Grey Osterud, Putting the Barn before the House: Women and Family Farming in Early Twentieth-Century New York (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012, $26.95). Pp. 296. isbn 978 0 8014 7810 9.
M. Walker
Apr 17, 2013
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Journal of American Studies
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Semantic Scholar
Key Takeaway Key Takeaway: Nanticoke Valley farm families maintained flexible gender roles and strong mutual-aid networks, enabling them to survive and thrive in the uncertain agricultural economy of the early twentieth century.
Abstract
In , historian Hal S. Barron called Grey Osterud’s Bonds of Community: The Lives of Farm Women in Nineteenth-Century New York “the most thorough and sophisticated reconstruction of the relationships between rural men and women that we have for the nineteenth century.” Indeed, Osterud’s pathbreaking work has undergirded the studies of a generation of historians of rural women – including this reviewer’s. Her meticulously researched community study of farm families in New York’s Nanticoke Valley thoroughly refuted the notion that “separate spheres” existed among most nineteenth-century northern farming families. She demonstrated that a flexible gender division of labor and strong mutual-aid networks built and maintained by women provided Nanticoke Valley farm families with the resources to survive and even thrive in the uncertain agricultural economy of the late nineteenth century. In Putting the Barn before the House, which Osterud describes as the sequel to Bonds of Community, she carries the story of Nanticoke Valley farmers into the twentieth century. Using the same exhaustive research and careful analysis, Osterud demonstrates that in Nanticoke Valley, farm families maintained flexible gender roles and strong mutual-aid networks, as well as a “culture of mutuality,” well into the twentieth century. Men and women agreed that “putting the barn before the house” was a vital strategy to enable the family to persist on the land and convey it to the next generation. While the demands of the family farm shaped women’s lives, Nanticoke Valley women did not see themselves as “drudges” in service to a patriarchal system. Instead, they negotiated with their husbands or other relatives to achieve a gender division of labor that accommodated their own preferences to the needs of farm and family. Since the work of each family member contributed to the family economy, women enjoyed and maintained positions as partners in the farming operation. Osterud argues that the types of agency that women were able to exercise varied in part with their connection to the land. Women who inherited land from parents or founded farms with their husbands often displayed more autonomy and control over family decision-making than women who married an inheriting son. Yet, almost without exception, early twentieth-century Nanticoke Valley farm women strove to “create marital partnerships characterized by mutuality rather than marginality” (). Nanticoke Valley farming families also rejected the efforts of Country Life reformers and, later, agricultural extension agents who urged men and women to adopt both progressive commercial farming strategies and the ideology of separate spheres. Instead, they sought to embody “the core values they espoused: gender integration and mutuality, reciprocity and mutual aid, and social equality and collective action” (). In the early decades of the twentieth century, Nanticoke Valley farmers organized marketing and producer cooperatives designed to increase their control over their fate in the agricultural marketplace. They also worked through