31-03-2025
America's farmland feminism was lost to history. Reviving it would heal country.
The following column is partially adapted, with permission from the publisher, from Brian Reisinger's book 'Land Rich, Cash Poor: My Family's Hope and the Untold History of the Disappearing American Farmer.'
My sister didn't have time for any BS.
She was a skilled welder by then, one of the many trades a farmer picks up, and had patched and pounded machinery for years to get it going again when breakdowns halted work on the farm. So, when she needed a part that required going to town, she went in herself. Her footsteps were the same as any farmer, that gruff whisper of dirt grating beneath work shoes on a smooth floor. But when she asked a guy for help, she got a response my dad or I never would have.
'Shouldn't a man be getting it?'
It was one of countless moments she'd faced being a woman in the 'man's world' of farming. But it was far more than that. The moment demonstrated a deep truth we've lost, especially in the Trump era with much of urban and liberal America believing rural America is backward: For much of our history, rural women led the charge on social progress through many of our country's biggest crises. And now rural women can help save us again, if we let them. We live in a world more deeply divided along rural and urban lines than ever, and our forgotten farmland feminism — lost in part with the decimation of 4.8 million farms as our economy shifted from rural to urban — tears down all our preconceived notions. Resurrecting it can help solve problems like threats to our food supply, and more.
For those who believe women's rights can't possibly have much to do with rural America, consider that American farming once boasted nearly 6.8 million farms, nearly all of them small operations often ran by women as much as their husbands in many ways, along with any children who were old enough to gather eggs in the farmyard or walk a field row under the hot sun.
My great-grandparents escaped pre-World War I Europe to make a better life in the rolling farmland of southern Wisconsin, and my great-grandma and her daughters did the work of any man. My grandpa's sister, Great-Aunt Helene, remembers carrying 80-pound buckets of milk from the barn to the milkhouse as a young woman, milking cows morning and night, and shocking grain alongside the threshing crews of men who banded together in those days to help each other's farms get through harvest. All the while, she and her mother and sisters did housework on top of fieldwork, and fed the men who were free to drink the day away when the work was done.
It began a kind of social progress that was both powerful, and paradoxical. In the country, women did the work of any man in a way the rest of the economy didn't allow in those days, equipping them with a kind of independence that was ahead of its time. And yet, they were also left caring for their families and depending upon the men who often controlled the money.
The legacy of independent women doing the work of men – a reality for generations that is still lived out today – has been lost to history. It leaves a much more complicated picture of the values and attitudes of rural America than you'll usually hear about.
From the 1920s to the 2020s, rural America lost millions of farms, and people. The numbers tell a story of millions of rural women doing the work of men, only to be forgotten as our economy shifted from rural to urban. Some numbers that illustrate the change:
6.8 million: Farms at America's height in 1935, mostly small family operations where women did the work of men
11.8 million: Men who went off to WWII, leaving behind urban jobs rural women were ready to fill
75 million: Population in rural America in the 1940s, or 57 percent, before dropping to just 14 percent by 2020.
25-29: The key age group rural Wisconsin lost for seven decades, including young women, as America's economy shifted rural to urban
By the time of World War II, as more than 12.2 million Americans went to war, there was a legion of rural women moving to the city and handling the industrial jobs of the men who had gone off to war. While Rosie the Riveter is an iconic symbol of early female empowerment in these days, often forgotten is how many of those women came from rural America, ready to do the work because of generations of doing the work of men. Though she was too young to leave the farm during the war, our great-aunt Helene soon after exemplified this: she left shocking grain for sorting meat at the Oscar Mayer plant.
This continued on through the generations, from our great-grandma, to our grandma who ran the farm when our grandpa fell 30 feet off a corncrib and broke his back, to our mom who worked alongside our dad through the Farm Crisis of the 1980s that decimated rural America.
But somewhere in that time, rural America also fell behind urban America on this front. As America's population went from majority rural in the 1940s to majority urban — including primarily losing its young people who bring economic vitality and passion for change — the country's focus shifted away from its rural roots. Female trailblazers showed what women could do in medicine, corporate America, academia, and more, while rural families were left trying to survive vanishing farms, manufacturing jobs, and more. We lost the fact that there were generations of rural women whose strength and independence might have been celebrated by the feminist movement, if only they had paused in their work long enough to tell their stories.
My sister stood in the middle of that contradiction as she stared down the man who thought she couldn't find the right machine part because she was a woman. By then she was the fourth generation of independent women doing the work of any man. But she was living in what had remained a man's world as the advancing urban economy left behind the gradually declining rural economy.
It was far from the only time she confronted this challenge, despite the independent women she'd grown up working alongside. Rarely, did she encounter openly hostile sexism; more often it was small indignities that piled up over time — each one trying to tell her she wasn't supposed to be there. There was the salesman who spoke only to our dad. There were the various farmers and farmhands who wouldn't take her phone calls seriously, or joked about her being a girl when the heavy work was underway.
