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Individualism, efficiency, and domesticity: Ideological aspects of the exploitation of farm families and farm women

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Abstract

A complex conjuncture of ideological constructions obscured and rationalized the systematic exploitation of farm women. First, farming and homemaking, to which people cling in an attempt to avert the alienation of wage labor, provide a basis for evaluating one's labor in terms that, ironically, makes them vulnerable to super-exploitation. Second, agrarian ideologies, with their strongly patriarchal bias, did not allow women to understand themselves as public actors. Modernizing elite ideologies, specifically the equation of entrepreneurial individualism and efficiency with “progress” and affluence, and the “cult of domesticity” with its redefinition of men's and women's roles, promised women greater equality within the family; however, these normative codes simultaneously opened the farm and home to greater dependence on capitalist markets. The ideology of entrepreneurial individualism also provided templates through which farm men and women (mis)understood their relative poverty as being the result of private, individual choices. In addition, virtually all media assumed a sector differentiated only by commodity, rendering size, class, or other distinctions invisible. Finally, the ideology of separate spheres, as it developed in the nineteenth century, created a segmented and discriminatory labor market for women. The period focused on, the late 1940s and the 1950s, was crucial in establishing the terms of the post-War order.

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  1. Jane Adams
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Jane Adams is Associate Professor of Anthropology and of History at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. Her work has focused on class, gender, and policy dimensions of historical changes in rural society. She has recently authoredThe Transformation of Rural Life: Southern Illinois 1890–1990 and edited"All Anybody Wanted of Me Was to Work": The Memoirs of Edith Bradley Rendleman. She is also active in promoting sustainable agriculture, as President and Board Member of the public interest group Illinois Stewardship Alliance.

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Adams, J. Individualism, efficiency, and domesticity: Ideological aspects of the exploitation of farm families and farm women. Agric Hum Values 12, 2–17 (1995). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02218564

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