Same Church, Different Pew: Women and Intentional Catholic Farming in the Hudson River Valley

This paper examines the development of two Catholic farming initiatives in
the Hudson River Valley region of New York State and the women behind the farms.
Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker established Rose Hill Farm in Tivoli,
New York in 1964. Day sought to create a farming community that would
attract both workers and scholars. Thousands of people visited the farm to live
or simply "experience it" for the fourteen years it was in operation. Day's
work on the farm also propelled her toward farm-labor issues. Less than ten
years after Rose Hill closed, new Catholic activists emerged who also
focused on agriculture as a way to expose young people "to life that is real." One of these
activists was Sister Margo Morris, a member of the Society of the Sacred
Heart of Jesus, who with fellow teachers, began a farming curriculum at her
school in Greenwich, Connecticut in 1982. Morris eventually moved to the
Hudson Valley where she became a full-time farmer and teacher. She is currently
the president of Sprout Creek Farm in Poughkeepsie, New York. In this paper
I will compare these two Catholic farming programs, and examine the
motivations, contexts, organization, and outcomes of each. Ultimately,
Day’s farm was not able to maintain its goal of a worker-scholar community,
but Morris’s farm both diversified and thrived. Additionally, I will expore
how women’s leadership, mediated by the influence of Catholic teaching,
functioned on each farm. Day’s experiment, for instance, did not ostensibly
challenge traditional Catholic teaching on women's roles in society, while Morris’s
curriculum specifically focused on developing girls’ leadership and promoting
agricultural knowledge and environmental stewardship.