"I Like to Hoe My Own Row": A Saskatchewan Farm Woman's Notions about Work and Womanhood during the Great Depression

Abstract

Kate Graves was my great-grandmother. She was sixty-three years old when economic depression and drought struck prairie Canada in 1929. Over the next twelve years she dispatched more than 150 letters to her fourth-eldest daughter, my grandmother Georgina Edith Graves Griffiths, from her rural community in the heart of the Saskatchewan Dust Bowl. The central theme of these letters was work. Despite her age, Kate spent seventeen-hour days churning butter, raising chickens, tending children, cooking, cleaning, canning, sewing, and gardening. Her letters reveal the vital contribution she made to her family and the family farm in the 1930s. But more importantly, they tell us how she saw her role and how her perceptions helped to shape her life and the lives of other female family members. My great-grandmother used her letters to impart her ideas about farm women’s proper work roles and to affirm her identity as a “good” farm woman. She tried to empower herself by policing gender boundaries in her family and working hard in the domestic sphere. The irony was that, rather than enhancing women’s power, Kate’s idealized notions helped to disempower her and future generations of western Canadian farm women. Seventy-five years later most prairie farm families—including my immediate family—would continue to value “men’s work” more than “women’s work” and to grant men more resources and power than women. Although literature on American farm women in the Great Depression abounds, we know very little about rural women in prairie Canada in the