Feminist Politics on the Farm: Rural Catholic Women in Southern Quebec and Southwestern France 9780773567665

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Feminist Politics on the Farm Rural Catholic Women in Southern Quebec and Southwestern France

Feminist Politics on the Farm examines rural women's organizations, politics, feminism, agricultural life, and personal relations. The women studied were clearly progressive in their opinions and the authors show that their original and varied opinions cast doubt on much of the standard literature about non-elite women's understanding of mainstream politics and the women's movement. These rural women differed significantly from the usual stereotypes of farm women as apolitical and conservative. Nor were they the reactionaries implied by theories of modernization. Instead, they were supportive of women's political activism, and of their equality and self-assertiveness, and were as feminist as other women in Canada and France. Political scientist Naomi Black and historian Gail Cuthbert Brandt worked collaboratively, using a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods. Their study is in large part based on a lengthy questionnaire administered by local interviewers in 1988-89 to almost 400 women living on family farms near Bordeaux and Montreal. They also include analyses of the women's organizations to which half of the subjects belonged, the Cercles de fermieres in Quebec and the Groupements de developpement et de vulgarisation agricole feminins in France. Throughout the book the authors reflect, in language accessible to the general reader, upon the advantages and disadvantages of using conventional quantitative approaches to explore women's experience and opinions. NAOMI BLACK is professor of political science, York University. GAIL CUTHBERT BRANDT is principal and professor of history, Renison College, University of Waterloo.

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Feminist Politics on the Farm: Rural Catholic Women in Southern Quebec and Southwestern France NAOMI BLACK AND GAIL CUTHBERT BRANDT

McGill-Queen's University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

McGill-Queen's University Press 1999 ISBN 0-7735-1828-2 Legal deposit second quarter 1999 Bibliotheque nationale du Quebec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen's University Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for its activities. We also acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program.

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Black, Naomi, 1935Feminist politics on the farm: Rural Catholic Women in southern Quebec and southwestern France Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7735-1828-2 1. Rural women - France, Southwest, 2. Rural women - Quebec (Province). 3. Feminism - France, Southwest. 4. Feminism - Quebec (Province). 5. Women in politics - France, Southwest. 6. Women in politics - Quebec (Province). I. Cuthbert Brandt, Gail II. Title. HQI459.Q8B54 1999 305.4'3631'094471 C98-901298-0

This book was typeset by Typo Litho Composition Inc. in 10/12. Sabon.

For the women of this book

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Contents

List of Tables

ix

Acknowledgments Abbreviations

xiii

xvii

Maps xix Introduction: Women Don't Prune Vines 1 Situating the Study 6 2 Farm Women's Organizations 3 The Women

46

4 Mainstream Politics 5 Feminism

24

76

112

6 Private Politics

144

7 Towards a New Analysis 190 Appendices A The Impact of Major Demographic Characteristics on Responses to Questions: Results of Logistic Regressions 221 B Surveys of Farm Women

225

3

viii

Contents

C European Community Surveys of Opinion Relating to the Status of Women 227 Notes

229

Bibliography Index

291

273

Tables

2.1 Respondents' organizational membership and role 40 2.2 Respondents' length of membership in clubs 40 2.3 Respondents' membership in the Jeunesse agricole catholique feminine, cross-tabulated with age 42 2.4 Volunteer work done by respondents weekly, by season 45 3.1 Description of the exemplars 3.2 Respondents'ages

48

53

3.3 Respondents' education, cross-tabulated with age 56 3.4 Number of respondents' children, cross-tabulated with age 58 3.5 Respondents'attendance at mass 59 3.6 Respondents' attendance at mass, cross-tabulated with age 60 3.7 Respondents' matrimonial property regime, cross-tabulated with age 64 3.8 Agricultural work done frequently by respondents on all farms 66

x Tables

3.9 Specialized agricultural work done frequently by respondents on farms with relevant principal products 67 3.10 Agricultural work done by respondents weekly, by season 69 3.11 Domestic work done by respondents weekly, by season 71 3.12 Respondents' paid employment off the farm 73 3.13 Respondents' regrets for not currently having paid employment off the farm 73 4.1 Respondents' definitions of the concept politics 78 4.2 Respondents' involvement in mainstream politics, set in context 82 4.3 Respondents' self-placement on the left-right scale of political beliefs 90 4.4 Respondents' definitions of the concepts left and right 91 4.5 Respondents'votes

92

4.6 Respondents' willingness to participate in grass-roots political action 95 4.7 Respondents' views about politics

99

4.8 Dimensions of mainstream politics: factors derived from respondents' views 108 5.1 Respondents' self-identification as feminists 116 5.2 Respondents' definitions of the concept feminism 116 5.3 Respondents' views about the rate of change in the status of women 123 5.4 Respondents' views about those wanting role equity for women and men 123 5.5 Respondents' views about the women's movement 126

xi Tables

5.6 Respondents' willingness to join the women's movement 126 5.7 Dimensions of feminism: factors derived from respondents'views 138 6.1 Respondents' satisfaction with their current paid employment off the farm 148 6.2 Respondents' reasons for currently having paid employment off the farm 148 6.3 Respondents' reasons for not currently having paid employment off the farm 149 6.4 Respondents' description of their role in the farm enterprise 151 6.5 Respondents'self-identification by title

152

6.6 Respondents' remuneration for work on the farm 154 6.7 How respondents are remunerated for work on the farm 155 6.8 How tasks are allocated on the respondents' farms 157 6.9 Respondents' views on what agricultural work is appropriate for men 161 6.10 Respondents' views on what agricultural work is appropriate for their spouses 162 6.11 Respondents' views on what agricultural work is appropriate for women 163 6.12 Respondents' views on what agricultural work is appropriate for themselves 164 6.13 Domestic tasks ever done by respondents' spouses 172 6.14 Respondents' views on acceptability of adultery for wives 176 6.15 Respondents' views on acceptability of premarital sexual activity for girls 176 6.16 Respondents' views on decriminalization of abortion as progress 176

xii Tables

6.17 Respondents' report of their use of contraception 177 6.18 Respondents' views on decriminalization of abortion as progress, cross-tabulated with frequency of attendance at mass 179 6.19 Dimensions of private politics: factors derived from respondents'views 183 6.20 Respondents' satisfaction with their agricultural work 18 8 6.21 Respondents'most important problems 188 6.2.2 Respondents' happiness

