Agrarian Women challenges the widely held assumption that frontier farm life in the United States made it easier for women to achieve rough equality with men. Using as her example the family farm in rural Nebraska from the 1880s until the eve of Wo

A profound shift is occurring among women working in agriculture - they are increasingly seeing themselves as farmers, not only as the wives or daughters of farmers. In this book, farm women in the northeastern United States describe how they got into farming and became successful entrepreneurs despite the barriers they encountered in agricultural institutions, farming communities, and even their own families. The authors' feminist agrifood systems theory (FAST) values women's ways of knowing and working in agriculture and has the potential to shift how farmers, agricultural professionals, and anyone else interested in farming think about gender and sustainability, as well as to change how feminist scholars and theorists think about agriculture.--COVER.

Elite Women and the Agricultural Landscape, 1700–1830 offers a detailed study of elite women’s relationships with landed property, specifically as they were mediated through the lens of their estate management and improvement. This highly original book provides an explicitly feminist historical geography of the eighteenth-century English rural landscape. It addresses important questions about propertied women’s role in English rural communities and in Georgian society more generally, whilst contributing to wider cultural debates about women’s place in the environmental, social and economic history of Britain. It will be of interest to those working in Historical and Cultural Geography, Social, Economic and Cultural History, Women’s Studies, Gender Studies and Landscape Studies. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

The debate on the origins of modern gender norms continues unabated across the academic disciplines. This book adds an important and hitherto neglected dimension. Focusing on rural life and its values, the author argues that the modern ideal of separate spheres originated in the era of the Enlightenment. Prior to the eighteenth century, cultural norms prescribed active, interdependent economic roles for both women and men. Enlightenment economists transformed these gender paradigms as they postulated a market exchange system directed exclusively by men. By the early nineteenth century, the emerging bourgeois value system affirmed the new civil society and the market place as exclusively male realms. These standards defined women's options largely as marriage and motherhood. Marion W. Gray received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He studied in Göttingen, was a visiting faculty member at Gießen, and has worked at the Max Planck Institute for History in Göttingen and the Arbeitsgruppe Ostelbische Gutsherrschaft in Potsdam. Formerly a faculty member in History and Women's Studies at Kansas State University, he is currently Professor and Chair of the Department of History at Western Michigan University.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) produced a 2011 report on women in agriculture with a clear and urgent message: agriculture underperforms because half of all farmers—women—lack equal access to the resources and opportunities they need to be more productive. This book builds on the report’s conclusions by providing, for a non-specialist audience, a compendium of what we know now about gender gaps in agriculture.

On Behalf of the Family Farm traces the development of women’s activism and agrarian feminisms in the Midwest after 1945, as farm women’s lives were being transformed by the realities of modern agriculture. Author Jenny Barker Devine demonstrates that in an era when technology, depopulation, and rapid economic change dramatically altered rural life, midwestern women met these challenges with their own feminine vision of farm life. Their “agrarian feminisms” offered an alternative to, but not necessarily a rejection of, second-wave feminism. Focusing on women in four national farm organizations in Iowa—the Farm Bureau, the Farmers Union, the National Farm Organization, and the Porkettes—Devine highlights specific moments in time when farm women had to reassess their roles and strategies for preserving and improving their way of life. Rather than retreat from the male-dominated world of agribusiness and mechanized production, postwar women increasingly asserted their identities as agricultural producers and demanded access to public spaces typically reserved for men. Over the course of several decades, they developed agrarian feminisms that combined cherished rural traditions with female empowerment, cooperation, and collaboration. Iowa farm women emphasized working partnerships between husbands and wives, women’s work in agricultural production, and women’s unique ways of understanding large-scale conventional farming.

First published in 1996. In what ways have women contributed to agriculture? To what extent have scholars addressed these contributions in the professional literature? What has been the impact of gender in agricultural policy and economic development? What is the status of gender equity in the division of farm labor and in agricultural education? Such questions are raised by students and researchers worldwide who seek documentation which focuses on these vital topics. The purpose of this bibliography is, therefore, to synthesize this unique widely dispersed information in one volume, to assist researchers, faculty, and students in expediting the research process.