What work is real? Changing roles of farm and ranch wives in South-Eastern Ohio

Abstract

The paper discusses the changing tasks of farm and ranch wives during the period 1910–1985 in a county in the economically depressed region of south-eastern Ohio. Analysis is based on interviews conducted in the summer of 1985 with women aged from 27 to 86. Some task changes are due to technological innovation in the home and the farm and to broader industrial restructuring within the agricultural manufacturing system. Other changes follow from patriarchal rules and divisions of labour within the family. Technological innovation is implemented into a gendered and hierarchical division of labour. The discussion emphasizes the role perceptions of the women, noting the words and methods they themselves use to describe their role. What emerges is a picture of a role which tends to ‘absorb the slack and tension’ generated by the multiple changes within agriculture. The gendered division of labour continues, often altered and with manifest role confusion, but clearly gendered.