188

Acknowledgments

We want to start by thanking each other. A collaborative project taking ten years is not easily completed by women with different academic backgrounds, different perspectives, and, frequently, different geographic locations - not to mention shared propensities for perfectionism and overcommitment. If neither of us quite recognizes her intentions in the final product, both of us are proud of our shared offspring, and of each other. A number of individuals helped us with particular dimensions of the study. For the Quebec section of the project our first contacts were academic ones. Professor Yolande Cohen of the Universite du Quebec a Montreal generously gave us access to her research on the Cercles de fermieres and, most important, to her contacts in federation 12, beginning with our dear Jeannette Bergeron (ex-president of the regional federation). In France, Professors Pierre Guillaume and Marie-Claire Rouyer of the Universite de Bordeaux gave us help and encouragement over the years as we planned the project and its follow-up conference and conference publication. We would also like to thank Professor Patrick Quantin of the Universite de Bordeaux for his assistance when we were preparing our questionnaire. To the Nivets and the Quinsacs we are, always, grateful for hospitality and friendship. Our approach to the clubs in France was through the state agricultural agencies. We are deeply indebted to Danielle Ransinangue, conseillere agricole with the Mutualite sociale agricole in Bordeaux, as well as to Colette Darfeuille, Marie-Claire Boucher, and Claudine Ducasse, also at the Mutualite, and Alain Cozzoli of the Chambre regionale d'agriculture in Bordeaux. Pierrette Bonnin, the gracious president of

xiv Acknowledgments

the Groupement de developpement agricole feminin of Lussac, was our first contact with club members there, and we thank her for her continuing support; club presidents Sylvie Mothes (Monsegur-Pellegrue) and Marie-Claire Saint-Marc (Bazas) were also very helpful, especially in identifying club members and interviewers. David Northrup at the Institute for Social Research, York University, guided us around the pitfalls of survey research; we owe to him the very useful suggestion that respondents be asked about the suitability of agricultural tasks, not just for men and women in general but also specifically for themselves and their spouses. Professor Harvey Simmons of the Department of Political Science at York University advised us about the complexities of French party classification and election reporting. Susanna Eve assisted us with translations at various points, and Verna Cuthbert Normandeau provided invaluable information about legal questions and terminology connected with matrimonial property regimes in Quebec and France. For the conduct of the interviews we must thank many individuals. A magistral job of co-ordinating was carried out by Jeannette Bergeron for Quebec and Viviane Quinsac for France. Their competence, calm, and cheerfulness far exceeded anything we could have hoped for or have managed ourselves. In addition, we thank the invaluable interviewers: Lucie Goyette, Jeannette Payant, Germaine Primeau, and Claire Verner (Quebec), and Isabelle Castenet, Laure Herve, Magali Ithier, Sophie Jelowicki, Sylvie Mothes, Chantal Pujol, and Nadine Robert (France). The computer analysis of our quantitative data was carried out for us by Mirka Ondrack of the Institute for Social Research at York University. We thank her for her consistent care and support. At every stage she gave us wise counsel about our interpretations and certainly bears no responsibility for any errors we may have made. Marina Sakuta at Glendon College did the first round of putting our data into readable form; the huge task of developing tables for our book manuscript was carried out with intelligence and energy by Vered Pittel, who also helped us to put the manuscript into final good shape. The maps are the work of Barry Levely of the University of Waterloo. We thank too our many research assistants: Barbara Cooper, who carried out the first bibliographical analyses, as well as Michelle Payette-Daoust and Jocelyne Praud, Sylvia Fescia-Bordelais, Tamara Myers, Jennifer Lund, Barbara Crow, and Krista Hunt. We also thank those who provided financial support for this project: for a seed grant to commence planning, the Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies of York University (and for assistance and encouragement in applying for that grant, Professor Clara Thomas); for main funding, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRCC), which

xv Acknowledgments

generously allowed both reformulation and extension of the project as it developed; for the 1990 conference, SSHRCC, the Vari Foundation, the York-Bordeaux Program, the Canadian Department of External Affairs (International Cultural Relations program), and the Centre d'etudes canadiennes and Centre de recherches interdisciplinaires sur les femmes of the Universite de Bordeaux; for funding for computer analysis and research assistants, Glendon College and the Faculty of Arts Commitee on Research, Grants and Scholarships (York University), and Renison College (University of Waterloo). Our husbands and the rest of our families patiently tolerated what must have seemed to them like a never-ending project; they all know what we owe to them.

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Abbreviations

ACFAS Association canadienne-francaise des arts et sciences AFEAS Association feminine d'education et d'action sociale ANES American National Election Study CACSW Canadian Advisory Council on the Status of Women CFW Concerned Farm Women CIAPF Centres d'information agricole de planteurs de tabac feminins CMR Chretiens dans le monde rural CNES Canadian National Election Study EC European Community (Eurobarometer studies) FDGVPA Federation departementale des groupements de vulgarisation du progres agricole FNGEDA Federation nationale des groupements d'etudes et de developpement agricoles FNSJB Federation nationale Saint-Jean-Baptiste GAEC Groupement agricole d'exploitation en commun GDAF Groupement de developpement agricole feminin gf groupement feminin GVAF Groupement de vulgarisation agricole feminin GFVAM Groupement feminin de vulgarisation agricole et menagere INSEE Institut national de la statistique et des etudes economiques JACF Jeunesse agricole catholique feminine

xviii Abbreviations MLF Mouvement pour la liberation des femmes MSA Mutualite sociale agricole NAC National Action Committee on the Status of Women NDP New Democratic Party NFU National Farmers' Union SIECCAN Sex Information and Education Council of Canada ucc Union des cultivateurs catholiques UCF Union catholique des fermieres UFCS Union feminine civique et sociale WCTU Woman's Christian Temperance Union wI Women's Institutes WLM Women's Liberation Movement YWCA Young Women's Christian Association

Map 1 Survey sites, Southern Quebec

Franklin Godmanchester Howick Sainte-Anicet Saint-Antoine-Abbe Sainte-Barbe Saint-Chrysotome Saint-Etienne-de-Beauharnois Saint-Louis-de-Gonzague Sainte-Martine Saint-Michel-de-Napierville Saint-Paul-de-Chateaugay Saint-Stanislas-de-Kostka Saint-Timothee (Paroisse) Saint-Urbain-Premier Salaberry-de-Valleyfield

Map 2 Survey sites, Southwestern France

Bazas Lussac Monsegur Pellegrue

Feminist Politics on the Farm

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Introduction "Les femmes ne taillent pas la vigne. "Women don't prune vines."

This book is about women on family farms in two countries. It is about the farm work that they do, about their families, and about their activities in rural women's organizations. Most importantly, it is about the issues of control and autonomy that are central to their lives: their politics. In spite of all that they share, our subjects' situations are diverse, as are their activities. Even among the 50 per cent who live near Bordeaux, the wine centre, only a minority come from farms with wine as a principal product. Yet the vineyards supplied us with the title of this prefatory section as well as a central metaphor for the study. Not only are wine and wine-making powerful sources of imagery, but the nature of work in the vineyards illuminates the situation of all the women we studied. A good deal of wine production in the Bordeaux region remains basically unmechanized, a matter of skilled and unskilled crafts learned mainly by apprenticeship. On the farms that produce and process grapes for wine, everybody, women and men, girls and boys, at some time works with and around the vines. The agricultural labour is unrelenting: fertilizing, weeding and harrowing between the rows, dealing with insect pests and diseases, planting and staking and nurturing new as well as old vines. Then, of course, there is the harvesting, the pressing of the grapes, and the transformation of the juice into wine. We asked when the slack season was, and people laughed. Throughout the year there is the ongoing task of packaging and selling the finished wine. Labels have to be printed and attached, corks purchased, boxes put together and then filled, wrapped, and shipped. There is also all the entrepreneurial work of arranging sales and promoting the product, as

