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Life cycle or patriarchy? Gender divisions in family farming
Journal of Rural Studies. Vol. 7. No. 112, pp. 71-76, Printed in Great Britain
0743-0167/91$3.00 Pergamon
1991
+ 0.ot-l Press plc
Life Cycle or Patriarchy? Gender Divisions in Family Farming Sarah Whatmore Department
of Geography,
University
of Bristol,
U.K.
Abstract -
The paper critically examines traditional ‘explanations’ of the gender division of labour on the family farm as a function of the life cycle - which poses a relationship between women’s domestic household labour ‘compensatory’ responsibilities and their participation in other areas of work on and off the farm. It seeks to demonstrate, at a theoretical and empirical level, the inadequacy of this explanatory framework for the analysis of the position of women as ‘farm wives’ in ‘family farming’. The paper draws on survey and ethnographic evidence from two study areas in southern England. It argues that to understand the position of women as farm wives requires a theory of gender relations as power relations within which ideologies of appropriate gender roles are shaped and reshaped in the everyday work practices of the family farm.
From a number of quite disparate research perspectives, the gender division of labour has assumed a growing importance over the last decade in research into the sociology of agriculture in advanced industrial countries. This is reflected in a flourishing literature within mainstream rural sociology on the role of women in the farm labour process (e.g. Lagrave et al., 1987; Haney and Knowles, 1988; Gasson, 1989). It is also reflected in the developing focus within agrarian political economy on the internal relations of family farming, particularly the nature of the family labour process (e.g. Sachs, 1983; Scott, 1986; Friedmann, 1986). These developments represent progressive directions for research in the light of a long-standing contradiction in the literature which, while placing theoretical stress upon the distinctiveness of ‘the family’ as a pivotal feature of the sociology and political economy of modern farming, has focused almost exclusively on individual ‘farmers’ and ‘businesses’ as its unit of empirical analysis.
themes are thus illuminated. The first is that a narrow concept of labour is widely adopted, which only comprehends labour contributing to commercial agricultural production, sometimes extended to valorized work by family members on, or off, the farm. The host of activities necessary to the reproduction of family labour on a daily and generational basis is largely excluded (however, see Reimer, 1986; Ghorayshi, 1989). Secondly, the family itself has been poorly theorized, with that configuration of household and kinship relations associated with the nuclear family being taken as the ‘normal’ or even the ‘natural’ form. Treating the family/household as an organic unit of analysis obscures the very different and unequal positions of individual members which build upon, and are reinforced by, the gender division of labour (Lem, 1988). Thirdly, both these problems are underlain by a general failure to incorporate a theory of gender relations, as contested power relations between men and women, into explanations of how the family is structured and the family labour process sustained and transformed.
Despite their very different problematics, these two research developments can be usefully related. A focus on women, as the point of entry into the larger question of the nature of the family labour process, highlights deficiencies shared by Marxist and nonMarxist treatments of the division of labour on the farm and associated with their uncritical use of the composite concept of ‘family labour’. Three main
While biological ‘explanations’ of gender divisions of labour have been effectively discredited, both mainstream and Marxist accounts rely heavily on the more innocent concept of ‘family life cycle’ and associated ‘gender roles’. For example, even the most sophisticated analyses in the mainstream literature (e.g. Bouquet, 1986; Gasson et al., 1988) tend to ascribe ‘asymmetries’ in the gender division of
Introduction
71
72
Sarah Whatmore
labour to stage in the family life cycle, arguing that women’s role varies in relation to household structure and age of children. In Marxist analysis, the life cycle concept has been taken up in attempts to establish the self-sufficiency of family labour in domestic forms of commodity production by taking account of its variability during the family life cycle (Friedmann, 1978). The difficulty with such accounts is that they fail to explain the diversity and variation of gender divisions of labour in different times and places and, more particularly, they leave unaddressed the central issue of why it is women as opposed to men who undertake subsistence and ‘reproductive’ work over a wide range of contexts. Instead, this chain of reasoning naturalizes the division of labour in the family household by taking women’s responsibility for this work as given and then offering it as an explanation for the different pattern of involvement in agricultural or off-farm work between men and women. Such explanations are tautologous and sexist. They tell us little about the social relations through which labour is expropriated and resources distributed within the family household, and even less about the material practices and ideologies through which women’s gender identity and labour activity as ‘farm wives’ is constructed. In this paper I shall argue that a meaningful political economy of agriculture must incorporate an analysis of gender, centred on a theory of patriarchal gender relations. The approach outlined here draws on research undertaken in two contrasting areas in southern England, west Dorset and the Metropolitan Green Belt around London. The account presented is necessarily highly selective and interested readers are referred to a fuller version of the research published under the title ‘Farming Women’ (Whatmore, 1990). The first section of the paper sketches some key elements towards an alternative analysis of the family labour process which accords gender divisions theoretical, as well as empirical, significance. The second section uses survey and ethnographic material to illustrate selected features of women’s position in the family labour process focusing on the ideologies which legitimize their subordinate status as wives. Rethinking
the family labour process
The theoretical problems in orthodox political economy analyses of family farming outlined above raise a number of more fundamental questions about the conception of social process and change within structural Marxism, the dominant approach in the sociology of agriculture since the 1970s (Butte1 et al.,
