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This book explores the history of the rural community of the Nanticoke Valley, south-central New York, through the voices and viewpoints of local women born before World War I who lived on family farms. In particular, it looks at the socioeconomic conditions that had enabled the women of the Nanticoke Valley to lead lives that suited them so well. It examines the structural and sociological factors that accounted for the remarkable degree of gender equality and neighborly cooperation in the Nanticoke Valley. It also analyzes rural women's perspectives on gender and generational relations during what Hal Barron, a social historian, calls the second great transformation of rural society. This Introduction traces fundamental changes in Nanticoke's agricultural economy, especially the trend toward combining farming with urban wage-earning. It also considers emergent patterns in rural society, including the relationships between natives and newcomers that developed as many families departed and immigrants arrived in open-country neighborhoods.

This chapter examines rural women's active participation in movements that promoted economic cooperation and collective action while resisting the rise of capitalist agribusiness and the marginalization of women's work that was often explicit in the recommendations of agricultural and home economics advisors. At the turn of the twentieth century, Nanticoke Valley farmers formed cooperatives that allowed them to not only purchase fertilizer and feed but also process and market their products. Bargaining collectively and excluding the middlemen who would otherwise profit from their trade made farming more sustainable economically. It also ensured that farmers had practice in conducting organizations and handling financial affairs democratically. This chapter looks at the history of the Broome County Farm and Home Bureau, as well as the local branches of the Dairymen's League and the Grange League Federation, to illustrate the ways that rural men and women organized themselves to solve the socioeconomic problems they faced.

This chapter examines how rural women in the Nanticoke Valley and Broome County addressed the issue of the hypothetical boundary between home economics and the economies of farm families. The development of the Broome County Farm and Home Bureau was marked by clear differences between the plans of outside experts and the practices of rural residents. When faced with ideas about farm family economies they did not agree with, the women simply ignored the experts. Most notably, farm women rejected the model of gender that was implicit in the dual structure of these organizations and explicit in much of the expert advice they received. This chapter considers how farm women used the Home Bureau to claim a legitimate place within the county and statewide organization and gain access to its resources, as well as promote more local forms of organizing while involving men in a wide range of community-centered, gender-integrated activities. It also shows how men cooperated with women's efforts to sustain more equitable modes of labor, decision making, and collective action.

This book concludes by focusing on the issues of gender, mutuality, and community that surfaced in the Nanticoke Valley from the onset of the Great Depression through World War II. It examines how people in the countryside coped with the Great Depression through cooperation, sharing work and tools in the annual round of farm labor, and relying on mutual aid to ensure that most families had the bare necessities. It shows that longtime residents who had kept their farms while sending family members to work in the city devoted more of their efforts to subsistence production and small-scale, market-oriented agriculture. It also discusses postwar economic transformations in the Nanticoke Valley, with particular emphasis on the demise of neighborhood work-sharing and how it undermined the organizations and institutions that had sustained farm families. Finally, it considers how rural women's participation in organizing political-economic movements helped sustain family farms.

This chapter examines women's active participation in income-producing labor, whether on or off the farm, as a fundamental feature of farming families in the Nanticoke Valley who combined farming with wage-earning. Most of the immigrants who bought farms in the Nanticoke Valley kept some family members in the urban labor force while the others worked on the land. At the same time, many of the poorer native-born families also sent people to work in the city. These families struggled to maintain a foothold in the country by combining wage-earning with farming. In some families, men resorted to off-farm labor while women cultivated the land; in other families, these roles were reversed. This chapter shows how rural women, through their work on the land and their sales in the market, developed a strong sense of personal agency, while their husbands became more cooperative farm partners.

This chapter examines the paths through which women came to live and work on family farms—inheriting land from their parents, marrying an inheriting son, or founding a farm in partnership with their husband—as well as those who were displaced from the Nanticoke Valley. It considers how rural women's connections to the land have shaped their sense of self, the agency they felt able to exercise, and the trajectory of their life as they look back on it. It explains how these women saw themselves as profoundly embedded in kinship networks and deeply grounded in the work they did to support and nurture others; family and work were inextricably interconnected in their narratives. It shows that most rural women, whether they inherited, married into, or founded farms, expressed a clear sense that they could negotiate with their husbands over the division of farm tasks, participate to some degree in decisions about farming as well as childcare, and play a key role in figuring out whether or how pass the enterprise on to the next generation.

