Posted: March 04 2005 at 11:27am | IP Logged

Rural Homesteads

How will woman’s influence affect the agricultural pattern? What form of life on the land will appeal to women and attract them to the rural areas? The new pattern of life on the land must meet the fundamental requirements of woman’s nature if it is to win her enthusiastic interest and active support. It must provide the conditions to family and community. Only then can we have a really healthy and well-balanced rural life.

What are the conditions which woman’s nature requires on the land? First of all, the woman needs the small, diversified, family farm. The homestead, producing primarily for family use and only incidentally for sale should become the basic unit of the new agricultural pattern. The ideal of practical self-sufficiency can be realized on much smaller farms than are customary today, although the exact acreage will vary with local conditions. Because it is family-centered, organized first of all to supply all that the family requires for a full life, the homestead is deeply satisfying to woman’s nature, for she is a universality and a personalist. She is made to be everything to somebody, some person. That is why the large commercial farm with its hundred cows or thousand acres of wheat has little interest in her. These are specialist ventures, which usually make her a specialist in the kitchen just as they make her husband a specialist with milking machines or combines. But the small, diversified farm corresponds completely to her desire for variety and personalized relationships in work. She enjoys the homestead with its few cows to furnish butter, milk and cheese for her family; its few pigs for meat; its few sheep for lamb and wool; its small flock of chickens for really fresh eggs; a few bee hives for honey; perhaps a flock of ducks to add a note of color and humor to the farm yard. She wants to plant an orchard, a vineyard, a berry patch, an herb and flower garden, as well as a plot of vegetables. She is by nature of Jill of all trades, as Chesterton puts it, and finds relaxation in turning from her household tasks to weed the garden or milk the cow. She wants to know the animals individually, to give them names, even to make pets of them. On the family homestead, the birth of every calf is an event anxiously awaited by the entire family. Everyone knows the peculiarities of each animal, and this knowledge itself adds interest to the work. The homestead is on a human scale, giving rich possibilities for satisfying activity for every member of the family. If women think that agriculture means commercial farming with its crushing burden of specialized, impersonal work, they will take no interest in it and want no share in it. But if they see that the rural life movement means the small, diversified, family-centered farm, they will turn toward it enthusiastically and join the ranks of those who are moving forward to the land.