1990). The approach put forward here differs from this framework in two crucial respects, informed by post-structuralist and feminist critiques developing largely outside the agrarian literature. The first difference is that the agricultural restructuring process is not conceived of as a mechanistic outcome of the structural logic of capitalism in which family farms are inexorably tied into the wider market economy and ultimately themselves commoditized. Rather, the process of commoditization is taken to be rooted in human agency, crediting an active role to ‘peasants, farmers and small-scale entrepreneurs in the process of commoditization itself’ (Long et al., 1986, p. 2). Such an approach demands that the analysis of the farm labour process incorporates the interpretative processes of human agency, by which actors make sense of their life-worlds, as these influence and are themselves influenced by wider structural relations (Burawoy, 1979). A dialectical relationship is suggested between social structures and actions, through the medium of social practice, as the dynamic of social change (Knorr-Cetina and Cicourel, 1981). Arguments along these lines have begun to develop in agrarian political economy, most notably in the context of developing societies (e.g. Long et al., 1986; Watts, 1989). Orthodox political economy is challenged in another sense also, by extending the compass of social relations beyond those of class and capital accumulation to recognize the causal powers of other social structures notably, in this context, gender and human reproduction. Gender is taken to be a general category of social relations, like class or ‘race’, which can take a variety of specific forms. Patriarchal gender relations are theorized as one such form which empowers men and subordinates women, and is contested through a range of social institutions and practices (Cockburn, 1986). Following Connell (1987), a distinction is made between gender order, as the macro-level historically structured power relations between men and women, and gender regime as the micro-level stage of gender politics played out through the practices of particular households, and so on. Within this framework the gender regimes of family farming can be examined as particular points in a wider matrix of patriarchal gender relations. Such a conceptual framework leads to a fresh understanding of family farming, as a varying form of production centred on the intersection of family household and agricultural enterprise and characterized by the complex interweaving of commodity and gender relations. In particular, it provides a means of examining the commoditization of family farming
Life Cycle or Patriarchy’? as a highly differentiated process modifying, and being modified by, household and kinship relations. Variations in gender divisions and ideologies structuring the family labour process can be analysed in relation to different levels of commoditization. Extending the relational typology of farms developed elsewhere (see Whatmore et al., 1987), three types of family farm can be identified - family labour farms, transitional family farms and family business farms. These types reflect a shift from labour to property as the organizing principle of household-based forms of production as their level of commoditization, or market integration, increases. The concept of the famify farm can be unpicked and traced to specific combinations of household and kinship relations. In contemporary family farming in many advanced industrial countries the dominant form is the conjugal household unit, in which the family labour process is centred on a married couple. Marriage represents a particular variant of what Pateman (1988) has termed the ‘sexual contract’, through which the identity and rights of individual citizenship in modern societies are gendered; constituting women as less than full individuals, their identity and rights being mediated by their relationship to men. The conjugal household is characterized by potential changes in its composition over time with the addition and departure of children and, less commonly, with the temporary addition of extended kin. It is situated within a wider kinship network in which patrilineage structures the practices through which the ownership of property is vested in the hands of men and reproduced generationally along the lines of male filiation (Whitehead, 1984). Together these household and kinship relations define the patriarchal gender regime of the family farm. The political economy of the family farm begins to look radically different from this perspective. The labour process in particular assumes new contours, encompassing not just activities producing agricultural commodities for the market, but all those which contribute towards sustaining the family household and farm enterprise on the land. In these terms the farm labour process can be taken (for analytical purposes) to comprise potentially four iabour circuits; agricultural labour, domestic household labour (DHL), non-agricultural farm labour and off-farm labour. The first two of these represent the principal labour circuits characteristic of farming, and the latter two as secondary. But this in itself is currently undergoing change with the growth of part-time farming. Gender
divisions in the farm labour process,
thus
73
defined, become a concern not just with the allocation of tasks but with the different relations under which men’s and women’s labour is carried out in terms of property rights over the means of production and control over the products of family labour (Mackintosh, 1981). Moreover, these divisions of labour become not the end-point for an analysis of gender relations in family farming, but force us to address the ways in which the women and men involved make sense of, and live with, the inequalities manifested in them. It is these broader horizons that the next section seeks to illustrate. The family at work
The gender division of labour described here for two study areas in southern England reinforces and elaborates patterns being established from research in many parts of the advanced industrial world. Rather than present another set of survey results, my intention is to highlight some key features of the gender division of family labour and property interpreted through the framework outlined above before considering the ideologies of ‘wifehood’ which inform women’s own experience of these divisions and legitimize their position in the political economy of the family farm. Gendered
labour power
Traditionally it has been argued that women’s agricultural labour participation is a function of their domestic labour activities, particularly childcare. One of the most consistent characteristics of the gender division of the farm labour process is undoubtedly women’s sole, or primary, responsibility for domestic household labour across all age groups, farm types and irrespective of the extent of their involvement in other labour circuits. All farm women surveyed in this research (81) carried out all the main domestic tasks, including childcare (in the 38% of households with children), with very limited contributions from other family/household members. But one-third of these households did employ paid domestic ‘help’; a means, it might be anticipated from traditional accounts, to ‘liberate’ women from these tasks and enable them to participate more fully in agricultural or other labour circuits. But if we look more closely at how domestic labour responsibilities relate to women’s involvement in other farm labour circuits, in this instance agricultural labour, traditional accounts are undermined and a rather different interpretation suggested. Women emerge from this survey (and others, e.g. Gasson, 1989) as playing a key administrative role
74
Sarah Whatmore