This chapter examines the ways in which farming families in the Nanticoke experienced and adapted to economic change by focusing on the story of the Young family and their decades-long effort to establish a farm “under difficulties.” Led by the sixty-year-old George Young, the Young family are a living proof of “the successes that had been attained by farmers” in the region. In their shared work and family commitments, as well as in their concern with agricultural improvement and involvement in farmers' cooperatives, the Youngs exemplified the values held by most Nanticoke Valley farmers. The history of the Young farm also illustrates what Ralph Young, a son of George, called “progressive ideas”; the family adopted the latest techniques and machinery and specialized in dairying. The development of their farm illustrates the entire sequence of changes in methods of production, processing, and marketing that occurred between 1900 and 1945. This chapter also considers the essential contributions made by rural women, as seen in the Young women, to the family farm.

This chapter examines how the increasing scale and degree of specialization of commercial farms and the trend toward combining off-farm labor with small-scale farming affected the gender division of labor on farms and power relations in farm families in the Nanticoke Valley during the early twentieth century. It shows that both of these economic shifts generated a new form of class stratification in rural society. To some degree, this divergence corresponded with ethnicity; many immigrant families who moved to run-down or abandoned farms kept some family members working in the factory while others labored on the land to build up the enterprise. The chapter first considers the complex gender and intergenerational relations within farm families and rural communities before discussing how fundamental changes in the rural economy took place. It also explores how farming families resisted capitalist transformation so successfully for so long and what roles rural women played in sustaining diversifed family farms as well as the community networks on which they relied.

This chapter presents the narrative of an impoverished immigrant woman who farmed in the Nanticoke Valley and juxtaposes it with the short story, “The Revolt of Mother” (1890), by Mary Wilkins Freeman. “The Revolt of Mother” defined the predicament of farm women in the minds of contemporary urban Americans. Freeman recognized that her story's portrait of gender relations, as shown in the interaction between husband and wife, was self-contradictory. Rural women, for their part, did not see power within marriage as a zero-sum game. The narrative of the immigrant woman, Josie Sulich Kuzma, articulates a very different perspective from that of “Mother” in the Wilkins Freeman story. For Kuzma, the most painful aspect of life on the farm was neither the physical labor it required nor the fact that poverty compelled her to live in a shack, but rather the social isolation that arose from the constant demands of farm work and the family's lack of decent clothing.

This chapter explores the working relationships between women and men on a range of family farms in the Nanticoke Valley. More specifically, it considers what shaped the gender division of labor in farming families and how their work affected and reflected intergenerational and marital partnerships. It shows that the composition of the household affected the work assigned to growing children. Persuading at least one child to remain on the farm and enabling him or her to take over the enterprise while supporting the older generation was a key goal of those who had inherited their land. Gender and intergenerational relations exemplify the shifts that occurred as a family enlarged its farm operation and became an intergenerational partnership. This chapter examines the factors that created substantial variations in families' working relationships over time, as well as discrepancies between the work rural women actually did and how others perceived their role in the family enterprise.

This chapter examines how the rural women of the Nanticoke Valley negotiated working relationships as they worked on family farms. What made the most difference in the tenor of rural women's life stories was the degree of agency they felt able to exercise over the major decisions that shaped their lives. Like most farm people, these women expected to have to contend with many circumstances over which they had no control. Most of the women who remained in or moved to the countryside sought mutuality rather than autonomy; they deliberately sustained relationships with others that were characterized by flexibility and reciprocity. They were aware of the importance of their own labor and commitment to the family farm in counteracting the gender divisions and hierarchies of power that seemed to prevail outside their rural culture. This chapter also considers how native-born and immigrant farm families combined farming and wage-earning during the interwar period and especially how farming enabled women to mix income-producing labor with childcare.