With These Hands: Women Working on the Land (Women's Lives, Women's Work) - Softcover

Jensen, Joan M.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0912670711 ISBN 13: 9780912670713

Publisher: Talman Co

Synopsis

Documents the history of American women working in agriculture and describes their problems, attitudes, characteristics, and cultural heritage

About this title

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

By 1860, eastern farm families had already come to depend on butter for a cash income to supplement income from grain surplus. As spinning and weaving had earlier been their prime household industry, making butter now became the chief occupation of farm women and girls. With the increasing urban consumer demand in the nineteenth century, women on small farms developed a decentralized butter industry, in which they carried surplus butter to country stores to exchange for necessities-just as, in an earlier era, they had carried yards of homespun cloth, until it was replaced by industrial textiles. As each frontier became settled in the West, more women turned to buttermaking as a way of supplementing the farm income.

Review

Long before women stepped foot into the kitchen, they were out in the fields. Tracing back to the 15th century, With These Hands shows how women were the agricultural force who cultivated the land, nurtured their families and controlled a portion of the agri-community. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, historians have neglected to research and document this aspect of history, since it tends to reflect on the lives of poor and minority women. Revealing a relatively unknown perspective on agriculture, these writings and period photos bring to light the working lives of women. Illuminated are the ways in which they gained energy and power from those experiences. -- From The WomanSource Catalog & Review: Tools for Connecting the Community for Women; review by SH

Edition details

• Publisher: Talman Co
• ISBN 10: 0912670711
• ISBN 13: 9780912670713
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English