Sharing and Dividing Farm Work

Abstract

This chapter examines how the increasing scale and degree of specialization of commercial farms and the trend toward combining off-farm labor with small-scale farming affected the gender division of labor on farms and power relations in farm families in the Nanticoke Valley during the early twentieth century. It shows that both of these economic shifts generated a new form of class stratification in rural society. To some degree, this divergence corresponded with ethnicity; many immigrant families who moved to run-down or abandoned farms kept some family members working in the factory while others labored on the land to build up the enterprise. The chapter first considers the complex gender and intergenerational relations within farm families and rural communities before discussing how fundamental changes in the rural economy took place. It also explores how farming families resisted capitalist transformation so successfully for so long and what roles rural women played in sustaining diversifed family farms as well as the community networks on which they relied.