4 Feminist Politics on the Farm well as bookkeeping and dealing with marketing and taxation and the local authorities. Some of the work is stoop labour, relatively unskilled; some of it requires manual dexterity or special knowledge; some of it, today, is learned in agricultural colleges and courses. But most of it is still taught by parents to their children. To the outsider, little if any of what happens in and around the vineyard looks as if it ought to be sex-linked. But it is. Some tasks are perceived as matters of skill and judgment - and those tasks are men's work. The key process is tailler la vigne: pruning the vines. Grapevines grow by putting out new shoots from the old, woody stem. The grapes are produced by these shoots, which are pruned in the spring and, at the end of the season, cut back to the trunk. The shoots are not allowed to grow as they will, for their number and placement determine the quality of the wine. Deciding what and where to cut is therefore crucial to the crop. In the Bordeaux region only men prune the shoots. They teach their sons so that they will be able to do this after them. Women do not prune vines. When we framed our questionnaire, we listed among farm tasks only the wider category of travail des vignes - working in the vineyard. Even so, we found that such work, in contrast to harvesting the grapes or making them into wine, was an activity that our French farm wives thought more appropriate to themselves than to women or men in general (and one that a considerable number of them in fact reported doing frequently). We interpreted these figures to mean that our respondents knew very well that men did the "important" part of the vineyard work - but they wanted to do it themselves. Our reasons for this interpretation can be found in two stories: one about Garance and her father, the second about the women belonging to the GDAF of Lussac (one of the rural women's groups we studied). These stories together frame our study, which is about farm women and the politics of their lives. Garance (that was not her name, of course). When we were setting up our survey, she was the bright and charming teen-age daughter of a rural family that also included a slightly younger son whom we will call Pierre-Francois. The family, typically, maintained a small vineyard, although that was not the family's main source of income. It was in this vineyard that we learned about the multiple meanings of travail de la vigne. At dinner with the family one evening we were drinking the excellent though unremarkable wine from their vineyard and discussing our questionnaire. We mentioned our discovery that girls and women do not prune vines. "Really? I've never noticed it," said the father, an egalitarian who would not have consciously discriminated between his

5

Introduction: Women Don't Prune Vines

daughter and his son. "Yes," said Garance. "Papa, I never realized until now: Pierre-Francois does pruning but you never let me do it." We were there as she experienced the feminist click of awareness. From our perspective, that was the first stage in her becoming politicized: aware of relations of power and inclined to change them. The GDAF of Lussac - the Groupement de developpement agricole feminin. Most of its members were older than Garance's mother, highly competent, take-charge women. Some of them owned the family vineyards, which were their personal inheritances. All, naturally, worked in them: travail de la vigne. Their club was a formidable organization that was later to bring members and spouses to inspect the vineyards of Canada's Niagara peninsula. These women told us the story of how they had decided to learn more about vineyard techniques and had asked their local agricultural agent if he would give them a class on pruning (neither their fathers nor their husbands had taught them this skill). He hesitated, he stalled, he finally came - but unfortunately, he had forgotten his pruning shears, so he could not hold the class. They rescheduled the class and bought their own pruning shears. And, as they made clear to us, they understood very well what was going on. From our perspectives, they were already politicized. Garance and the members of the GDAF of Lussac are representative of the farm women we studied in France. Unequal partners, they were coming to see that equality is possible even in the vineyards. We have no equivalent anecdotes for Quebec, where the pattern of stereotyping of work is less striking. Perhaps, also, dairying and mixed farming have less mythic resonance than wine-making. Still, we remember, in the area near Valleyfield, a regional president of the Cercles de fermieres (the rural women's organization that we studied in Quebec) telling us briskly that her three sons picked up a broom when needed - of course! When she visited our respondents in France, she was shocked at the manual labour expected of her counterparts in dairy farming. Her organization, an old one, was far more experienced in overtly political action than the newer French ones. Yet, with all the differences, her attitudes and her life were very like those we were able to record in France. Expectation, habits, and history played comparable though not identical roles in the two countries. We can, we think, map some processes that worked in similar ways for the two groups of women we looked at. Women are capable of pruning vines. They are capable of doing many other things that they do not yet do. But will they? We think they will, if they want to. This book is about 389 of them, rural Catholic women in Quebec and France. What they do and what they want: these are their politics, and the subject of our study.

CHAPTER ONE

Situating the Study "II n'y a rien pour les agricultrices." "There is nothing for farm women."1

This book is first of all an account and analysis of the situation and opinions of 3 89 farm women interviewed near Bordeaux, France, and Valleyfield, Quebec, in the winter of 1988 and the spring of 1989. But as a cross-disciplinary collaboration between a historian and a political scientist, it also represents a deliberate and conscious attempt to carry out feminist research using quantitative analyses. In this study we report on two groups of white, Roman Catholic, married women in North America and Europe with both the hope and the strong belief that it can provide insights applicable - with care - to a larger category we are prepared to label "women." In spite of the risks of co-option and of misdirection, we are convinced that the conventional master-tools of quantitative research can be employed to understand and ultimately to deconstruct the places where they were first crafted. Presenting not just the outcome of our research but also the process, we have tried to find a form that is as transparent and non-technical as possible.2 We begin by turning to the origins of our study, including the theories and previous studies that provide its context. THE O R I G I N S OF THE PROJECT

We first discussed the idea for this study about fifteen years ago. It then waited on the back burner, as previous commitments took precedence. The study that eventually developed bridges a whole section of our lives, and we want this book - this report - to do credit to our experience. We therefore attempt to reflect and to relate faithfully the process of making this particular study. Such a subjective and self-referential

7 Situating the Study presentation is a familiar mode for feminist research, but it fits only uneasily with the formal, largely quantitative framework in which we initially placed our study. For this and other reasons, one of our major concerns is to present our own responses to the attempt to carry out, in a feminist mode, the sort of study we projected.3 Why this study? people asked us. Why there, and why those women? Bordeaux, they said, what fun that must have been, and then they would make gestures of raising wine glasses. But why Valleyfield, and why the two together? The answers include our more specific personal reasons for place and respondents, along with relevant technical reasons. Among the reasons for selecting the Gironde and the south shore of the St Lawrence near Montreal, and "those women," French women and Quebec women alike, were reasons very closely related to who we are, to what other work we had already done, and, most important, to what we wanted to find out as individuals with our particular experience and history. The project as we first planned it was about politics, but the meaning of the notion of "politics" and "the political" was itself at issue. We proposed to extend these concepts to include women's participation in rural women's organizations and also their roles as wives and as participants in the family enterprise. In addition, we included feminism as a political concept because it related to autonomy and control, which in turn defined politics for us. We thought of participation in women's organizations as at least part of a political role, and certainly as training for political activity more conventionally defined. Household activities and opinions seemed important as both structural and attitudinal creators of feminism and therefore as indicators of it. Here also we expected to analyse power structures, those linking husbands and wives on the farm. In effect, we thought it possible that there was an independent agenda of issues to which rural women responded, and responded in ways usually interpreted as non-political or conservative - though not by us. Their response to these issues would in part be mobilized or organized through certain women's groups, these in turn not usually recognized as having any but a constraining political influence on women. Catholic married women, farmers' wives, supposedly the most apolitical and private of women, would be shown to exemplify such a pattern. Farm women and farm women's organizations might be seen, then, to play a role in politics - and possibly in the advancement of women. We hoped to demonstrate this for both Quebec and France. Located in North America, experiencing a Quiet Revolution in the twentieth century instead of a violent one in the eighteenth, Quebec has a different

