This book features the voices and viewpoints of women born before World War I who lived on family farms in Nanticoke Valley, south-central New York. It explores the ways that families shared labor and the strategies of mutuality that rural women adopted to ensure they had a say in family decision-making. Sharing and exchanging work also linked neighboring households and knit the community together. The culture of cooperation that women espoused laid the basis for the formation of cooperatives that enabled these dairy farmers to contest the power of agribusiness and obtain better returns for th ... More

This book features the voices and viewpoints of women born before World War I who lived on family farms in Nanticoke Valley, south-central New York. It explores the ways that families shared labor and the strategies of mutuality that rural women adopted to ensure they had a say in family decision-making. Sharing and exchanging work also linked neighboring households and knit the community together. The culture of cooperation that women espoused laid the basis for the formation of cooperatives that enabled these dairy farmers to contest the power of agribusiness and obtain better returns for their labor. The book recounts this story and explores views about gender, labor, and power, which offered an alternative to the ideas that prevailed in American society. Most women saw “putting the barn before the house”—investing capital and labor in productive operations rather than spending money on consumer goods or devoting time to mere housework—as necessary for families who were determined to make a living on the land and, if possible, to pass on viable farms to the next generation. Some women preferred working outdoors to what seemed to them the thankless tasks of urban housewives, while others worked off the farm to support the family. Husbands and wives, as well as parents and children, debated what was best and negotiated over how to allocate their limited labor and capital and plan for an uncertain future. This book tells the story of an agricultural community in transition amid an industrializing age.