Professional Documents
Culture Documents
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FARMING FOR THE LONG HAUL
needed. Even on the Illinois and Iowa prairies and farther west,
farmers maintained woodlots and orchards as part of the economic
strategy of the household. This was the way of life of American
farmers, much like traditional farmers throughout the world, with
major commitments to crops and livestock central to their practice,
but with considerable attention paid to the resources available
around them on the larger farm and beyond. New demands and
new opportunities shrank the size of the larger farm, at first gradu-
ally, then rapidly and drastically in the last half of the twentieth
century, as farmers pulled up orchards and cut down the remaining
woodlands and woodlots in the race to keep up with uncertain
economic opportunity.
Some of the old practices had died out long ago in the face
of the new, commercially available conveniences. As early as the
1830s, New England mills turned out inexpensive cloth, first
brought to the West in the 1890s through the Sears catalog. At
first in the East, then increasingly in even the most remote parts
of the country, households gave up locally produced homespun
cloth and leather for commercially produced clothing. Many of the
tools that farmers and householders depended upon were already
manufactured by that time, and eventually metal and plastic would
supplant homemade pots and baskets, buckets and ropes. Propane
would replace much wood heating by the mid-twentieth century.
Even today with the whole farm drastically reduced as it is,
much of the work of the farm household, beyond that directly tied
to production, is woman’s work—and in many cultures, but particu-
larly our own, it’s undervalued, even deprecated and feared. Where
today the “successful farmer has a wife with a job in town” (a wife,
by the way, who also does the cooking, cleaning, child-rearing, and
whatever garden work may be left on the modern farm), tradition-
ally women played an enormously important role in providing the
resources of the whole farm for the family’s and community’s use.
Witch, hag, and crone were a few of the terms, rich with oppro-
brium, for the village herbalist, healer, and midwife. Women in
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Woodlands and Wastes
many contemporary farming cultures still fetch the wood, haul the
water, tend the garden, manage small livestock, do the cooking, and
nurture one and all. They may also be farmers in their own right.
In the West that possibility—that women might be property
owners and thus citizens on an equal standing with men—was
already erased in the sixteenth century, as the new property laws
developed (see chapter 4). At the same time, a campaign emerged
on many fronts to limit the public role of women and disparage or
even prosecute their traditional work. The witch hunts were one
side of this movement. Intellectuals like Francis Bacon added a
sinister further twist. Often called a “father of modern science,”
Bacon might more accurately be called the father of scientism,
the unscientific belief that science will lead the human race in an
ever-progressing ascent to the utter dominance of nature. To the
still-potent objections to mining and draining as a “rape of Mother
Nature”—a sentiment reaching back to Roman times—Bacon
countered by referring to nature as “a common harlot” who should
be “put in constraint, molded, and made as it were new by art and
the hand of man” so that humankind could recover the dominion
over nature promised it. Her secrets should be wrested from her
through forceful “interrogatories” and her inner parts “delved and
penetrated” to satisfy our demand for knowledge.11 For Bacon,
agriculture, like all the mechanical arts, was best founded in such
efforts to bind and dominate nature, and only effective through
literally manly exertions.
Women’s arts were submerged in the emerging scientistic
world view. But those arts were essential to the household, whether
urban or rural. Women have traditionally been the herbalists and
basket makers who managed the wild sources for their materials.
They plastered the house with mud or manure and sometimes built
it themselves of local materials. In traditional American farmsteads
women beat the flax, cleaned and carded and spun and wove the
wool, made the clothing, and maintained the household. Whether
men or women milked the cows, women churned the butter and
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FARMING FOR THE LONG HAUL
took eggs and butter to town for extra money, and they preserved
food for the winter. In Western cultures and others, women have
been variously alewives, bakers, butchers, market vendors, and
fishmongers. Some of these roles had prestige, others not. But in
much of the work of the larger farm, wherever major emphasis
is put on the productive enterprise, today as in the past, woman’s
work is invisible, except to the extent that she assumes a role in the
business of farming. But the business of farming is only part of the
whole farm economy that we will have to recover if we are to farm
for the long haul.
One example of that ancient economy illustrates the crucial
need to take seriously the practices of the past. The recovery of
traditional herbal knowledge by both women and men over the
last decades promises a return to health care that is sustainable in
the long haul. Pharmaceutical antibiotics and their makers are fast
losing their ability to keep up with pathogens. Herbal antibiotics
and remedies, with their wider spectrum of beneficial effects, don’t
usually have the spectacular quick turnaround of pharmaceuticals,
but they appear to contribute better to the body’s inherent abil-
ity to heal itself. Herbal medicine was driven underground by
the American Medical Association’s campaign against all rival
approaches starting in the late nineteenth century. The campaign
was launched with the explicit promise of increasing the income
of doctors by restricting access to certified medical education and
carried with it a commitment to pharmaceutical drugs as a chief
mode of healing. Hundreds of medical schools were closed, includ-
ing most that educated women.12 Today all state boards of medical
examiners are in the control of AMA doctors, though chiropractics
and osteopathy are still tolerated and acupuncture has gained some
respect. Herbal practice was banned in many states and remains
so unless carried out by an AMA-approved physician or an
acupuncturist. But herbal medicine has made a quiet comeback, as
AMA-approved medicine has failed to deliver on its promises and
drifted out of reach of most people most of the time.
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Woodlands and Wastes
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