8

Feminist Politics on the Farm

politics and a different Catholicism from France's. Yet there are historical connections and important social resemblances, so that the rural environments share many features. It made sense to look at both countries as we asked to what degree there was, and remains, a feminist practice and discourse within and around organizations of rural Catholic women. Finally, the study had, we thought, a wider interest. In our view, farm women were intrinsically interesting for those concerned about the relations between public and private domains of human activity. To a much greater extent than for almost all urban women, our respondents' place of residence was the same as the site of the business in which they were involved. They also had a distinctive relationship with their spouses, who were both employers and co-workers. Stated more abstractly, there was no clear separation between reproduction and production for farm women, since their daily lives were characterized by a constant interaction between domestic responsibilities and market-oriented activities. For us, as for our respondents, this was at least potentially a desirable interrelationship. One French farm woman put it this way: "In spite of all difficulties, I love my [farm] work and I love my household just as much, so life is as agreeable as possible."4 Even though things had not worked out as well as this for all farm women, it was not surprising that their collective efforts, both past and present, were based on complementarity rather than competition. For our study we selected two regions we knew to be appropriate for the sort of comparison we had in mind: the area southwest of Montreal centring on the small city of Valleyfield, and the rural area close to the urban agglomeration of Bordeaux, located in the department of the Gironde. A first cluster of reasons for selecting these areas related to the women's organizations we wished to study. These were locations where rural women had a lively group life. The area south of Montreal was the home of a vigorous federation of Quebec's rural women's group, the Cercles de fermieres. This particular federation of cercles, federation 12,, had in the 15)405 successfully resisted Church attempts at control.5 It was also a cercle region, we learned from the provincial president in 1988, that was considered particularly "old fashioned" because it was not identified by members or federation officials as feminist; this was important for our interest in the impact of relatively traditional women's groups.6 In the Gironde we had a French region where the Groupements de vulgarisation (or developpement) agricole feminins (GVAF or GDAF) had persisted even though the men's groupements had been unsuccessful; other regions had both men's and women's groups or just masculine ones. Our organizational examples were therefore best-case versions; they could be thought of as good

9

Situating the Study

possibilities for falsification, for if their members seemed unaffected by club membership, no other groups could be expected to be either (and we would, we vowed, be conservative in extrapolation to any other groups). In both cases we had local contacts that gave us access to the membership of the clubs. Women's agricultural work was not our central concern, in direct contrast with most material available about rural women. Nevertheless, we needed locations where it was realistic to expect that women could have major involvement with the full range of farm activities. The Bordeaux region was particularly useful as a centre of wine production, an activity not intrinsically sex-typed because women as well as men have traditionally been involved in it. The same region also offers a significant number of dairy farms to compare with Quebec's predominant source of farm income; dairying was once virtually a women's monopoly and potentially retains a large claim on their time.7 Most important for our purpose, both areas were still characterized by family farms. The various versions of agribusiness eliminate the family farm's combination of agricultural and domestic work for women, and would have made it impossible for us to examine variety in gender patterns of task assignment and performance. In addition, in both areas farming was relatively prosperous, and farmers and farm wives were unlikely to be working off the farm. At the time of our study generous farm subsidies still protected both French vintners and Quebec producers of dairy products, although France was being pressured by the European Community to reduce its agricultural production, and the meetings of the General Agreement on Trades and Tariffs (now the World Trade Organization) were threatening removal of agriculturalprotection measures. The areas we studied were also heavily Catholic.8 Together they could represent to a plausible degree the rural Catholic environment, including women's groups, that has been analysed in historical but not in contemporary terms. By examining this environment, we could perhaps challenge accepted feminist views about the impact of Catholicism on women's politics. These were also areas we knew and were comfortable with. Francophiles, we had both lived in France, were fluent in French, and had experience doing research in French on French topics; one of us had spent a post-graduate year at the Institut d'Etudes politiques of the Universite de Bordeaux; the other had conducted a study of women textile workers in the Valleyfield area of Quebec. It was also helpful that we both had relatives living in Montreal and friends in Bordeaux. Buried in our life histories, furthermore, are more analytically relevant elements that drove the study and help to explain its origins.

io Feminist Politics on the Farm

Women's work is the central research interest of the historian, traditional women's organizations the focus of attention of the political scientist. Feminists, we compose two-sixths of the collective that in 1988 produced a comprehensive history of Canadian women. To write that history, we had to assess feminism and women's activism in a nation that had a good deal of both but relatively little of their more dramatic versions. Nor do we underestimate the historian's experience as a farm daughter in Ontario, and the political scientist's as an early member of a feminist group considered "liberal" by observers but radical by participants. In part because of this background, both of us had, by the 19805, come to feel that some aspects of current analyses of feminism and women's politics were less than satisfactory. In particular we were dubious about the accounts given of the political attitudes of rural women and rural women's organizations in Europe and North America, in both their historical and their contemporary versions. We disagreed with the way in which such women and such women's groups had been assessed, not just by mainstream history and political science but also by feminist analyses. In Bordeaux, received cordially by feminist academics who had been part of the radical feminist group Psychanalyse et politique, we found them politely sceptical about the theoretical interest of arrierees - backward - rural women; in Toronto we found colleagues equally doubtful that farm women could be either feminist or politically engaged. Such views seemed to us contrary to the openness feminism should show and, above all, contrary to our own experience. As we talked with rural women in both Canada and France, we found ourselves saying to them: Many scholars think you are backward, unpolitical, unimportant. Yes, they would reply, we know this is what they say. But they are wrong. We were well aware that, on the family farm, the overlap of the roles of spouse and employer had huge potential for multiplying women's oppressions. According to both class and gender analysis, rural women were sleeping with their enemies (we came to read a new interpretation into that accusation). Clearly also there were large possibilities of cooption into merely coping, into glorifying a subordinate status. All the same, our shared theoretical perspectives along with our prior research and experience suggested to us that there might be something in farm women's insistence that they did not need/want/aspire to work off the farm or be paid for their farm work. Public and private are very close in space on the family farm, imbricated in daily practice; the impact might not, we felt, be all negative. Nor was it obvious to us that cash or its equivalent were the appropriate solutions to farm women's problems, if new solutions were in fact needed.

11 Situating the Study

More generally, as a result of our research and our own experience as feminists, we were dubious about many of the accounts and analyses of feminism and of women's organizations. Too many seemed based on abstract theories unfitted to illuminate the situation of actual women. Others generalized unhelpfully from limited sectors of women's lives. We particularly distrusted the frequent implication that women ought to become more like men. Neither history nor present reality, we thought, bore out such a view. So this is where our project came from. We had good theoretical reasons to focus on rural women and, in relation to them, the areas of our own specialization: women's work and women's organizations. And we had solid justifications for locating our project among the Catholic francophone women of the two areas we selected. SOURCES AND THEORIES

