2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

This panel seeks to examine the role of women in agriculture throughout the long twentieth century in the continental United States. Panel chair, Stacy N. Roberts, takes us into the fields and festivals that marked the strawberry harvest season in rural North Carolina. Women were crucial to the success of this alterative crop in the Jim Crow South. The wages earned by both African American women and children mimicked the labor system seen elsewhere, particularly in the U.S. Southwest. Bethany Hopkins's "Yeoman With No Men" takes us to the Southwest and the fields of sunny California where women owned and operated farms for various reasons. However, given the gender norms of the late nineteenth century, women who chose to remain single and operate a farm had to co-opt the language of domesticity to make their businesses acceptable to society at large. Finally, Sally Dwyer-McNulty moves the panel forward into the mid-twentieth century and the Hudson River Valley to examine the farming experiments of Catholic women and the leadership roles they nutured. Taken together, these papers will unearth the varied experiences of women in agriculture and demonstrate how they often challenged contemporary social and cultural norms.