Women and the Agricultural Revolution
Elise Boulding in her article, Women and the Agricultural Revolution, argues that
women played a key role in initiating the Agricultural Revolution. She defines the
revolution as happening within two stages: horticulture and agriculture proper. Women
had a prominent role within the earlier form, horticulture. Horticulture is defined as
farming for subsistence only.Women’s roles on the farm were not as dominant as society
grew to farming for surplus instead. Boulding begins the article by discussing the shift
society made from wandering nomads to settled villagers. She explains that it was women
who recognized that plants could be easily domesticated. It was because of the domestication of plants that people decided to eventually settle down. In doing so, the
early settlers exchanged the fairly simplistic nomadic life to that of a hard-working farmer. Throughout the essay, Boulding emphasizes the role women played in initiating this revolutionary shift. She describes the main duties women had and the status they held within a horticulture society. However, this changed as the purpose of farming shifted to agriculture proper.
According to Boulding, women’s influence on the Agricultural Revolution began
very early on. Women had recognized the significance of einkorn, a nutritious plant that
was easy to cultivate. It was because of women recognizing that plants could be
domesticated that nomads were introduced to farming....
Rebecca Sharpless’ book “Fertile Ground, Narrow Choices” tells the stories of everyday women in Central Texas on cotton farms. She argues that women were not just good for keeping house, cooking, sewing and raising children but that they were an essential key to the economy. Whether they were picking cotton alongside men or bearing children
Jamestown, Virginia, is a crucial source of legends about the United States. Pocahontas, a daughter of an Indian werowance married an Englishman named John Rolfe and changed her name to Rebecca. In her article, “Gender Frontier”, Kathleen Brown underscores gender role and responsibility in both Native American and English settlers. Gender frontier is the meeting of two or more culturally specific system of knowledge about gender and nature. She also stresses the duties that they played in their societies prior to the arrival of the English people in the early colony in Virginia. Brown describes the difference values between Europeans and Native Americans in regards to what women and men should and should not do and the complex progression of
Significantly, Welch deconstructs the myth that Plains Indian women were just slaves and beasts of burden and presents them as fully rounded women, women who were crucial to the survival of the tribal community. In fact, it is the women who perform the day-to-day duties and rituals that enable cultural survival for the tribes of...
Modern day interpretations of pioneer women are mostly inaccurate and romanticized as easy, and luxurious in a new land however, that is far from the truth. Overall, pioneer women had many jobs that were underappreciated, they weren’t valued as men but without them many people in the West wouldn’t have survived and had to leave so much to go on a trip that took weeks and was no vacation, because women pioneers would have to cook and clean and take care of her children and husband, while on a wagon with having to adapt to the changing weather and climates, they did jobs that were considered as “men’s jobs” and worked as hard as men to survive in the west during the Manifest Destiny. Therefore, women pioneers were overlooked as an insignificant part of the Westward Expansion.
The small community of Hallowell, Maine was no different than any other community in any part of the new nation – the goals were the same – to survive and prosper. Life in the frontier was hard, and the settlement near the Kennebec Valley was no different than what the pioneers in the west faced. We hear many stories about the forefathers of our country and the roles they played in the early days but we don’t hear much about the accomplishments of the women behind those men and how they contributed to the success of the communities they settled in. Thanks to Martha Ballard and the diary that she kept for 27 years from 1785-1812, we get a glimpse into...
Even before this event, the struggles of women in society were surfacing in the media. Eliza Farnham, a married woman in Illinois during the late 1830s, expressed the differing views between men and women on the proper relations between a husband and wife. While Farnham viewed a wife as being “a pleasant face to meet you when you go home from the field, or a soft voice to speak kind words when you are sick, or a gentle friend to converse with you in your leisure hours”, a recently married farmer contended that a wife was useful “to do [a man’s] cookin and such like, ‘kase it’s easier for them than it is for [men]” (Farnham, 243).
As many women took on a domestic role during this era, by the turn of the century women were certainly not strangers to the work force. As the developing American nation altered the lives of its citizens, both men and women found themselves struggling economically and migrated into cities to find work in the emerging industrialized labor movement . Ho...
The colonial woman has often been imagined as a demure person, dressed in long skirt,apron and bonnet, toiling away at the spinning wheel, while tending to the stew at the hearth. In reality, the women of the early settlements of the United States were much more influential, strong and vital to the existence of the colonies. Her role,however, has shifted as the needs of the times dictated.
“The Pastoralization of Housework” by Jeanne Boydston is a publication that demonstrates women’s roles during the antebellum period. Women during this period began to embrace housework and believed their responsibilities were to maintain the home, and produce contented and healthy families. As things progressed, housework no longer held monetary value, and as a result, womanhood slowly shifted from worker to nurturer. The roles that women once held in the household were slowly diminishing as the economy became more industrialized. Despite the discomfort of men, when women realized they could find decent employment, still maintain their household and have extra income, women began exploring their option.
When the United States was taking shape a nation, many events took place, and they played an important role in defining the country in different ways. One theme that comes up is the role women played in the development of America as a nation. For long, the society has been focusing on the role of men from different races and ethnicities in the development of America. The women of the Great Plains are among those that the American society had failed to recognize on many fronts, including their lives before America started to become a great nation in the mid-nineteenth century. These women lived between the Appalachian Mountains and the Rocky Mountains horizontally and between Arctic Circle and Mexico vertically, where the land is
plant life grow. Then the settlers grew crops, and to solve the issues of droughts and floods,
One manner in which this unusual place can be seen is in the women's privileged relationship to the land in the text. While Jim Burden attends school, it is Antonia who shapes and works the new land that the pioneers inhabit, going "from farm to farm" to fill the need for agricultural hands (111). While Otto and Jake fill this need early in the text, it is predominantly Antonia's cultivation of the land that is followed throughout the remainder of the text. Similarly, the concrete contributions of the "hired girls" stand in pointed contrast to the invisible and/or passive employment of male characters such as Mr. Harling.
Women in the nineteenth century, for the most part, had to follow the common role presented to them by society. This role can be summed up by what historians call the “cult of domesticity”. The McGuffey Readers does a successful job at illustrating the women’s role in society. Women that took part in the overland trail as described in “Women’s Diaries of the Westward Journey” had to try to follow these roles while facing many challenges that made it very difficult to do so.
Whitmeyer,Rachel.(2012). Women’s roles in “Season of Migration to the North.An American University Seminar. Retrived from: http://theafricanwriter.wordpress.com/2012/09/26/womens-roles-in-season-of-migration-to-the-north/
Agriculture is quite possibly the most important advancement and discovery that humanity has made. It produces the one thing that we need the most: food. It has been around since 9500 BC, and can be the oldest sign of mankind’s acumen and the development and evolving of our minds and creations. Agriculture has been mastered throughout hundreds of years and is one of our most important resources on Earth, along with water and fossil fuels. Although the older farming methods from ancient times seem somewhat mediocre and barbaric, they were very ingenious and advanced for that time period. Over thousands of years, we have improved the way agriculture is used, how land is cultivated, the various techniques of farming and irrigation, and the tools and mechanics used. Numerous things that we see as aboriginal today, such as using a hand plow, were extremely contemporary in ancient times, and played key roles in the development of man and society, since quick labor was not abundant before this time. We are now extremely advanced in agriculture and irrigation and the tools used to farm and grow and harvest crops. We have learned from our past and ancestors how to grow and evolve in our methods and have advanced forward greatly.