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Women's Work in Agriculture: Divergent Trends in England and America, 1800 to 1930

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Sally McMurry
Sally McMurry
Affiliation:
Pennsylvania State University
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Extract

English cheeses—Cheddar, Gloucester single or double, Cheshire, Stilton, and others—are familiar throughout the Anglo-American world, whether consumed after dinner in English homes or as key ingredients of American tex-mex or vegetarian cuisine. These famous cheeses originated long ago but in most cases reached a zenith in quantity and in reputation during the last century. Little is known about the history of English cheese dairying, despite its fame and its importance to agriculture past and present. Its economic background has received only slight attention, and its social history is almost entirely unexplored; yet clearly the social structure of English cheese dairying has historically exerted a major influence on the industry, because it traditionally depended upon a distinctive sexual division of labor. The history of women's work in English cheese dairying has implications for a broader historiographical question: When and why did women gradually disappear from many kinds of agricultural work in Western societies?

Type
The Social Ground of Modern Agriculture
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 34 , Issue 2 , April 1992 , pp. 248 - 270
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1992

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34 Harding Family Papers, typescript summary of a dairy farmers' meeting in Chester; Mercer, “Two Centuries,” Walter Baber, transcribed interview no. 109, Somerset Rural Life Museum. Donajgrodzki, A.P., in “Twentieth Century Rural England, A Case for Peasant Studies,” Journal of Peasant Studies, 16 (04 1989), 425–43,CrossRefGoogle Scholar argues that rural residents of Yorkshire exhibited cultural characteristics of peasants, some of which are similar to those described here.

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39 British Dairy Institute Examination Papers, Reading University Archives; Jeffrey Adams, transcribed interview no. 122, and Mrs. Duckett, interview no. 13, Somerset Rural Life Museum.

40 The collaboration of Lloyd and Cannon is described in Cheke, Story of Cheesemaking, 215, 192–5. See also Margaret Knowles, “Use of the Acidometer in Cheese-Making,” JBDFA, 15 (1900), 37–40.Google Scholar

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42 Taylor, “English Dairy Farming,” 146–53; Smith, B.L. and Whitby, H., “Milk Marketing Before and After Organization” (University of Oxford Agricultural Economics Institute, 1937);Google ScholarMacintosh, James, “Dairy Farming and Dairy Work,” JRASE, 99 (1938), 250–79;Google ScholarDockery, M.A., “Developments in the Farmhouse Cheese-making Industry in England and Wales,” Geography, 68 (1983), 263–5.Google Scholar Marjorie Cohen's article, “Decline of Women in Canadian Dairying,” and also her book, Women's Work, Markets, and Economic Development in Nineteenth-Century Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988),Google Scholar as well as Lena Sommestad's unpublished paper, “From Dairymaids to Dairymen,” presented in 1990 at the Berkshire conference, have investigated women's work in dairying in Canada and Sweden, respectively. Both scholars find a decline in women's opportunities during the 1930s. Because no equivalent work exists for England, at this point it is not possible to know if the same thing happened there. However, women were displaced from butter dairying in Ireland in the early twentieth century. See Bourke, Joanna, “Dairywomen and Affectionate Wives: Women in the Irish Dairy Industry, 1890–1914,” Agricultural History Review, 38:Pt. 2 (1990), 149–65.Google Scholar

43 Angkarloo, “Women's Work,” 114–6.

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