eight children and a farm wife and she always urged Farmers to do something which I'm going to urge you to do and that is she urged Farmers to raise less corn and More Hell. Well, I'm not sure. I'm not sure whether you want to raise less corn or not. That's up to you. But I'm pretty sure that it's time for Farm women to get involved in a little discreet ladylike hell-raising outside the home. Thank you.