on the farm, combining the job descriptions of accountant and public secretary, receptionist, relations officer. Most women do the ‘dogsbody’ tasks of dealing with enquiries and running errands, over three-quarters of them on a regular basis, and two-thirds do the book-keeping. In terms of manual labour, 70% are involved, one-third on a regular basis. For all types of agricultural work a higher number and proportion of women with childcare responsibilities are involved in agricultural labour than those without. Conversely, in terms of childcare and paid domestic help (the only two real ‘variables’ as far as women’s domestic household labour is concerned) only five women with childcare responsibilities do not contribute to manual agricultural labour, of whom four also have paid domestic help. Women’s participation in agricultural work is more strongly related, not to their domestic responsibilities but to the degree of commoditization of the relations of production and reproduction of the family farm. For example, a higher proportion of women in family labour farms are involved in manual labour on a regular basis than women in family business farms, while those in family business farms are the most likely to have paid domestic help. Domestic household labour has a much more complex empirical place in the gender division of labour than traditionally assumed. Whatever else women do on the farm it is clearly in addition to, rather than instead of, their domestic tasks and responsibilities. Moreover, whatever the level of women’s other labour activities, there is little variation in the extent to which domestic household labour is shared with husbands and other family members. By the same token, men’s (non)-participation in the domestic labour circuit is much less variable in relation to their other labour activities compared to the pattern of women’s work on the farm. These features of the division of labour constitute part of a larger pattern of gender inequality to be explained rather than an explanation in themselves, and lead us to consider the wider structure of family labour relations. Women participate in the farm labour process under conspicuously different relations and conditions from those of their husbands and sons. Most notably, women’s rights over property reflect, and reinforce, social constraints on their identity as individuals arising from patriarchal practices and ideologies which subsume women as dependants of their husbands (Hirschon, 1984). Amongst the women surveyed here, their legal or financial interest in farmland is limited in extent, with only onequarter holding any form of interest. For farm capital women’s interest is more widespread (63%). This reflects the material and symbolic significance
of land in the social relations of farming and, in particular, the leaverage which it has over other forms of capital. In the vast majority of cases where women do have property rights in land or capital, these take the form of a minority stake held in joint ownership with their husbands. It is not in other words an individual right, but conditional upon their conjugal status. When one considers that access to farmland and capital is structured primarily by patrilineal inheritance these marked inequalities are hardly surprising. But they become more striking if one takes into account the independent property rights over land and the money capital which women bring to the ‘family’ farm on marriage, or invest in it during marriage. In this survey 50% of women had put money capital, and 15% had put land, into the conjugal farm while only a minority retained any personal control over these assets through a legal stake in the ‘family’ business. How these manifest inequalities persist and change, are legitimized and contested by women and men, is a crucial question for any explanation not just of the gender division of family labour, but of the resilience of family farming. Making sense of inequality: ideologies of wifehood As Burawoy has so convincingly argued, the labour process needs to be understood in terms of the specific combinations of coercion and consent that elicit the co-operation of those exploited by the relations and practices which define it (Burawoy, 1979, p. 30). Agricultural sociology remains largely silent on these issues. Little is known about the power relations involved in the family labour process and the ideologies which underlie them. Clearly the extent to which women are expected to participate, and the terms of their participation, as ‘wives’ responsible for domestic household labour, is not uniform or fixed. Different familial ideologies and constructions of ‘wifehood’ can be distinguished, for example, from this research relating to the extent to which commoditization has reshaped the relations and value systems of family enterprise (see Whatmore, 1990). However, in the limited space available here, attention is focused on common features of the discourses within the farming community through which gender divisions are given meaning, inequalities are legitimized and individual women negotiate their position on the farm and within the family. The familial gender division of labour is built upon, and serves to reinforce, a process by which women’s identity is bound up in ideologies of wifehood (and
Life Cycle or Patriarchy? motherhood) which naturalize gender inequalities. While domestic household labour is a central feature of all women’s working lives it is taken for granted and habitual, rather than an active, labour process; experienced, as one women put it, as ‘an on-going chore . . . like washing your face’. Women almost invariably recount the tasks performed using the third person, in passive rather than active tenses, thereby obscuring their active engagement in this labour circuit such that the work involved appears to perform itself, or to just happen. Experientially it becomes a facet of everyday existence that is part of being a woman rather than an identifiable job of work. This naturalization of women’s responsibility for domestic work is central to the ideological process of legitimation in which lived experience presents what is socially produced as natural and beyond human control. All the women in the detailed case studies I undertook expressed a ‘hatred’ for domestic work, particularly housework and laundry. None the less they accepted responsibility for it as ‘a fact of life’ or ‘the natural order of things’. Although conflicts frequently arose between these ‘duties’ and other labour demands (and their own aspirations), such conflicts were largely ‘resolved’ by women without challenging the consensus which establishes their social identity as ‘good wives and mothers’. However, this consensus does break down and is challenged, particularly in circumstances where more domesticated ideologies of wifehood pertain, notably in the more commoditized farms, where women are alienated from any distinctive farming identity or status. One woman who had succeeded in increasing her involvement in the farm business found that the restructuring of the division of family labour was all one way. ‘I think that to John (husband) children and the house are the woman’s job and that’s it, even though I’m doing his job as well. I tend to find that he doesn’t really understand so he gets cross and I just get fed up . . he doesn’t shout but he seems to think that it is unreasonable for me to discuss it.’ In other words, where an established gender regime is challenged, coercion becomes a visible dimension of the power relations structuring the familial gender division of labour and women’s social identity as farm wives. This involves not just husbands but inlaws, for in such circumstances the continuity of the farm as family property, as well as the emotional and economic bonds of marriage, are at stake.
