Putting the Barn Before the House: Women and Family Farming in Early Twentieth-Century New York

by Grey Osterud

Overview

Putting the Barn Before the House features the voices and viewpoints of women born before World War I who lived on family farms in south-central New York. As she did in her previous book, Bonds of Community, for an earlier period in history, Grey Osterud explores the flexible and varied ways that families shared labor and highlights the strategies of mutuality that 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. Indeed, 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. Osterud recounts this story through the words of the women and men who lived it and carefully explores their 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 a necessary and rational course 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. Osterud tells the story of an agricultural community in transition amid an industrializing age with care and skill.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780801464645
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	03/27/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	296
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Grey Osterud, an independent scholar and editor, is the author of Bonds of Community: The Lives of Rural Women in Nineteenth-Century New York and Putting the Barn Before the House: Women and Family Farming in Early Twentieth-Century New York.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Nanticoke Valley in the Early Twentieth Century

Part I: Gender, Power, and Labor
1. Putting the Barn Before the House
2. Women's Place on the Land

Part II: Farming and Wage-Earning
3. "Buying a Farm on a Small Capital"
4. The Transformation of Agriculture and the Rural Economy

Part III: The Division of Labor and Relations Of Power
5. Sharing and Dividing Farm Work
6. Intergenerational and Marital Partnerships
7. Wage-Earning and Farming Families
8. Negotiating Working Relationships

Part IV: Organizing the Rural Community
9. Forming Cooperatives and Taking Collective Action
10. Home Economics and Farm Family Economies

Conclusion: Gender, Mutuality, and Community in Retrospect

Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

"Thoroughly researched and skillfully organized, the well-crafted narrative provides readers with both a sense of place and a sense of history."—Choice (1 November 2012)

"In this delightful sequel to Bonds of Community, Grey Osterud carries her analysis of family-based agriculture in south-central New York's Nanticoke Valley into the first half of the twentieth century. Osterud masterfully plumbs interviews she conducted with twenty-four women born before 1917, drawing on feminist theory and oral history theory for interpretative insights. Her interviews suggest that concepts of separate spheres and autonomy were foreign to the understandings and experiences of rural women in the earlyt twentieth century."—American Historical Review

"Overall, Putting the Barn before the House succeeds marvelously in accomplishing what it sets out to do, both argumentatively and methodologically. . . . To be sure, during the past fifteen or twenty years, many studies have carried a brief for oral history research, but few have done so as persuasively as Osterud's. Nor have many studies done a better job of harmonizing information gleaned from oral histories with source material found in more traditional archives. . . . Osterud has provided readers with a very compelling, meticulously well-researched study that should be of interest of scholars working in a number of different fields."—Colin R. Johnson, Enterprise and Society (March 2014)

"Building on her 1991 book Bonds of Community: The Lives of Farm Women in Nineteenth-Century New York, Grey Osterud returns to the Nanticoke Valley of south-central New York State, this time with a focus on the early 20th century.... Personal narratives, interviews with two dozen women over many years, are at the core, and are the greatest strength, of the book.... Osterud makes a compelling case that gender flexibility and integration, reciprocity, mutual aid, social equality and collective action were the core values of the rural way of life in the Nanticoke Valley for generations."—Sarah Carter, Social History (November 2013)

"In this fascinating book, Grey Osterud delves into the lives of two dozen women from the Nanticoke Valley in New York to explore women's role in farming and community over time. . . . Her current book is rich with insight into the patterns of change over time. For those committed to understanding the lives of farm women, this book should not be missed." —Carrie A. Meyer, The Journal of American History, (March 2014)

"In 1993, historian Hal S. Barron called Grey Osterud's Bonds of Community 'the most thorough and sophisticated reconstruction of the relationships between rural men and women that we have for the nineteenth century.' In Putting the Barn before the House, which Osterud describes as the sequel to Bonds of Community, she carries the story of Nanticoke Valley farmers into the twentieth century. Using the same exhaustive research and careful analysis, Osterud demonstrates that in Nanticoke Valley, farm families maintained flexible gender roles and strong mutual-aid networks, as well as a 'culture of mutuality,' well into the twentieth century. Men and women agreed that 'putting the barn before the house' was a vital strategy to enable the family to persist on the land and convey it to the next generation. Osterud's gracefully written book is a masterful contribution to rural and agricultural history. Putting the Barn before the House is an exemplary work for historians in any speciality that explores rural and urban social and labor history."—Journal of American Studies

"Putting the Barn Before the House is the very fruitful result of years of research and thought. It is an essential addition to our understanding of how the strands of gender, economy, and community intertwine in American history. Grey Osterud combines vivid oral histories with a thoughtful presentation of the transformation of one agricultural area, the Nanticoke Valley of New York. Osterud maintains a clear focus on the changes in gender relations that accompanied alternating eras of crisis and stability. This book illuminates women's interest in farms as business enterprises and how their work adapted accordingly, the changes in gender relations within the family that resulted, and the development of cooperative alternatives to capital-intensive agricultural production."—Joan M. Jensen, New Mexico State University, author of Loosening the Bonds: Mid-Atlantic Farm Women, 1750–1850 and Calling This Place Home: Women on the Wisconsin Frontier, 1850–1925

"Grey Osterud has written an account of American rural life that is suffused with empathy and insight. Elegantly written and deftly researched, this book enriches our understanding of rural society by focusing on the 'women's story' and by allowing several generations of women to be 'the authors of their own lives.' This is a book that rises out of an intimacy with the community of the Nanticoke Valley, which, allied with skillful oral history research and an unromantic eye, results in a compelling story of change and renewal."—Lynn Abrams, University of Glasgow, author of Oral History Theory

"Putting the Barn before the House is an intimate and compelling look at the changing roles of rural women and their families during the first half of the twentieth century. Grey Osterud has conducted a remarkable series of oral history interviews and uses them along with a wide array of other sources to craft a masterful and insightful community study that speaks volumes about the critical issues shaping the modern American countryside."—Hal S. Barron, Louisa and Robert Miller Professor of Humanities and Professor of History, Department of Humanities, Social Sciences, and the Arts, Harvey Mudd College, Graduate History Faculty, Claremont Graduate University, author of Mixed Harvest: The Second Great Transformation in the Rural North, 1870–1930

"In this exquisite book, Grey Osterud draws on women's first-person narratives, together with a wealth of other evidence, for a fresh and convincing interpretation of gender relations, agency, mutuality, and resistance in rural women’s lives. Among this book’s many pleasures is the artful way in which the author attends to the form as well as the content of oral history interviews, carefully distinguishing her analysis from her subjects’ perspectives and allowing meaning to emerge from the poignant stories women tell."—Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Julia Cherry Spruill Professor of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, coauthor of Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World

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