Groundbreaking. She was one of the first to examine the contributions of women to u. S. Agriculture, and it was this book that helped launch sociologists and other social scientists and rural historians and so forth, to look at the contributions of women who had largely been invisible up to this time. This is a nod to that groundbreaking book. Why study women in egger culture in agriculture . What i have been arguing and what other scholars are arguing is that why we want to study women in agriculture specifically, and not just talk about agriculture and gene roles, is that women have always played a really Critical Role in feeding us, in clothing us, in sustaining Rural Communities where there are farm families, increasingly helping fuel our society, and this is everywhere, not just the u. S. When we talked about agriculture, womens critical contribution was largely invisible. But when we did see it, and we will talk about that, when we did acknowledge it, it often wasnt valued the same as a mans contribution. And in some cases, it simply wasnt counted at all. In addition, the other component we argue about why we should study women in agriculture and take a gender lens, is because there is an important gender gap in a culture, where women dont have the same access to resources men do. They dont have the same access to productive resources, like land and capital. They dont have the same access to opportunities in leadership, education and so forth. If we want to address that gender gap, first we have to understand what is the issue, the problem. If you dont know about it, you dont know how to solve it. And for us to solve it, we specifically have to think about men and women and gender relations. That is what we have been arguing in this class. What we want to do today is we are posing good questions. And these are questions we are going to answer throughout the lecture throughout the semester, with two questions. Why have women and their contributions been invisible . And why and how is there a gender gap within agriculture . These are the two big questions. We will look at three examples to examine. We are going to look at farmer identity, farmer ownership and farm identity and farm labor. And today we are going to unpack these issues as they are today, and for us to understand how we got to where we are today, we want to look at what these examples look like historically. That is our goal today. And what im arguing today based on social science and historical literature that has look historical literature that has looked at women, im going to be arguing that there are many Different Reasons for this. But want but one important reason is the idea of agrarian ideology. By ideology, what we mean is the state of beliefs that underpin our politics and our economy. This idea that ideology ideology, which im going to unpack, what is critically important for you to remember is that this ideology, in terms of thinking of the family farm, assumes the family farm is split into two spheres, the farm in the household. And in these spheres, women and men play different roles. So two spheres, men and women playing different roles. So we are going to look at how powerful the ideology is come about when we look at the reality on the ground, it doesnt reflect what we see in terms of the family farm in the u. S. So to put some boundaries on what we are talking about today, our focus is on the family farm. We are going to be picking up the history of the family farm since the 1860s, really from the time of the homestead act. Those are our boundaries. The family farm has important geographical dimensions, most represented in the midwest, where we are here in iowa, and on the great plains and it largely affected white men and women. We will turn our attention to the experiences of africanamerican, which has an important dimension in the south in terms of slavery and sharecropping agriculture. So what we are talking about today is not a universal experience among all women everywhere, but has important historical and geographical and structural dimensions to it. When we talk about the agrarian ideology in the family farm, agrarianism is a very old ideology, thousands of years old. And this ideology is rooted in the belief have economic and political primacy over other industries, that farming is the most valuable, the most moral of all industries and all economic endeavors. So in the u. S. , when we think about agrarianism, it is Thomas Jefferson, our third president , who most clearly embodies the idea of agrarian ideology. Thomas jefferson spoke about agrarian is him, he wrote about it and was perhaps most influential in shaping this idea. When jefferson talked about agrarianism, he defined it in relation to family farms. But jefferson, as we know, was a slave owner, so perhaps there is irony there, but in terms of developing the republic in the u. S. , jefferson argued in favor of taking the land that was taken from native americans, that it should be disposed of among people who wanted to work it. So if you wanted to work the land, you should have the right to own your own property. So Thomas Jefferson is in favor of widespread ownership what are we going to do about this . So Thomas Jefferson was in favor of widespread ownership of the land. What is important when we think about how influential this ideology was, today when most people think about farming, the think about family farming, right . And there have been many different structural forms of agriculture in the u. S. , slavery, sharecropping for example, so there are tons of ways we can appreciate how influential agrarian ideology was, because of the thinking that farming is primarily family farming, where the people who own the land should work the land. So agrarian is him was what was called a gendered ideology. In thinking about the family farm, jefferson put forth the view that the family farm was two different spheres. Even though we call it a family farm, he had a view of two spheres, the farm and the household. And within those spheres, women and men would play very different roles. So here, his view, which we are arguing were influential, his views of what it means to be the property owners, men would be agricultural producers, and if you owned property that gave you the right to engage in civic affairs, also to vote, and that women, their sphere would be the household. They wouldnt own property. They would be