75
constructed and contested in the labour practices of family farms such that women as well as men are involved in the process of legitimizing patriarchal labour relations. The implication is not that women are somehow ‘duped’ into acquiescing in their own subordination but that the relationship between the ideas and meanings constructed through subjective experience of the labour process, and the ways in which these ideas and meanings inform labour practices themselves, are considerably more complex than traditional notions of ‘false consciousness’ or ‘role-adoption’ allow (Weedon, 1987).
Conclusions
A case has been made for incorporating a theory of patriarchal gender relations into political economy analyses of family farming. From this perspective the category ‘family labour’ can be seen to be organized around the conjugal household and patrilineal kinship practices and it is this patriarchal regime, rather than life cycle variations in women’s domestic responsibilities, which structures the pattern of the gender division labour in family farming. These labour relations, I have argued, are accommodated and contested through a wide range of practices beyond the labour process itself, such as sexuality, emotional ties and physical power. At the same time, the labour process is important as an active constituent in the making and remaking of gender identities and relations. The gender division of labour then, poses more challenging questions for the sociology and political economy of agriculture than is suggested by its traditional treatment as an empirical exercise in describing the allocation of tasks. Most importantly, it challenges the unitary concepts of simple commodity production and family farming central to orthodox Marxist and non-Marxist analysis. How can household-based production meaningfully be treated as a ‘unity of property and labour’ in the face of the systematic gender inequalities manifest in the labour relations of these forms of production? Nor is this challenge merely a theoretical issue. The preoccupation with the impact of commoditization on the future of family farming overlooks the potential significance of challenges from within by women, particularly younger women, for whom the gender regime of family farming is becoming increasingly archaic and insupportable in the light of developments on the wider social canvas of gender relations. References
The interpretation of ideology arising from this analysis is of a process in which ideas and meanings about appropriate gender divisions and identities are
Bouquet, books,
M. (1986) Family, Servanfs and Visitors. GeoNorwich.
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Sarah
Burawoy, M. (1979) Manufacturing Consent. Chicago University Press, Chicago. Buttel, F., Larson, 0. and Gillespie, G. (1990) The Sociology of Agriculture. Greenwood Press, Westport, Connecticut. Cockburn, C. (1986) The relations of technology. What implications for theories of sex and class? In Gender and Stratification, Crompton, R. and Mann, M. (eds), pp. 74-85. Polity Press, Cambridge. Connell, R. (1987) Gender and Power. Polity Press, Cambridge. Friedmann, H. (1978) World market, state and family farm: social bases of household production in the era of wage Iabour. Comparative Studies in Society and History 20, 545-586. Friedmann, H. (1986) Property and patriarchy: a reply to Goodman and Redclift. Sociologia Ruralis 26, 186-193. Gasson, R. (1989) Farm work by farmer’s wives. Farm Business Unit Occasional Paper No. 15, Wye College, Ashford, Kent, U.K. Gasson, R., Crow, G., Errington, A., Hutson, J., Marsden, T. and Winter, M. (1988) The farm as a family business. Journal of Agricultural Economics 39, l-41. Ghorayshi, P. (1989) The indispensable nature of wives’ work for the farm family enterprise. Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 16, 571-595. Haney, W.G. and Knowles, J. (eds) (1988) Women and Farming. Changing Roles, Changing Structures. Westview Press, Boulder, Colorado. Hirschon, R. (ed.) (1984) Women and Property, Women as Property. Croom Helm, London. Knorr-Cetina, K. and Cicourel, A.V. (eds) (1981) Advances in Social Theory and Methodology: Towards an Integration of Micro and Macro Sociologies. RKP, London. Lagrave, R., Albert, C., Berlan, M., Caniou, J. and Perrot, M. (1987) Celles de la Terre. Agricultrice:
