The focus on women and domestic responsibilities is necessary and relevant to broad considerations of gender and back-to-the-land migration, but it tells only a partial story. Many women do work the land and in multiple social and economic contexts – independently, with other women, as equal partners with men, and as farm owners, tenants or paid labourers.
Because this research is focused on homesteads run by individuals and families, the results inevitably reflect that bias and cannot offer accounts of, for example, intentional communities and women’s roles within them. Within the scope of this research, women’s contributions to the agricultural work on the case study farms should not be understated. It is somewhat more challenging, however, to decode their experiences from the general to the gendered, as it is rare that their accounts consciously invoke a discourse of difference when discussing agricultural practices.
Historical research by Schmitt (2006: 62) reveals that an ‘astonishing number of female researchers contributed to the advancement of alternative agricultural science in the first generation of biodynamic and organic agriculture’ in the early 20th Century. Schmitt traces correspondence between ‘early women pioneers’ to demonstrate how new networks of knowledge were developed simultaneously with, but separate from, the work of established agricultural science, a domain to which women’s entry was highly restricted. Across national borders and between independent associations, women from organisations such as the Soil Association in the UK (founded by Lady Eve Balfour) and the Biodynamic Association in Germany communicated their accrued understanding about ecologically balanced farming and gardening practices in a collaborative manner. Schmitt (2006: 65) writes that a ‘culture of correspondence opened up new possibilities for self-confirmation for women who had scarce other opportunities’ and also elicited an attention to care and nurture that permeated the communication.
Schmitt’s research, however, does not attempt to engage with why women were attracted to alternative agriculture practices beyond the issue of inaccessibility to formal science
institutions. Other scholars have been more concerned with the emotional and socio-political connections between women and alternative agriculture. Kneafsey et al. (2008: 41-49), for example, draw some inferences about gender and food production by viewing the activity in relation to an ‘ethic of care’. The authors derive their perspective from feminist studies that consider moral decision-making as an emotional process informed by feelings of empathy, responsibility and connectedness. Care in this context is a process of feeling and doing that makes the ‘concerns and needs of others (and not necessarily, or only, human others) a basis for action.’ (Kneafsey et al., 2008: 43). Care is used as a framework for analysing alternative agriculture and food networks by the authors because the expressed motivations of many participants in these systems are built around issues of ecological sustainability, economic justice (such as ‘fair trade’), animal welfare and conviviality. These represent critical, reflexive forms of consumption and production that consciously model themselves as an alternative to a reductionist, industrial system that regards food as mere biological fuel and its production a simple question of economic efficiency. The authors’ conception of care ‘implies reaching out to something other than self and implicitly suggests that it will lead to some kind of action – therein lies its political potential’ (Kneafsey et al., 2008: 42). Care certainly seems to be the dominant ethic in, for example, the back-to-the-land journal Country Women.
Produced throughout the 1970s by an exclusively female commune in California, Herring (2010:
85) describes the content of the magazine as offering ‘how-to guides for collecting shellfish, sowing fields, raising sheep, chopping wood, bartering, welfare rights, building hotbeds, and raising calves.’ Coupled with this practical information, however, were radical anti-capitalist and feminist critiques, content considered entirely compatible with the day-to-day practicalities of agrarian life.
The specifics of gender, emotion and alternative farming are approached by Bjorkhaug (2006), whose quantitative work on organic farmers in Norway aims to assess whether there is a
‘feminine principle’ in organic farming. She theorises this principle around gender studies that understand women to ‘hold holistic attitudes to the use of natural resources, encompassing the principle of conservation. Men on the other hand are more focused on economic issues such as output rather than on ecological systems’ (Bjorkhaug, 2006: 197). This proposed difference, closely related to an ethic of care, is tactically employed by Indian activist and scholar Vandana Shiva (1989), who argues explicitly for a distinction between reductionist, Western and patriarchal systems of resource exploitation and holistic, indigenous and feminine
management. ‘Nonviolent alternatives [to industrial farming] exist,’ writes Shiva (1989: 164)
‘but… a feminine and ecological perception [is needed] to see them, and feminine priorities of sustaining and enhancing life to sustain them.’