As we designed this project, the role of rural women's organizations was central. In effect, we started with the following central hypothesis: for farmers' wives, participation in a women's organization is a key intervening variable in the process of politicization. By farmers' wives we meant more specifically women married to the operators of family farms; by women's organizations we meant traditional-style rural women's groups; and in both cases we were looking at francophone Catholics. By politics we meant two things: the activities surrounding governments and policy formation, and the structures of power that constitute our society's male-dominated structures of power. By politicization, again we meant two things: involvement in the activities that constitute mainstream politics along with its informal context of civil society, and awareness of the structures of male domination. We did not expect that politicization in the second sense would entail conscious resistance to systemic sexism. Our goal was to show that rural women - rural francophone Catholic women - were political in all senses imaginable, and that their clubs played a key part in their situation. For background and context we turned to Canadian and French history and to studies of the political roles of women, with a particular emphasis on the women of Quebec and France. What we found by the second half of the 19808 was for the most part unsatisfactory. Although women's history has begun to fill in for us the roles of women in the past, and even the study of women in politics has acquired a substantial bibliography, farm women have remained far from the centre of attention, even for feminists. When they are included, they tend, we think, to be treated in the context of an inappropriate model of women's "development" or modernization. If it

iz

Feminist Politics on the Farm

is most blatantly present in the interpretation (or dismissal) of rural women, this modernization model is implicit in a far wider range of discussions of both women and feminism. Conventional accounts of Canadian history first ascribed to farm women a noble but: essentially secondary role as the heroic, selfsacrificing helpmates of those brawny tillers of the soil who conquered the forests and settled the fertile plains. When farm women finally moved to the foreground in historical studies - in feminist women's history - they often did so as foils to urban, middle-class women whose economic, social, and political agendas were distinctive, and sometimes opposed to their own.9 Western Canadian farm women were studied primarily in relation to the suffrage movement, which was most effective on the prairies. Possibly as a result, their early organizations and leaders tended to be favourably portrayed, seen as embracing progressive causes and embodying a distinctive form of women's-rights activism.10 By contrast, farm women in eastern Canada, and particularly those in Quebec - one of our focuses - were described as a conservative social and political force. Their organizations, the Women's Institutes (wis) and their Quebec version, the Cercles de fermieres, suffered from a variety of negative assessments.11 Even more unhelpfully, France's relatively uninfluential women's movement has been portrayed as entirely urban. Rural women appear in the few accounts of French women's activism only in the form of the peasant women who in 1934 listened "open-mouthed" (and presumably uncomprehending) to speeches by Louise Weiss's suffrage group, La Femme Nouvelle.12 We could find very little information about the rural social Catholic women's group the Jeunesse agricole catholique feminine (JACF), even though, on the model of its male counterpart, we can assume it to have been an influential developer of a political role for rural women.13 Indeed, our own subjects, the Groupements de vulgarisation ou de developpement agricole feminins, which can be considered the successors of the JACF, go virtually unnoticed. The present lack of interest in the more traditional farm women's organizations as well as the unfavourable estimate of them can, of course, be attributed to a number of factors. For one thing, the agrarian populations of both Canada and France have declined dramatically in this century. More relevant, though, are the widely held views about farm women themselves - that farm women's social and political attitudes are outmoded, out of step with the times, not "modern." This is the key: modernization, a process that is believed to have left rural women unchanged. According to standard accounts of modernization, a population "develops" as it moves from rural to urban, from farm to factory, and

13

Situating the Study

from religious to secular. It is assumed that, as modernization occurs, women will become more like men, who are considered to be more modern because of their higher level of participation in the labour force, in trade unionism, and in electoral politics. The lower levels of participation of women in such activities, as well as their relative refusal to place themselves on a left-right scale of political beliefs, are seen as indicators of apathy or ignorance. Nevertheless, modernization will, most analysts assume, eventually produce levels of female employment and secularization and then political attitudes and behaviour resembling those of men.14 This model of modernization has had considerable influence on how rural women have been perceived, as is evident in the few available French analyses. In their frequently cited study of the political behaviour of women in France, for example, Janine Mossuz-Lavau and Mariette Sineau insisted on the primary and central importance of participation in the paid labour force for the politicization of women. Discussing married rural women (in 1981), Mossuz-Lavau and Sineau distinguished between those who were or had formerly been in the paid labour force and those who had never been so engaged; without hesitation they identified the workers and ex-workers as both more politicized and more progressive or "modern".15 A characteristic example of the application of this argument to women's political behaviour in Quebec, published in 1984, took as its starting-point the observation that "the [political] participation of women increases with the decrease in their acceptance of traditional roles." The author continued, "Since modernization appeared so rapidly and so recently for Quebec women, the study of changes in the participation of Quebec women ought to be particularly productive."16 Thus, the rankings implied by modernization have placed at the bottom, or at the back, the traditional feminists of both Canadian and French history as well as our subjects, contemporary farm women who remain outside the paid labour force and firmly committed to family and religious values. Along with absence of experience in the paid labour force, religiosity has taken the most blame for women's backwardness; this is a major part of the argument presented forcefully by Mossuz-Lavau and Sineau. To the extent that rural housewives are practising Catholics, they have been seen as doubly reactionary; to the extent that women's organizations are Catholic in membership or origin, as our examples are, criticisms have multiplied. We should note again that this analysis has not been confined to the study (or nonstudy) of rural women but applied far more widely. The political science critique of women as conservative, for example, has relied heavily on their demonstrated religiosity.17 Rural women are only the extreme example of women's backwardness.

14

Feminist Politics on the Farm

We noticed, however, that even such analyses contain the seeds of possible alternate explanations, directing our attention to housewives' own values and concerns, rural as well as urban. According to MossuzLavau and Sineau, rural housewives "are less politicized than the other rural women and refuse (except at the very limited period of elections) to take part in a conflict that perhaps does not seem to them to be their business; in this way they stay away from the two enemy camps, avoiding bringing either the right or the left into their daily life."18 The authors were, of course, merely speculating, for they had no direct evidence of motivation. Their data are compatible with such women responding to cues and concerns that are perhaps traditional but perhaps also less reprehensible than is often assumed. Other studies have suggested that being Catholic might not mean being hostile to politics or to progressive politics, particularly in the case of women. Thus Mattel Dogan noted many years ago that the "Christian parties" for which women voted disproportionately in Europe "are not parties of the right in the classic sense of the word. Often, because of their Christian concepts and their electoral base, they are more responsive to the claims of disadvantaged social groups and more open to social reform than are the radicals, the liberals, or the other parties that like to think of themselves as leftist."19 Such an interpretation is supported by studies of the content of social Catholicism and the recently documented tradition of Catholic feminism in France.20 For that matter, with respect to the French suffrage movement, we note that Louise Weiss has also commented on how the "braves campagnardes" - stalwart countrywomen - supported the project of votes for women and, in 1932,, assisted the suffragists and pressured their husbands to defeat the notoriously misogynist, anti-suffrage Senator Duplantier.21 In Quebec as well there is substantial evidence that lay Catholic women and their organizations have promoted progressive social causes. Founded in 1907 under the leadership of the Montreal feminist Marie Gerin-Lajoie, the Federation nationale Saint-Jean-Baptiste (FNSJB) addressed an array of social issues, including expanded educational opportunities for French-Canadian girls and women, improved legal rights for married women, and better working conditions for working-class women.22 Although this Catholic feminism frequently led its practitioners into conflict with male clerical authorities, Quebec women activists - most notably Idola St-Jean and Therese Casgrain continued to wage a determined suffrage campaign through the 19108 and 19305 in spite of Church opposition.23 It is usually assumed that rural women obediently adhered to the official Church position and even signed anti-suffrage petitions, but Casgrain at least believed that some rural women supported the suffrage cause.24 For the contempo-