Whatmore L’invention Politique d’un Metier. Editions de I’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. Lem, W. (1988) Household production and reproduction in rural Languedoc. Social relations of petty commodity production in Murviel-les-beziers. Journal of Peasant Studies 15, 500-530. Long, N., Ploeg, J. van der, Curtin, C. and Box, L. (1986) The commoditisation debate. Labour process, strategy and social network. Dept. of Rural Sociology, paper No. 17. Wageningen, The Netherlands, Mackintosh, M. (1981) Gender and economics: the sexual division of labour and the subordination of women. In Of Marriage and the Market, Young, K., Wolkowitz, C. and McCullagh, R. (eds), pp. 3-17. RKP, London. Pateman, C. (1988) The Sexual Contract. Polity Press, Cambridge. Reimer, B. (1986) Women as farm labour. Rural Sociology 51, 143-155. Sachs, C. (1983) Invisible Farmers, Women’s Work in Agricultural Production. Rhinehart Allenheld, Totowa, New Jersey. Scott, A.M. (1986) Towards a rethinking of petty commodity production. Social Analysis 20, 93-105. Watts, M. (1989) The agrarian crisis in Africa. Progress in Human Geography 13, l-41. Weedon, C. (1987) Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory. Basil Blackwell, Oxford. Whatmore, S. (1990) Farming Women: Gender, Work and Family Enterprise. Macmillan, London. Whatmore, S., Munton, R., Marsden, T. and Little, J. (1987) Towards a typology of farm businesses in contemporary British agriculture. Sociologia Ruralis 27, 21-37. Whitehead, A. (1984) Men and women, kinship and property: some general issues. In Women and Property, Women as Property, Hirschon, R. (ed.), pp. 176-210. Croom Helm, London.
0743-0167/91$3.00 Pergamon
1991
+ 0.ot-l Press plc
Life Cycle or Patriarchy? Gender Divisions in Family Farming Sarah Whatmore Department
of Geography,
University
of Bristol,
U.K.
Abstract -
The paper critically examines traditional ‘explanations’ of the gender division of labour on the family farm as a function of the life cycle - which poses a relationship between women’s domestic household labour ‘compensatory’ responsibilities and their participation in other areas of work on and off the farm. It seeks to demonstrate, at a theoretical and empirical level, the inadequacy of this explanatory framework for the analysis of the position of women as ‘farm wives’ in ‘family farming’. The paper draws on survey and ethnographic evidence from two study areas in southern England. It argues that to understand the position of women as farm wives requires a theory of gender relations as power relations within which ideologies of appropriate gender roles are shaped and reshaped in the everyday work practices of the family farm.
From a number of quite disparate research perspectives, the gender division of labour has assumed a growing importance over the last decade in research into the sociology of agriculture in advanced industrial countries. This is reflected in a flourishing literature within mainstream rural sociology on the role of women in the farm labour process (e.g. Lagrave et al., 1987; Haney and Knowles, 1988; Gasson, 1989). It is also reflected in the developing focus within agrarian political economy on the internal relations of family farming, particularly the nature of the family labour process (e.g. Sachs, 1983; Scott, 1986; Friedmann, 1986). These developments represent progressive directions for research in the light of a long-standing contradiction in the literature which, while placing theoretical stress upon the distinctiveness of ‘the family’ as a pivotal feature of the sociology and political economy of modern farming, has focused almost exclusively on individual ‘farmers’ and ‘businesses’ as its unit of empirical analysis.
themes are thus illuminated. The first is that a narrow concept of labour is widely adopted, which only comprehends labour contributing to commercial agricultural production, sometimes extended to valorized work by family members on, or off, the farm. The host of activities necessary to the reproduction of family labour on a daily and generational basis is largely excluded (however, see Reimer, 1986; Ghorayshi, 1989). Secondly, the family itself has been poorly theorized, with that configuration of household and kinship relations associated with the nuclear family being taken as the ‘normal’ or even the ‘natural’ form. Treating the family/household as an organic unit of analysis obscures the very different and unequal positions of individual members which build upon, and are reinforced by, the gender division of labour (Lem, 1988). Thirdly, both these problems are underlain by a general failure to incorporate a theory of gender relations, as contested power relations between men and women, into explanations of how the family is structured and the family labour process sustained and transformed.