responsible for caring for the house. They wouldnt be engaged in agricultural production, and that their role was really to support the y this was jeffersons argument. Jeffersons view of dispersion of the land and control of that land by family farmers, when we think about our history in the u. S. , it is the homestead act that we think of as being the fruition of this agrarian view of land settlement. We all learned about the homestead act, enacted in 1862 this gave anyone who wanted to work the land, including women, the ability to own 160 acres. They were given that land for free so long as they worked it and stayed on it for five years, and so forth, they were entitled to it. This was a really important act, mostly in the midwest and the great plains. And if we look at farm numbers, we see that the act together with other things, development of railroads and markets and development of institutions like universities and so forth, what we saw after that was the explosion of the number of farms. In 1860 we had less than 2 million farms in the u. S. By 1935 when it peaked, we had a most 7 million, 6. 8 million, the peak of the number of farms. So this was an incredibly important act, together with a whole number of other endeavors, that lead to the family farm. But again, the family farm was viewed as having these distinct spheres with these distinct roles for men and women. What scholars argue is that, when we think about the agrarian ideology, and we will illustrate this through examples, is that this ideology has been extremely influential. If we look at social institutions, policies, laws, education and so forth, we see it reflected in those. If we look at attitudes and values and beliefs within the individual or familiar community, or societal, we see this ideology permeating our attitudes, and again, this idea that within the family farm, the family farm has primacy, we value it enormously but within it there are clearly different roles for men and women to operate in different spheres. We are going to look at three examples that illustrate the agrarian ideology. Our goal today is to bring it back to the questions we posed. What we want to think about is, what effect has this agrarian ideology had on one, womens invisibility within agriculture, and two, the gender game. So if we think about why it matters the farm is separated from the household, how does that influence womens visibility . How does it influence the gender gap . The first thing is we are going to look at agrarian identities. And we are going to look at a short clip of a commercial, god made a farmer. I should ask, how many of you have not seen this commercial . A small handful have not seen this commercial. This was a commercial that ran during the two cent during the 2013 super bowl, and does anyone remember what it was advertising . What kind of truck . Dodge. Dodge ram truck. At the end of the commercial, you will see a truck. So it ran during the super bowl, and it was an incredibly emotional and impactful commercial. People loved it. Since that time, there have been over 23 million views of this commercial, articles have been written about it in the media, you can read so many comments, people absolutely loved this commercial. So we are going to watch it, and i want you to think about the images in the commercial, but i also want you to think about the language that has been used. What you are hearing is actually a speech by paul harvey, a conservative radio broadcaster. And the speech is from 1978, so we can see it is a few decades old. And as we watch and listen, you can jot down notes, and one of the reasons i like to show the video is that i think it is a really nice example of the agrarian ideology. So think about how the farmer was represented, how the identity of the farmer was represented. What kinds of traits are associated with the farmer . How were men and women represented in this commercial . [video presentation starts] and on the eighth day, god looked down on his planned paradise and said, i need a caretaker. So god made a farmer. God said, i need somebody to get up before dawn, milk cows, working the fields, milk cows again, go to supper, go into town and stay past midnight at a meeting of the school board. God made a farmer. God said i need 70 to set up all night with a newborn colt and watch it die, and dry his eyes and say, maybe next year. I need somebody who can shave an ax handle from a persimmon route persimmon sprout, who at planting time will finish his 40 hour week by tuesday noon and put in another 72 hours spirits of god made a farmer. God said i need somebody Strong Enough to clear trees, yet gentle enough to wean pigs, so god made a farmer. It had to be somebody who would plow deep and straight and not cut corners, somebody to seed, weed, power plow, plant, strain the milk, bail a family together with the strong bonds of sharing, who would laugh and then psy and then reply laugh and then sigh, and then reply with smiling eyes when his son says that he wants to spend his life doing what dad does, so god made a farmer. Take a minute, chat with your neighbor or not chat with your neighbor, but think about how the agrarian ideology is captured in this film, and how farmers are represented, how the role of the farm, the identity of the farmer, is represented. Dont worry about writing down too much, it is just jotting down some notes to think about. Who wants to volunteer, and tell us what you saw and heard in terms of how the farmer and farming is represented . The audio is directly shaped towards men, the farmers a male, but the images show females doing work. So the images focused largely on men. Very nice. What else . At the beginning it started with nongender language, and towards the end, i think it still would shine a light on women, and this was back in 1978, not nearly as much as it could have. But i dont think we were ignored. So women werent entirely excluded, and the language at the beginning was sort of allinclusive. The language is not gender biased until it said, i want to do what dad does and then you get the fact that it is a male. But the language used, paul harveys voice is obviously very deep, but they show a variety of different people, older men, women, hardworking, [indiscernible] that is a really nice point, so all the ways we pick things up, and if it had been a womens voiceover, it was a man, but perhaps that automatically makes us think that