15

Situating the Study

rary period, it seemed likely to us that the enhanced role of feminism within the Catholic Church itself would also be relevant to any assessment of Catholic laywomen; some contemporary Catholic feminism is extraordinarily sensitive and inclusive.2-5 However, Catholic and rural women have remained marginal to the mainstream of both history and political science, even in their feminist versions. When attention has been paid, it has tended to be hostile, in part because historical analyses of the 19705, when women's history first flourished, were strongly influenced by theories emphasizing class and social control. Thus, for example, the FNSJB - created and developed by women from the French Canadian bourgeoisie - was criticized for being elitist, conservative, and ultimately self-serving.2-6 Similar considerations explain the lack of positive or even serious discussion of rural women as political actors, aside from studies of their role in the suffrage movement. We found little in English on the topic of North American or European rural women and politics more recent than 1981.27 In French, aside from Yolande Cohen's important analysis of the history of the Cercles de fermieres, Femmes de parole, which appeared in 1990, when we were already well into our study, the literature on farm women as political actors remains scanty.2-8 At the time we conducted this study, a few French articles had discussed women in agricultural organizations; several articles and one book had focused on the quest for the status of agricultrice.2-9 We also attribute the neglect of rural women's politics more specifically to unvoiced assumptions about the political inactivity or conservatism of farm women, along with the explanations most usually given for the persistent, if decreasing differences that analysts find between the behaviour of men and women in public life. At the end of the 19805 Mossuz-Lavau was still describing European women as "distanced from politics"; in her analysis of a 1989 European Community survey, the only distinction in terms of women's occupations was (still) between those who worked outside the household and those who did not.3° The general view was that rural women were most like women of the past, just as rural sectors of France and Quebec were thought of as the most backward. Rural women therefore were thought to represent a model of female attitudes and behaviour that was in the process of passing away. In such a theoretical context women's organizations, particularly those oriented towards the family, were interpreted as conservative influences sustaining a traditional and constraining version of female roles. The Cercles de fermieres, which were founded in 1915, have been attacked for being under the control of both clergy and state, and for representing an even more conservative and Catholic position

16 Feminist Politics on the Farm

than the FNSJB. 31 Our French groupements feminins, though postwar in origin, have been subject to the same criticisms because they are state-supported auxiliaries of men's organizations and because they have Catholic origins. All this interested us as social scientists. Perhaps these rural women could be thought of as living representatives of a past tradition that had itself often, in our view, been misrepresented.3i This was the context in which we formulated our research project, hoping to show that rural women and their organizations were both more interesting and more progressive than had usually been believed. Looking directly at politics, we began, therefore, with the assumption that Catholicism, domesticity, and rural location were not necessarily reactionary nor incompatible with progress, political activity, and a form of feminism. We were encouraged to find that studies of mass attitudes had occasionally suggested that rural women were less conservative than might be expected. For example, towards the end of the 19705 a cluster analysis of European Community data showed that farm women were grouped among the most feminist of women.33 But what explained farm women's politics if not the constraining forces of domesticity and religion? We thought that the answer would turn out to be linked to the oft-criticized traditional women's groups. We had gathered some present-day evidence to support our interpretation, specifically for farm women. There were a small number of sociological studies of farm populations that included some brief reference to the possibly positive role of rural women's organizations. One French study of life in small towns linked rural women's organizational membership to "openness of social spirit." Among the organizations in question were "associations dealing with the family, consumers' associations, and parent-teachers' associations."34 Similarly, in an extensive analysis focused on farm women's groups (published in 1987) Annie Rieu concluded that "active participation in [agricultural] union activities or in [agricultural] development is a significant indicator of the 'emancipation' of farm women." 35 In a study of a small rural community in Quebec, sociologist Fran Shaver suggested that the cercles performed the same function for women as business clubs did for men.36 Moreover, we could see that farm women in fact had been politically active on occasion, even by relatively conventional measures. We could find only one survey of the existing material on rural women in politics. Prepared in 1981, it found that farm women tended to have a higher level of participation in electoral politics than male farmers and to play a small but increasing role as elected officials.37 Turning to less formal political activities, we noted that a number of new organizations of farm women had appeared in Canada over the previous two

iy

Situating the Study

decades; they included Quebec's Union des productrices agricoles, Ontario's Women for the Survival of Agriculture and Concerned Farm Women, and Saskatchewan's Farm Women's Action.38 Rural women had also been visible in rural protests in France, such as the attempts to block the military appropriation of farmland in the area of Larzac and in more specifically agricultural protests in the 19708 and 19808. At these demonstrations a few of the more radical of the women had reportedly raised issues related to women's status.39 To sum up our position: we expected farm women to be both politically active and politically responsive. And our central interest was in the role of women's organizations, particularly the reputedly conservative rural ones, in nurturing women's political opinions and activism. PROCEDURES AND PROBLEMS: DOING FEMINIST RESEARCH

This was a project that grew out of pre-existing interests and connections, and that did so because of the logic that pulled its parts together. Thus our project was feminist in a deep sense as well as superficially. As we worked on it, we consciously attempted to keep it that way. The task of designing, carrying out, analysing, and writing up this study proceeded in fits and starts, much interrupted and delayed but never entirely put aside; we would argue that such a pattern is characteristic of women's work and particularly of their collaborative work. So too was our procedure for producing this book: we drafted the parts of it separately but reorganized and rewrote it together. We could not have done it separately, and, with respect to both any virtues and the unavoidable errors, it is our joint responsibility. As feminist scholars we felt we could legitimately value our familiarity with and connections to the subjects of our research. One of us was able to live for three months, along with her three children, in St-Christophe-des-Bardes, a tiny hamlet in the area of our surveys in the Gironde; the other joined her there for two intense weeks of contacts and local research. Montreal, an hour by air from Toronto and then an hour by car to our research site near Valleyfield, was home to one researcher's sister and brother-in-law as well the other's daughter, son-inlaw, and an increasing brood of grandsons; we were able to spend time there frequently and to consult members of the Cercles de fermieres as we drafted the questionnaire. When the questionnaire had been pretested in Quebec, we returned to France, carrying ninety pounds of questionnaires, to select and train French interviewers. Six months later we were back in the Gironde for a first presentation of results shortly after the interviewing had been completed. Such immersion in the

18 Feminist Politics on the Farm

locales gave a participant-observer flavour to our work even though we did not administer the surveys ourselves. We were also able to involve the organizations we were studying in our research activities, and this helped us immeasurably. We had originally planned a fairly conventional survey, with graduate students as interviewers preparing taped records that would be transcribed. Instead, for what were initially reasons of economy and convenience, we decided to employ local women as interviewers and to dispense with the taping. In Quebec the interviewers were members of the Cercles de fermieres, co-ordinated for us by a former president of federation 12. In France, local conseilleres agricoles who worked closely with the clubs identified the interviewers for us. The wife of the principal of the small local elementary school attended by the visiting researcher's children co-ordinated the French team for us; although not a member of any rural women's organization, she had lived in the area all her life and was a devout Catholic. In both places club presidents supplied lists of club members' names and locations, and helped us throughout the process; the mother-in-law of one club president and the daughter of another were among the interviewers. The survey thus became to a considerable extent a project of the cercles and the gfs. These contacts have consistently been productive for us in terms of the project itself. The summer after the field-work was completed we were able to organize an international conference in Bordeaux, attended by our Quebec and French co-ordinators as well as some Quebec and French academics and several members of the Lussac GDAF, marshalled by its president. Representatives of the relevant agricultural organizations in the Bordeaux area also attended, continuing their earlier helpfulness in giving us access to the archival material on the gfs. The conference expanded the conventional formula of a French academic conference, so that a day of formal sessions with academic researchers was preceded by a day at the Salle des vignerons at Lussac, including a preliminary presentation of data. Throughout the sessions the rural women participants challenged academic interpretations of gender relations; the example of the far more politicized Quebec clubs was noted by the members of the French ones. The resultant publication, the conference Actes, included the presentations made by three gf presidents as well as the Quebec spokesperson for the cercles.40 The next summer a group from the Lussac GDAF organized a trip to Canada, and we shared with them a day's tour of the Niagara wineries. In the summer of 1993 we were able to make an additional trip to Bordeaux; the additional interviews we conducted then helped us in our analyses. And as late as the summer of 1995 Bordeaux visitors to Toronto helped us to sort out categories and translations in our manu-