Despite their very different problematics, these two research developments can be usefully related. A focus on women, as the point of entry into the larger question of the nature of the family labour process, highlights deficiencies shared by Marxist and nonMarxist treatments of the division of labour on the farm and associated with their uncritical use of the composite concept of ‘family labour’. Three main
While biological ‘explanations’ of gender divisions of labour have been effectively discredited, both mainstream and Marxist accounts rely heavily on the more innocent concept of ‘family life cycle’ and associated ‘gender roles’. For example, even the most sophisticated analyses in the mainstream literature (e.g. Bouquet, 1986; Gasson et al., 1988) tend to ascribe ‘asymmetries’ in the gender division of
Introduction
71
72
Sarah Whatmore
labour to stage in the family life cycle, arguing that women’s role varies in relation to household structure and age of children. In Marxist analysis, the life cycle concept has been taken up in attempts to establish the self-sufficiency of family labour in domestic forms of commodity production by taking account of its variability during the family life cycle (Friedmann, 1978). The difficulty with such accounts is that they fail to explain the diversity and variation of gender divisions of labour in different times and places and, more particularly, they leave unaddressed the central issue of why it is women as opposed to men who undertake subsistence and ‘reproductive’ work over a wide range of contexts. Instead, this chain of reasoning naturalizes the division of labour in the family household by taking women’s responsibility for this work as given and then offering it as an explanation for the different pattern of involvement in agricultural or off-farm work between men and women. Such explanations are tautologous and sexist. They tell us little about the social relations through which labour is expropriated and resources distributed within the family household, and even less about the material practices and ideologies through which women’s gender identity and labour activity as ‘farm wives’ is constructed. In this paper I shall argue that a meaningful political economy of agriculture must incorporate an analysis of gender, centred on a theory of patriarchal gender relations. The approach outlined here draws on research undertaken in two contrasting areas in southern England, west Dorset and the Metropolitan Green Belt around London. The account presented is necessarily highly selective and interested readers are referred to a fuller version of the research published under the title ‘Farming Women’ (Whatmore, 1990). The first section of the paper sketches some key elements towards an alternative analysis of the family labour process which accords gender divisions theoretical, as well as empirical, significance. The second section uses survey and ethnographic material to illustrate selected features of women’s position in the family labour process focusing on the ideologies which legitimize their subordinate status as wives. Rethinking
the family labour process
The theoretical problems in orthodox political economy analyses of family farming outlined above raise a number of more fundamental questions about the conception of social process and change within structural Marxism, the dominant approach in the sociology of agriculture since the 1970s (Butte1 et al.,
1990). The approach put forward here differs from this framework in two crucial respects, informed by post-structuralist and feminist critiques developing largely outside the agrarian literature. The first difference is that the agricultural restructuring process is not conceived of as a mechanistic outcome of the structural logic of capitalism in which family farms are inexorably tied into the wider market economy and ultimately themselves commoditized. Rather, the process of commoditization is taken to be rooted in human agency, crediting an active role to ‘peasants, farmers and small-scale entrepreneurs in the process of commoditization itself’ (Long et al., 1986, p. 2). Such an approach demands that the analysis of the farm labour process incorporates the interpretative processes of human agency, by which actors make sense of their life-worlds, as these influence and are themselves influenced by wider structural relations (Burawoy, 1979). A dialectical relationship is suggested between social structures and actions, through the medium of social practice, as the dynamic of social change (Knorr-Cetina and Cicourel, 1981). Arguments along these lines have begun to develop in agrarian political economy, most notably in the context of developing societies (e.g. Long et al., 1986; Watts, 1989). Orthodox political economy is challenged in another sense also, by extending the compass of social relations beyond those of class and capital accumulation to recognize the causal powers of other social structures notably, in this context, gender and human reproduction. Gender is taken to be a general category of social relations, like class or ‘race’, which can take a variety of specific forms. Patriarchal gender relations are theorized as one such form which empowers men and subordinates women, and is contested through a range of social institutions and practices (Cockburn, 1986). Following Connell (1987), a distinction is made between gender order, as the macro-level historically structured power relations between men and women, and gender regime as the micro-level stage of gender politics played out through the practices of particular households, and so on. Within this framework the gender regimes of family farming can be examined as particular points in a wider matrix of patriarchal gender relations. Such a conceptual framework leads to a fresh understanding of family farming, as a varying form of production centred on the intersection of family household and agricultural enterprise and characterized by the complex interweaving of commodity and gender relations. In particular, it provides a means of examining the commoditization of family farming
Life Cycle or Patriarchy’? as a highly differentiated process modifying, and being modified by, household and kinship relations. Variations in gender divisions and ideologies structuring the family labour process can be analysed in relation to different levels of commoditization. Extending the relational typology of farms developed elsewhere (see Whatmore et al., 1987), three types of family farm can be identified - family labour farms, transitional family farms and family business farms. These types reflect a shift from labour to property as the organizing principle of household-based forms of production as their level of commoditization, or market integration, increases. The concept of the famify farm can be unpicked and traced to specific combinations of household and kinship relations. In contemporary family farming in many advanced industrial countries the dominant form is the conjugal household unit, in which the family labour process is centred on a married couple. Marriage represents a particular variant of what Pateman (1988) has termed the ‘sexual contract’, through which the