what we are talking about is men. Even with some parts, every dad everywhere wants his son to grow up to be just like him. I didnt detect a lot of gender i. S. Gender bias, but it is hard to take something from 1978, when it was traditionally maledominated, and turn it into something where we are now. Paul harvey was well known for his egg marketing and whatnot. So again, part of it is because we are looking at this historically, taking a historical speech and putting it onto contemporary images. Does anyone have a different view or another take . Thinking about these spheres, and talking about family farming, we largely saw images of the farm. What sort of images of the household did we see around the family farm, where the household is integral to family farming . The video showed women and men in the house together, when they would cook the food and bring it up to the guys in the fields. But it is the male as the head of the household, and the language is bringing them together. End you already think that there is gender bias. Ok. One of the things, when we think about family farming, we think of the household as integral. We will talk about that as we move through the lecture. The household is less visible in this image. The focus is more on the productive aspect, the farm aspect, and if you look at women, talking about family farming, i think there are three images of women come out of the 18. Farming family farming. I think there are three images of women out of the 18. Someone counted them up once. There are some women but theres not many of them, so men predominant in the images. And as one of you commented, the image we see is that the boy will take over the farm, and most of us, as was mentioned, often want our children to take over what we have done, but we can also interrogate that, which is what we are going to do. So if we think about the agrarian ideology, in this clip, the intent was to illustrate how both historically, because you guys pointed up the speech is historical, 1978, but even today the power of the agrarian ideology, where we see these spheres differently and we see the roles of men and women on family farms as quite distinct. And we can think about that in terms of the identity of the farmer. So when we talk about farmers, when we talk about family farming, the farmer is typically identified as male. So we have these strong images of men, often working independently, outside, working with crops and livestock and machinery. So these are the primary images that we get of the family farm, and the family farmer is a male. And when we think about traits associated with the farmer, they are masculine traits, things we associate with men often. Think being very strong, independent, persistent. You can see the men in the images, they were creative with different challenges, they were resilient in overcoming the challenges that nature and others presented to them, and so forth. And part of this helps us come back to this idea of agrarianism. It helps us recognize why the status of farmers is so high in the u. S. So if you do a survey of the american public, farmers have a really high status, family farms have a really high status. Part of it is because of this idea that farmers embody so many of the traits that we think are really important, and that we value in the u. S. , again, hardworking, resilient, the kind of language we use when we talk about farmers. And this is good, this is important. The critique is that when we look at this, the contributions of women, and even children, are largely indivisible are largely invisible. Again, we are talking about a family farm, a family farm, not a mans farm, a family farm. Where are the women . We didnt see them a lot in that video clip. When we talk about women, when we talk about women on family farms, we dont call them farmers. We dont call them farm women. Historically and predominantly today, we call them farm wives. So women on family farms, how we identify them is not in relation to the work that they do, but the marital relationship. So it was different for men and for women. And we can see the historical roots of this. Again, jefferson and others of their time argued strongly that white women should not be engaged in farm production. This was not the view they would have of black women, but in terms of white women on family farms, the argument was that they should not be working unless they were in desperate, dire straits, their husbands died or they were in poverty. A womans place in the home was as wives and mothers, supporting the husband, taking care of the household and the children and so forth. To justify this, womens roles, we associate what they do with strong traits of femininity. One of the things we can ask ourselves is, so what . So what . Men are farmers and women are farm wives. Men are responsible in the farm, women in the household, who cares . What scholars argue is that this belief that women didnt really contribute to farming and farm production, that there role on the productive side was largely invisible, had very real, material consequences. And we could see very real consequences for men, but we could also argue for families. The example i want to give, because it is related to us at iu estate university at iowa state university, is this idea that men and women operated in different spheres and had different implications for the kind of education men and women received. In 1914 the smith leave your act smith lever act. The smith lever act established the agriculture and Home Economics service, and the idea was that landgrant institutions such as iowa state university, would provide education for farm families. And this education would be based on science. The idea was that it would help them be successful enterprises. But because of this agrarian ideology, men and women operating in different spheres, women taking care of the house and the men who were the farmers, the education that was established had different programs for men than for women. So men learned the science in terms of what was needed for farm production, how to grow crops, how to lift after like stock how to look after livestock, deal with machinery, and the women learned the science of the domestic sphere, how to cook, how to preserve. And the photo you see here from the state Agricultural College in colorado, women were learning how to make butter, which is seen as a womens reserve. Does it matter .