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

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0912670908 ISBN 13: 9780912670904

Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY, 1993

Synopsis

Although millions of women in the United States have worked on the land, With These Hands is the first history of their work. This collection begins with the agricultural work of Native American women, and traces to the eighties their experience as well as that of Euro-American, Hispanic, Black, and Asian women who have struggled to remain on the land. Rural women’s complex lives emerge through letters, songs, fiction, official documents, journal entries, poetry, and oral history, documenting their love of the land, consciousness of racism and sexism, views of politics, and activities aimed at change.

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

About this edition

• Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0912670908
• ISBN 13: 9780912670904
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320
• Editor: Jensen Joan M.