1. How did you get interested in farm women’s political
activism?
Looking back, it was a pretty unlikely topic for me. I
actually grew up in town and my last relatives to live on farms were my
great-grandmothers—both of whom left in the 1920s. My first exposure to the
topic was as a college senior, when I interviewed ten farm women about their
experiences during the Second World War. Those women, with a really strong
self-identification as workers, inspired me to entirely rethink what I had
learned about feminism in women’s history courses. They were more interesting
to me than urban wage-earning women because on a farm you negotiate work roles
and economic resources with a husband or other family members, rather than a
boss. The social and family dynamics involved are still incredibly fascinating
to me.
2. Why focus on the decades after 1945?
When I first started this research, there was a wonderful
literature on activism before 1945 as well as activism during the farm crisis
of the 1980s. I was curious to know what happened between those years. Scholars
of the farm crisis asserted that women’s activism was something new, but I had
this hunch that it was actually quite old. I wanted to know what happened as
the dramatic changes related to mechanization were actually unfolding, and how
those changes affected farm women and their perceptions of appropriate roles on
the farm.
3. You argue that the Iowa farm women who participated in the Farm Bureau, the Farmers Union, the National Farm Organization, and the Porkettes in the 1950s and 1960s were feminists, even though they probably wouldn’t have called themselves that. Why do you think this is so?
In my line of work, as an academic who studies and teaches about gender issues, saying “I am a feminist” is an asset that enhances my credibility in scholarly circles. But this is not true everywhere, and even in 2013 identifying as a feminist carries certain risks. Depending on the crowd, you risk being ostracized as a disruptive, anti-male, anti-family radical. For women working to better conditions in the countryside, feminism wasn’t the primary issue. They saw improving women’s lives as one part of a much larger whole, so they drew from and developed feminist strategies, but standing up and publicly proclaiming one’s feminism was not a priority. This is not to say the women in these organizations wanted to identify but were too fearful. It simply wasn’t rhetorically necessary for them or their success as a group.