identity and rights of individual citizenship in modern societies are gendered; constituting women as less than full individuals, their identity and rights being mediated by their relationship to men. The conjugal household is characterized by potential changes in its composition over time with the addition and departure of children and, less commonly, with the temporary addition of extended kin. It is situated within a wider kinship network in which patrilineage structures the practices through which the ownership of property is vested in the hands of men and reproduced generationally along the lines of male filiation (Whitehead, 1984). Together these household and kinship relations define the patriarchal gender regime of the family farm. The political economy of the family farm begins to look radically different from this perspective. The labour process in particular assumes new contours, encompassing not just activities producing agricultural commodities for the market, but all those which contribute towards sustaining the family household and farm enterprise on the land. In these terms the farm labour process can be taken (for analytical purposes) to comprise potentially four iabour circuits; agricultural labour, domestic household labour (DHL), non-agricultural farm labour and off-farm labour. The first two of these represent the principal labour circuits characteristic of farming, and the latter two as secondary. But this in itself is currently undergoing change with the growth of part-time farming. Gender
divisions in the farm labour process,
thus
73
defined, become a concern not just with the allocation of tasks but with the different relations under which men’s and women’s labour is carried out in terms of property rights over the means of production and control over the products of family labour (Mackintosh, 1981). Moreover, these divisions of labour become not the end-point for an analysis of gender relations in family farming, but force us to address the ways in which the women and men involved make sense of, and live with, the inequalities manifested in them. It is these broader horizons that the next section seeks to illustrate. The family at work
The gender division of labour described here for two study areas in southern England reinforces and elaborates patterns being established from research in many parts of the advanced industrial world. Rather than present another set of survey results, my intention is to highlight some key features of the gender division of family labour and property interpreted through the framework outlined above before considering the ideologies of ‘wifehood’ which inform women’s own experience of these divisions and legitimize their position in the political economy of the family farm. Gendered
labour power
Traditionally it has been argued that women’s agricultural labour participation is a function of their domestic labour activities, particularly childcare. One of the most consistent characteristics of the gender division of the farm labour process is undoubtedly women’s sole, or primary, responsibility for domestic household labour across all age groups, farm types and irrespective of the extent of their involvement in other labour circuits. All farm women surveyed in this research (81) carried out all the main domestic tasks, including childcare (in the 38% of households with children), with very limited contributions from other family/household members. But one-third of these households did employ paid domestic ‘help’; a means, it might be anticipated from traditional accounts, to ‘liberate’ women from these tasks and enable them to participate more fully in agricultural or other labour circuits. But if we look more closely at how domestic labour responsibilities relate to women’s involvement in other farm labour circuits, in this instance agricultural labour, traditional accounts are undermined and a rather different interpretation suggested. Women emerge from this survey (and others, e.g. Gasson, 1989) as playing a key administrative role
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on the farm, combining the job descriptions of accountant and public secretary, receptionist, relations officer. Most women do the ‘dogsbody’ tasks of dealing with enquiries and running errands, over three-quarters of them on a regular basis, and two-thirds do the book-keeping. In terms of manual labour, 70% are involved, one-third on a regular basis. For all types of agricultural work a higher number and proportion of women with childcare responsibilities are involved in agricultural labour than those without. Conversely, in terms of childcare and paid domestic help (the only two real ‘variables’ as far as women’s domestic household labour is concerned) only five women with childcare responsibilities do not contribute to manual agricultural labour, of whom four also have paid domestic help. Women’s participation in agricultural work is more strongly related, not to their domestic responsibilities but to the degree of commoditization of the relations of production and reproduction of the family farm. For example, a higher proportion of women in family labour farms are involved in manual labour on a regular basis than women in family business farms, while those in family business farms are the most likely to have paid domestic help. Domestic household labour has a much more complex empirical place in the gender division of labour than traditionally assumed. Whatever else women do on the farm it is clearly in addition to, rather than instead of, their domestic tasks and responsibilities. Moreover, whatever the level of women’s other labour activities, there is little variation in the extent to which domestic household labour is shared with husbands and other family members. By the same token, men’s (non)-participation in the domestic labour circuit is much less variable in relation to their other labour activities compared to the pattern of women’s work on the farm. These features of the division of labour constitute part of a larger pattern of gender inequality to be explained rather than an explanation in themselves, and lead us to consider the wider structure of family labour relations. Women participate in the farm labour process under conspicuously different relations and conditions from those of their husbands and sons. Most notably, women’s rights over property reflect, and reinforce, social constraints on their identity as individuals arising from patriarchal practices and ideologies which subsume women as dependants of their husbands (Hirschon, 1984). Amongst the women surveyed here, their legal or financial interest in farmland is limited in extent, with only onequarter holding any form of interest. For farm capital women’s interest is more widespread (63%). This reflects the material and symbolic significance