19 Situating the Study script. Our respondents have supported this study enthusiastically at every stage; we hope that they will find it interesting. In general, our efforts to be open and participatory enhanced our research. As we worked through the data, we repeatedly found an absence of consistent pattern. If we had not known our subjects, we might have read these results as indicating a shallow and uninteresting relationship to political life. Instead, with the image of those women before us, we turned with more emphasis to interpretation of the measures and findings we had to deal with. This process was given resonance by the quality of the data we garnered.41 Helped by the glosses of the interviewers, we were able to have considerable confidence in the responses. For example, given that one respondent was pointed out to us as living en concubinage although she said she was married, we were the more confident that the rest of our subjects were in fact legally married (and that she could be included as if she were). Nevertheless, we had some major problems with data and with interpretation, problems we were not fully aware of until well into our analysis of the results of a lengthy and complex survey instrument. Against all our intentions, our schedule of questions finally had 112. items, many of them requesting ranked lists of responses. Three questions were open-ended, and asked for definitions of contentious concepts: left-right, politics, and feminism. In addition, many of our questions were directed at difficult, potentially private areas of belief and practice. We had been warned that Quebeckers would not talk about sex and the French would not report on politics. These reticences did not occur as predicted, and we now read back into those warnings an unrecognized denigration of women who were assumed to be too ignorant or too embarrassed to discuss serious issues. However, we had other problems related to data, beginning with the scarcity of baseline information. We had deliberately designed the questions to be comparable to the existing formulas of questioning about political behaviour and attitudes. In practice, this meant that we relied on questions posed repeatedly by the Eurobarometer surveys, the European Communities' public-opinion surveys begun in 1975, which had been virtually the only mass studies to ask explicit questions about women's views relating to politics and feminism. But Eurobarometer itself included little material about conventional political participation, and it became clear that there was little national evidence to replace or put beside the findings of Eurobarometer. We were, it seemed, penalized by our selection of sites: neither France nor Canada had good data available about mass-level political behaviour and attitudes, for these countries have not formed part of the various cross-national studies of such dimensions of politics, and France has carried out only infre-

2.0 Feminist Politics on the Farm

quently the sort of election studies common in North America.42 As a result, it was virtually impossible to establish local contexts for women's political participation in the countries we were studying. Given the dearth of material about women and politics in France and Canada, it is not surprising that we could find very little quantitative information specifically related to farm women's political views and behaviour. By and large, those who have surveyed farm women mainly specialists in rural sociology - have been interested in issues relating to agricultural work and status, and not in activities that might relate to the public worlds of formal or informal politics. Because of our own inclusive understanding of politics, we were able to draw to some extent on those surveys' repertoire of basic demographic characteristics, as well as on their material on women's involvement in farm work and in agricultural and domestic decision-making. However, farm women have been surveyed systematically only once in Quebec; the study is reported in Suzanne Dion's Les Femmes dans I'agriculture au Quebec.^ The only substantial recent survey of North American farm women was conducted by Rachel Rosenfeld and others for the United States Department of Agriculture in 1980, while the other surveys conducted in France or Canada have been much smaller and far more limited in scope (see the descriptions in Appendix B). Most recently, Louise Carbert applied our questionnaire, somewhat modified, in a heuristically interesting study of 117 married anglophone farm women in southern Ontario; however, the results are only intermittently comparable to ours.44 A second set of problems related more directly to our own data and our doubts about it. Because we used questions that have been widely used, as well as soliciting expert help in setting up the questionnaire and conscientiously pre-testing, it was only during a fairly advanced stage of analysis that more basic difficulties emerged. We were then amazed and sometimes appalled at how many of the questions, widely used or not, were unclear or ambiguous. For example, we are still not sure of the meaning of answers to a question about whether the respondent approved of "those women who would like to make the roles of men and women more alike." This notion always receives a high level of approval in European studies and was even more highly favoured in ours. We guess that it means wanting women's roles equally valued at least as often as it means changing them to be more like men's - but we have no way of proving this. And in this case interpretation matters, for the question has been relatively frequently used in studies of feminism, as we discuss in chapter 5. Doubt about this particular question obviously leads to doubt about many other formulations that are currently accepted - the more so in light of the responses to our open-

2,1 Situating the Study

ended questions about respondents' understanding of the key terms "politics" and "feminism." Another problem related to the quantity and specificity of responses. We had pre-coded answers as often as possible, trying to force responses into clear distinctions and into comparability with other studies, trying also to make the respondents pre-sort and rank the information required. Interviewers and respondents alike resisted this discipline, repeatedly insisting on recording more choices than we asked for or inserting alternatives we had not foreseen. We were consequently obliged to accept less clearly delimited responses than we might have hoped for, and less easily interpreted ones. More important, we found that we had a substantial amount of data that we felt we could not use for more than very gross distinctions. For example, we tried to tabulate the amount of domestic or agricultural work performed, only to find that respondents often listed more hours per week than was physically possible. Although such responses have psychological plausibility, they are not appropriate for analyses of correlations. As a result, not only were we uncomfortable about our own figures, but we came to distrust other analysts' conclusions based on responses to similar questions. In part because of such struggles with quantitative data, we were slow to examine our initial conceptualization of our respondents' situation and activities. That is, dissatisfaction with data contributed to delaying reconsideration of our initial premises. Then, when we came to the final stages of analysis, we began to query the way in which we had framed the study theoretically. At an advanced stage of the project we found that we were re-examining our own articulation of the relationship between women and politics. We do not think that there is anything exceptional about the process we went through. The mechanics of acquiring and processing data are complex and absorbing. The temptation to limit oneself to mere description is a major one, more so if the number of subjects is sufficiently large that sophisticated analyses seem appropriate. Social science research seldom generates a degree of certainty great enough actually to prove anything. Anything more likely or unlikely than chance is in fact interesting. All researchers wish they had asked different, or more, or better questions. We are different only in wanting to be explicit about what we found or failed to find. With such views we could not simply, as we had expected, insert our own data into the conventional analyses of rural women, satisfied to show that other scholars had maligned our subjects by failing to recognize a creditable level of participation (which they had). Nevertheless, we traced our respondents through all the categories of "normal" po-

