This book is about women on family farms in two countries. It is about the farm work that they do, about their families, and about their activities in rural women's organizations. Most importantly, it is about the issues of control and autonomy that are central to their lives: their politics.

In spite of all that they share, our subjects’ situations are diverse, as are their activities. Even among the 50 per cent who live near Bordeaux, the wine centre, only a minority come from farms with wine as a principal product. Yet the vineyards supplied us with the title of...

This book is first of all an account and analysis of the situation and opinions of 389 farm women interviewed near Bordeaux, France, and Valleyfield, Quebec, in the winter of 1988 and the spring of 1989. But as a cross-disciplinary collaboration between a historian and a political scientist, it also represents a deliberate and conscious attempt to carry out feminist research using quantitative analyses. In this study we report on two groups of white, Roman Catholic, married women in North America and Europe with both the hope and the strong belief that it can provide insights applicable - with care...

Our first approach to our respondents was historical, looking at records of the rural organizations to which they belonged. In the following sections we outline the evolution of the specific objectives, membership, and programs of the two associations to which half the respondents belonged, and then describe their participation in these organizations. In later chapters we shall deal with the impact of the organizations on those members we studied. We start with the Cercles de fermières, the older and better-documented of the groups.²

Thecercleswere created and financed by the Quebec Ministry of Agriculture and Colonization, beginning in 1915,...

Farmers’ wives are a much stereotyped group, seen by city dwellers as something remote but on the whole appealing: kindly, aproned, thrifty, lacking in formal education. Yet these women are as varied in many of their demographic characteristics as other comparable segments of the population. Although we limited our subjects by residence, language, religion, and marital status – they resided in certain carefully defined areas, and they were all French speakers, Catholic, and married – the women who participated in our survey differed considerably in many of the most important aspects of their lives. They ranged in age from twenty-three to eighty...

Towards the end of our questions on politics we asked our respondents, “Would you like to tell me what you understand by ‘politics’?” “It just doesn’t interest me,” was one response, and a fairly frequent one. But most were ready enough to comment. “Those jumping jacks,” said one woman sourly. “It must be a good job, since so many people want it,” said another. Usually, we got serious and informative answers, including perhaps the most relevant of all: “politics is those men who govern us.” This respondent, who was French, may not have meant to emphasize the gender of the...

When we turned to feminism, among the four exemplars we found three who were prepared to call themselves feminists. But of course the representativeness of the four was limited, and what we were seeing was no more than a reminder that a quite conventional woman might well think of herself as that radical thing, a feminist. What was more typical was that even the one non-feminist,gƒmember Christiane, reported that she supported some of the views that are usually associated with feminism. It is not surprising that she did not want to describe herself as a feminist, since she...

We now turn to our respondents as “housewives,” which is what nearly all of them are in the eyes of the rest of the world. “Housewife” - a term designating the woman who is not in the paid labour force, and who is often considered the least political as well as the least feminist woman possible. But we would argue that private life is itself political, and that it can generate significant change in lives and situations. Kathleen Jones suggests that “women’s traditional roles, as housewives and mothers,” should not be thought of as “politically isolated and generally politically ignorant...

This study confirmed our belief that “politics” includes all forms of social power. Within that vast realm we identify three clusters of actions and beliefs as crucial for all individuals: those relating to their role as citizens, those relating to feminism, and those relating to the private sphere, including in the latter work-assignment and authority structures in the family or the family business as well as views about sexuality. We present in this book what we have been able to discover of these areas of life as they have been reported to us by a group of approximately four hundred...