Yeomen With No Men: Female Farmers Eschewing Marriage in California, 1870-1900

In the late nineteenth century, gender roles created a problem for the growing number of women who ran specialty crop farms in California. Many of them were white, educated women who became farmers after the loss of a male breadwinner. To do this, they had to contend with the separate spheres ideology that said a woman’s place was in the home, and the public assumption that a woman needed a husband or father to operate a farm. 

I argue that in California, some of the most successful female farmers were women using farm ownership to eschew attaching themselves to a male breadwinner, either remaining unmarried or avoiding remarriage after the death or divorce of a husband. Furthermore, California boosterism provided an public means for these women to expand the boundaries of the domestic sphere. In newspapers, pamphlets, and memoirs, female farmers and their offspring depicted women’s farms as embodying white middle class values of domesticity, morality, and beauty that boosters attributed to California’s unique brand of agriculture. Meanwhile, female farmers maintained control over their economic lives: Single women like Minnie Austin created group farming ventures as a means to leave teaching jobs; widows like Georgie McBride invested in farms to support their children; and divorced women like Elise Buckingham maintained community respectability through profitable fruit ventures. In California, a farm women who eschewed marriage reimagined herself as a different kind of yeoman farmer—a yeoman without a man.