Women and Small Farm Revival: The Division of Labor and Decision-Making on Maine's Organic Farms

Abstract

Reacting to the intensified contradictions of the capitalist food system, many agrarian activists seek to revitalize family labor farms, to make agriculture ecologically sustainable, to renew the social and economic life of rural communities, and to create an unalienated labor process. While the agrarian movement is fragmented along lines of ideology, issue priorities and tactics, it is fundamentally in the populist tradition. This problematic of neo-populism, with its contradictory progressive and petty bourgeois tendencies, provides the context for an analysis of production relations on Maine's organic farms. The division of labor and decision-making authority on these farms is shown to conform closely to the age-old pattern of male dominance. Evidence from a survey of small commercial organic farms suggests that most women face a "double," and some a "triple burden" of farm, household and off-farm labor; that their work is more proletarian than that of males; and that their contributions to the family's means of subsistence and capital accumulation are not systematically correlated with participation in farm decisions. These preliminary findings are not sufficient to argue that small organic farms are patriarchal or that women (and children and wage workers) are exploited. But that thesis is consistent with the data, suggesting that farms in the new agrarian movement are not likely to be a force for transformation of the relations of dominance and subordination that characterize both capitalism and petty commodity production.