In her efforts to cast industrial agriculture as a patriarchal project, Shiva (1989) maintains that rural women have been replaced by machines – literally removed from the land and often directed toward low-paid wage labour, a disempowering process that erodes traditional knowledge and female agency. Independent, small-scale farming of the kind practiced by back-to-the-landers can therefore be seen as in turn replacing women from structured employment back onto the land. For some women this instils a sense of independence and self-reliance that serves as a source of personal empowerment:
I’m not saying we want to be totally self-sufficient, but I think it would good to have a sort of whole spectrum [of produce]. Make sure you’ve got something every month and plan it that way…. I love the fact that it’s free, the fact you just go to your land and get a bag of lovely tomatoes, and you can do what you want with it and you’re not having to worry about the cost, or whether it’s good quality. And it’s the control as well. You have complete and utter control. I suppose there’s certain variables – the weather and soil and things – but you’re not going into a shop and buying blind, effectively.
Tanya, Umbria
I know I have to take it slow because, unlike so many other careers, you have to take a big financial risk at the beginning, and there’s a lot more to make it successful and be able to support yourself. You don’t just contract yourself to a company like
regular workers… If it’s possible, I really like the lifestyle and I think it’s a really positive contribution… I just feel really comfortable in organic agriculture and I think it’s a really important thing for me to stay close to the source of the food that I eat, and be respectful to the environment in the way that you cultivate. So if I don’t end up having my own farm per se, I could see myself working on someone else’s or trying to do something to support organic agriculture.
Madeleine, WWOOFer, Emilia-Romagna
In a study of women in rural Cameroon, Hartwig (2005) writes that women relate the concept of power to themselves in their role as agricultural producers. Food production is an exercise of individual capability, knowledge and agency that gains women access to social and economic spheres where their abilities are recognised. By growing, selling and cooking food women act as ‘gatekeepers’ (cf. Belasco, 2008; Counihan, 1999) to sustenance for themselves and their dependants. Because this is a common role for women transnationally and cross-culturally (Whatmore, 1991; Belasco, 2008), its (dis)empowering potential is subject to the conditions of place. Shiva’s (1989) argument contends that women displaced from the land are deprived of space on which to project their abilities and knowledge, leaving them only their (cheap) labour to sell. This is true of all displaced peoples, of course, and the resultant loss of knowledge is not exclusive to women, nor necessarily to the displaced populations themselves (cf. Hunn, 1999; Mohanty, 2002). The ‘gatekeeper’ role of women in agriculture, however, provides an agency and a necessary value to their work which is repressed and re-placed by industrial food.
In its project of homogenising food production and consumption, traditionally female agricultural roles and domestic responsibilities (such as preparing family meals) have been increasingly outsourced to machinery or labourers and concentrated among large corporations.
Depending on context, working the land can occupy a contradictory role as a repressive disabler of women’s opportunities outside the home and as a facilitator of agency, allowing women’s knowledge and abilities to flourish. As Hartwig’s (2005: 157) research shows, rural women ‘certainly experience pride in what they do and their increasing skills and abilities, but also in the results of their agency, and they do it with a certain goal. It is not only the product as such that they are proud of. Above and beyond that, they act and produce, conscious that their production and produce form an important means of gaining access to other forms of power.’
The forms of power that Hartwig refers to will be culturally specific and context-dependent.
For back-to-the-landers in Italy, they are generally expressed as economic independence, control of food supplies and mastery over one’s time. I remain worried, however, as to whether a gendered interpretation of empowerment and ethics among back-to-the-landers might rely too heavily on an essentialist reading of ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ principles. Shiva (1989) mounts an interesting project in appropriating and subverting a long-standing justification for gender discrimination, one that sees women as more ‘natural’ then men – and consequently less rational, having not transcended an assumed nature / culture boundary so
completely. By reclaiming a ‘feminine perspective’ or ethic, ideas of care and nurture can be mobilised toward radical ends, recalling the claim of Kneafsey et al. (2008: 42) that the political potential of care lies in ‘reaching out to something other than self’. There is too little evidence from my own fieldwork, however, to support a view which sees care is a distinctly
‘feminine’ ethic so much as an ethic that has been feminised in particular contexts.