Gender work, politics : Southern Alberta farm women, 1905-1929
Date
1994
Authors
McManus, Sheila
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Abstract
The farm women of Canada's prairies have been remarkable in their absence from much of the historical record to date, and the critical tool of gender analysis has rarely been applied in the work which has been done. Utilizing women's diaries, the women's pages of farm newspapers, and the records of the United Farm Women of Alberta, this thesis provides a preliminary analysis of the construction and meaning of gender in the lives of Southern Alberta's farm women.
The white, English-speaking women who arrived in Alberta by the thousands in the first three decades of this century came from the United States, central and eastern Canada, and England. They transplanted to the region a construction of "woman's" gender which was in many ways very like that of the places they had left behind: respectable, white, English-speaking women were concerned with domesticity, and maintained close connections of friendship and aid with female relatives and neighbours. They were to be patient with the slow process of homesteading, and quietly persevere in the face of tragedies and setbacks.
This notion of "womanhood" was challenged and modified by the experiences of work shared by many farm women. The "usual" women's work of childrearing, housekeeping, cooking and cleaning remained largely unchanged, although the completion and management of these tasks required even more ingenuity and patience. What was different was the amount and kind of productive outside work performed by many of these women, from milking cows to the back-breaking labour of harvesting. Accommodating these new activities into a coherent gender construction was easy for some women, and less so for others. At the individual level this work was generally absorbed into a woman's construction of gender. At the broader social level of the farm journals, however, few women spoke of the outside labour they performed, and concentrated on articulating their strategies for overcoming the new challenges to the usual tasks. A gender construction which accommodated outdoor work might be coherent at an individual level, but it was much less comprehensible and acceptable to
broader societal norms.
When the official political voice of the United Farm Women of Alberta began articulating a broader construction of "womanhood," the flexibility and coherence of their construction met the rigidity of legal and political discourses which retained the more limited view of a woman's place. Where farm women's activities coincided with traditional gender roles, in areas such as health care, for example, they were generally very successful. Where they clashed, particularly during the struggle for married women's property rights, the women's political goals were not fully realized.
While the individual constructions of gender on the farm and the construction the U.F.W.A. tried to articulate at the political level were coherent, there was a fundamental gap in the articulation and reception. Women on the farm knew they worked inside and out, and knew the value of their contributions to the farm. Within the forum of the farm newspapers, however, socially accepted gender roles dictated that women's outside work take a lower profile. When it came time to advance their political aims, the more traditional roles firmly entrenched in the social, political and legal discourses of the day eventually prevailed.