of land in the social relations of farming and, in particular, the leaverage which it has over other forms of capital. In the vast majority of cases where women do have property rights in land or capital, these take the form of a minority stake held in joint ownership with their husbands. It is not in other words an individual right, but conditional upon their conjugal status. When one considers that access to farmland and capital is structured primarily by patrilineal inheritance these marked inequalities are hardly surprising. But they become more striking if one takes into account the independent property rights over land and the money capital which women bring to the ‘family’ farm on marriage, or invest in it during marriage. In this survey 50% of women had put money capital, and 15% had put land, into the conjugal farm while only a minority retained any personal control over these assets through a legal stake in the ‘family’ business. How these manifest inequalities persist and change, are legitimized and contested by women and men, is a crucial question for any explanation not just of the gender division of family labour, but of the resilience of family farming. Making sense of inequality: ideologies of wifehood As Burawoy has so convincingly argued, the labour process needs to be understood in terms of the specific combinations of coercion and consent that elicit the co-operation of those exploited by the relations and practices which define it (Burawoy, 1979, p. 30). Agricultural sociology remains largely silent on these issues. Little is known about the power relations involved in the family labour process and the ideologies which underlie them. Clearly the extent to which women are expected to participate, and the terms of their participation, as ‘wives’ responsible for domestic household labour, is not uniform or fixed. Different familial ideologies and constructions of ‘wifehood’ can be distinguished, for example, from this research relating to the extent to which commoditization has reshaped the relations and value systems of family enterprise (see Whatmore, 1990). However, in the limited space available here, attention is focused on common features of the discourses within the farming community through which gender divisions are given meaning, inequalities are legitimized and individual women negotiate their position on the farm and within the family. The familial gender division of labour is built upon, and serves to reinforce, a process by which women’s identity is bound up in ideologies of wifehood (and
Life Cycle or Patriarchy? motherhood) which naturalize gender inequalities. While domestic household labour is a central feature of all women’s working lives it is taken for granted and habitual, rather than an active, labour process; experienced, as one women put it, as ‘an on-going chore . . . like washing your face’. Women almost invariably recount the tasks performed using the third person, in passive rather than active tenses, thereby obscuring their active engagement in this labour circuit such that the work involved appears to perform itself, or to just happen. Experientially it becomes a facet of everyday existence that is part of being a woman rather than an identifiable job of work. This naturalization of women’s responsibility for domestic work is central to the ideological process of legitimation in which lived experience presents what is socially produced as natural and beyond human control. All the women in the detailed case studies I undertook expressed a ‘hatred’ for domestic work, particularly housework and laundry. None the less they accepted responsibility for it as ‘a fact of life’ or ‘the natural order of things’. Although conflicts frequently arose between these ‘duties’ and other labour demands (and their own aspirations), such conflicts were largely ‘resolved’ by women without challenging the consensus which establishes their social identity as ‘good wives and mothers’. However, this consensus does break down and is challenged, particularly in circumstances where more domesticated ideologies of wifehood pertain, notably in the more commoditized farms, where women are alienated from any distinctive farming identity or status. One woman who had succeeded in increasing her involvement in the farm business found that the restructuring of the division of family labour was all one way. ‘I think that to John (husband) children and the house are the woman’s job and that’s it, even though I’m doing his job as well. I tend to find that he doesn’t really understand so he gets cross and I just get fed up . . he doesn’t shout but he seems to think that it is unreasonable for me to discuss it.’ In other words, where an established gender regime is challenged, coercion becomes a visible dimension of the power relations structuring the familial gender division of labour and women’s social identity as farm wives. This involves not just husbands but inlaws, for in such circumstances the continuity of the farm as family property, as well as the emotional and economic bonds of marriage, are at stake.
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constructed and contested in the labour practices of family farms such that women as well as men are involved in the process of legitimizing patriarchal labour relations. The implication is not that women are somehow ‘duped’ into acquiescing in their own subordination but that the relationship between the ideas and meanings constructed through subjective experience of the labour process, and the ways in which these ideas and meanings inform labour practices themselves, are considerably more complex than traditional notions of ‘false consciousness’ or ‘role-adoption’ allow (Weedon, 1987).
Conclusions
A case has been made for incorporating a theory of patriarchal gender relations into political economy analyses of family farming. From this perspective the category ‘family labour’ can be seen to be organized around the conjugal household and patrilineal kinship practices and it is this patriarchal regime, rather than life cycle variations in women’s domestic responsibilities, which structures the pattern of the gender division labour in family farming. These labour relations, I have argued, are accommodated and contested through a wide range of practices beyond the labour process itself, such as sexuality, emotional ties and physical power. At the same time, the labour process is important as an active constituent in the making and remaking of gender identities and relations. The gender division of labour then, poses more challenging questions for the sociology and political economy of agriculture than is suggested by its traditional treatment as an empirical exercise in describing the allocation of tasks. Most importantly, it challenges the unitary concepts of simple commodity production and family farming central to orthodox Marxist and non-Marxist analysis. How can household-based production meaningfully be treated as a ‘unity of property and labour’ in the face of the systematic gender inequalities manifest in the labour relations of these forms of production? Nor is this challenge merely a theoretical issue. The preoccupation with the impact of commoditization on the future of family farming overlooks the potential significance of challenges from within by women, particularly younger women, for whom the gender regime of family farming is becoming increasingly archaic and insupportable in the light of developments on the wider social canvas of gender relations. References
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