She had faced a variation of this for most of her life — the expectation that it wouldn't be her who would farm. Part of that was being the second eldest behind me, a son who confronted the opposite, in the form of an expectation I didn't feel I could meet. (I would go on to pursue a writing career off the farm, and wrestle with the guilt of being the first of four generations of eldest Reisinger sons not to farm.) But part of it was also gender. Nobody in our family ever told Malia that a woman couldn't farm.
Our dad was overjoyed when she stepped up. But, as the second eldest she didn't face the same expectation I did early on, and there was no shortage of loved ones and strangers alike surprised that a girl might take over. As my sister got into her 20s and began to take the reins, she saw not everyone was as happy as our dad to see her farming. And it was one of many challenges as she raised her kids, and worked other jobs off the farm—in part because it was unclear whether farming would provide the kind of living it had our parents.
Of course, the logic of those doubting her as a woman made little sense, in a world where generations of farm women had done the work of men. But the women of generations past had done it as wives and sisters, less often as lone successors, and had rarely if ever spoken up. Eventually, Malia decided she didn't care what people thought.
'If people can't respect me,' she said, 'I'm not doing business with them.'
Her greatest test was yet to come.
On a brutal winter day in December of 2020, the cold air became too heavy for our 69-year-old dad to bear. He had to sit on a haybale in the middle of his morning chores, trying to catch his breath. Within hours he was in the back of an ambulance roaring down the highway, a severe case of COVID closing in on his aging lungs.
By then we had all experienced the fear, frustration, and — sometimes — family disagreements that came with trying to balance health precautions with being able to go on with life and keep our livelihood. But this kind of COVID blew past debate and forced us to face the possibility he may not return. Now, deciding she didn't give a damn what anyone else thought would do far more than let my sister blaze a career caring for the animals she loved, and working the land we grew up on. It would give her the courage to fight as COVID's disruption's hit farms with falling prices and more.
Our dad stayed with me as he fought for his life, and Malia fought for the farm. In today's economy, with farms dealing with the many economic, political, and technological forces that have made it so hard to keep going, a family tragedy — like the owner being laid up for weeks — can cripple a farm's operations and put it under. My sister called on close friends for help, among them women who had also grown up on farms and knew how to work alongside her. It was a circle of support that recalled the olden days, of women working the farm as well as any man, and families banding together to weather economic crisis.
But the thing about a farm on the edge is that there's always another challenge piling on. Cows began going down sick, and one winter morning twin calves were born outside in the cold. Malia ran to our skid-steer to help gently move the calves into the warm barn, but a bolt had fallen out of the machine's safety release and it wouldn't move. The cows and the calves and the work were all waiting, and our dad was still sick.
She cried out in rage and fear. Then she took a breath, and did what three generations of women before her had done: She got back to work.
Finally, the day before Christmas Eve, our dad was well enough to come home. I still think about my sister's resilience, as we confront the national crisis of the disappearing American farmer. The livelihoods of family farms and much of rural America are slipping, our food supply is becoming more vulnerable — and more expensive and less healthy— and we're failing to solve the problem in part because rural and urban America can't agree on the solutions.
The lessons of farmland feminism can challenge us to change. With America so divided along rural and urban lines, Democrats are in danger of writing off rural America, and Republicans are in danger of taking rural voters for granted. But if we can force ourselves to stop getting rural voters — and each other — so wrong, we can craft new policies to help solve these problems.
There's reason to believe we can do this. We still have nearly 2 million farms in this country, 96 percent of which are family operations. That's nearly 2 million families, searching for a way to survive, led by people like my sister who our policymakers could do so much more to understand.
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One day as my dad was still recovering his strength from his severe bout with COVID, a tractor pulling a manure spreader jackknifed on the way into the valley and careened into the ditch — off the same steep road that had imperiled vehicles ever since our family had first settled there more than a century ago. Our dad, usually cheerful in the face of challenge, but still weak, worried aloud now about how they'd ever get it out.
'What are we gonna do?' he said. 'What are we gonna do?'
'You're gonna go home,' Malia said. 'I'm gonna make some calls.'
My dad stepped back, his lungs straining in the cold, while Malia called in a truck big enough to pull the manure spreader backward up the hill. Our dad said Malia was the only person he'd trust to steer the tractor, so Malia climbed in and helped jimmy it out of the ditch, then drove it down the ice-laden hill it had failed to make the first time.
And the work went on.
Brian Reisinger is a writer who grew up on a family farm in Sauk County. He contributes columns and videos for the Ideas Lab at the Journal Sentinel. He works in public affairs consulting for Wisconsin-based Platform Communications. He splits his time between Sacramento, Calif. — America's 'farm-to-fork capital,' near his wife's family — and the family farm in Wisconsin. You can find him on X at @BrianJReisinger
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Women have always been force on American family farms | Opinion