22 Feminist Politics on the Farm

litical action as far as our data would allow. Then, continuing to work with mainstream assumptions and categories, we compared subgroups within our sample, looking at possible variations in level of activity or in attitudes, not just between club members and non-members but also between officers and others among the club members. Next, still following mainstream approaches, we also looked at the basically nonpolitical characteristics usually given credit or blame for affecting women's political activity and attitudes: age, paid labour, religiosity, children, education. This part of our study amounted, in effect, to reviewing and dismissing the standard ways of evaluating women's politics through survey data. For the second major part of our analysis we shifted attention to the somewhat more interesting areas of inquiry opened up by those feminist analysts who have moved away from the constraints of the ordinary academic indicators and definitions of politics. We looked at the informal pressure activities of women's organizations; we looked at reactions to the women's movement; and we looked at feminism. Finally we looked at what now seem to us, from a "political" point of view, the most significant questions we posed: the inquiries about task allocations and decision-making on the farm, along with some related questions about sexuality and self-identification (as farmer or housewife or alternative roles). The last substantive section of this book, which we call "private politics," discusses these questions. Here we speculate about the content of some sort of domestic ideology and also about the theoretical implications of what we found in these farm households. In our concluding chapter we attempt to reassess the approaches we have tried, as well as to suggest some new directions. When we were discouraged about this study, we told each other that at least we had a unique new set of information about a group of women not often analysed. This is true, and gives us an additional reason for reporting the series of inquiries that both conventional and feminist-extended social science would expect. There is a basic inconsistency in this procedure, of course, for incompatible assumptions about the nature of politics underlie the different stages. In this account we initially ignore these inconsistencies, proceeding first of all to place our subjects in relation to other women studied as political actors. But we always also look specifically at what our subjects' attitudes and behaviour tell us about their politics and whether their institutional membership is related to it. We have no doubt of the value of what we were attempting to do. It is extremely important to know how people understand the world, what they actually do and believe. Survey research, including the statistical analysis of its results, is one of the few ways we can imagine to

Z3

Situating the Study

find out what people believe (or, at least, will say about what they believe). Our own sample of 389 cases is large enough to overcome some of the limitations that come from the very small groups that feminists are likely to end up with because of their concern for specificity and detail. One of our consultants, a specialist in survey research, told us approvingly that our sample, large enough for statistical generalizations, was also small enough to be personally familiar to us on an almost anthropological basis. We were delighted with that comment - but in fact our individual respondents were neither identifiable nor known to us personally. At the same time our general descriptions, if coarse-grained, at least minimize the temptation to make easy generalizations based on a few striking cases. We shall begin the presentation of this inquiry by telling, in the next two chapters, about the organizations around which we organized our study and then about the women we studied.

CHAPTER TWO

Farm Women's Organizations "Nous possedons un drapeau dans les couleurs vert, jaune et blanc: le jaune signifie le moisson, le vert signifie 1'environnement, le blanc signifie la recherche de 1'authenticite et la verite." "Our club flag is green, yellow, and white: yellow stands for the harvest, green stands for the environment, and white stands for the search for authenticity and truth." J

Our first approach to our respondents was historical, looking at records of the rural organizations to which they belonged. In the following sections we outline the evolution of the specific objectives, membership, and programs of the two associations to which half the respondents belonged, and then describe their participation in these organizations. In later chapters we shall deal with the impact of the organizations on those members we studied. We start with the Cercles de fermieres, the older and better-documented of the groups/ THE E V O L U T I O N OF THE C E R C L E S DE F E R M I E R E S

The cercles were created and financed by the Quebec Ministry of Agriculture and Colonization, beginning in 1915, as part of its attempt to stem the rural exodus that threatened Quebec's traditional economic and social structures. The farm wife was frequently better educated than her husband, kept the family account books, made a significant economic contribution to the farm through her unpaid labour, and acted as a close adviser to her husband. Accordingly, she was considered a crucial element in the attempts of both Church and state to keep French Canadians on the farm. 3 The purpose of the new groups was to provide training and support for farm women in both their homemaking and their agricultural tasks. By encouraging women to engage in revenue-generating activities such as bee-keeping and poultry raising, spinning and weaving, and to learn new household techniques emerging from the domestic science movement, government officials hoped to keep them - and therefore their families - firmly attached to the land.

2.5

Farm Women's Organizations

Surprisingly enough, it was via Belgium that most Quebeckers were introduced to the Women's Institute movement that had begun in Stoney Creek, Ontario, in 1897. When the first Cercles de fermieres were established in Quebec, there were already thirteen Women's Institutes (wis) in the province, located primarily in Protestant anglophone areas such as the Eastern Townships.4 As in Ontario, Quebec's provincial government provided subsidies for the wis and paid the salaries of domestic science demonstrators. However, the cercles as we know them were established independently of the existing wis. Paul de Vuyst, an official in the Belgian Department of Agriculture, learned of the wis while on a trip to Toronto in 1904. When he became principal inspector of agriculture in Belgium a year later, he used his position to promote similar groups in his own country. In 1906 the first cercle was formed in Flanders, and by the following year a similar group had been established in the French-speaking part of Belgium. In several localities the associations grew out of existing rural Catholic domestic science schools, so that although they were technically secular as well as subsidized by the government, they had close links with the Catholic Church from the start. By the beginning of the First World War the Belgian Catholic Church had succeeded in gaining control of the movement, justifying its claim for dominance by Catholicism's legal monopoly over education in Belgium.5 Paul de Vuyst's work caught the attention of Georges Bouchard and Alphonse Desilets, two Quebec agronomists who were to be jointly responsible for the first cercles in Quebec. They drew heavily on the objectives and structures of the Belgian cercles in their own efforts to deal with the problems of rural depopulation. Like De Vuyst, they emphasized the need for the modernization of rural life and the importance of scientific education for farm women and for the professionalization of their work.6 According to Desilets, "The Belgian Cercles de fermieres and those in Canada, especially in our province, share a single goal: to create a sense of professional duty among rural women."7 Desilets maintained direct control of the establishment and development of the cercles for a considerable period: he created in 1920 and personally directed until 1929 a new domestic economy section of the Ministry of Agriculture, upon which the cercles were to be dependent for expertise and resources. It was Desilets, therefore, who initially made the decisions regarding the structure and functioning of these associations, and it was he who gave approval to groups of women who wished to constitute themselves as officially recognized cercles. He insisted that they obtain the support of their local agronomist and parish priest, although the written constitution of the cercles did not require the approval of the local cure until 193 8.8

z6

Feminist Politics on the Farm

The degree of control that farm women as such had over the cerdes is unclear. Certainly, after the first groups were created by Desilets, francophone rural women quickly seized the opportunity to constitute their own organizations. However, although the groups were designed primarily with farm women in mind, membership was open to all women living in rural areas and villages. In the 19205 apparently about 70 per cent of the members were from farms, but by the middle of the following decade the figure was only 60 per cent.9 Furthermore, at least in the earlier days, the wives of village notables, rather than farmers' wives, held the key executive offices of the local organizations.10 In any case, the extensive research about the cerdes recently completed by Yolande Cohen and her research team at the Universite du Quebec a Montreal suggests that, whatever their membership, the cerdes enjoyed a considerable degree of autonomy despite the framework of male control.11 In the years following 1925 there were so many groups forming that it was impossible for Desilets to exercise complete control over them. In 192.9 he passed direction of the cerdes over to Anne-Marie Vaillancourt; at the same time a provincial council was established to act as a liaison between the local cerdes and the Service d'Economie domestique of the Ministry of Agriculture.12 By the early 19408 there were over 700 cerdes, with a total membership exceeding 30,000. The trend towards greater independence from the ministry was reinforced after 1941 by the creation of regional federations that provided more opportunity for the executive members to frame the movement's agenda.13 In addition, from a very early date the leaders of the cerdes were brought into contact with women from other parts of Canada and the world, for they were among the founding members of the Federated Women's Institutes of Canada in 1919 and of the Associated Country Women of the World in 1933.14 The cerdes served rural women in a variety of significant ways. To begin with, they provided the opportunity for an enlarged sociability, an escape from the geographical and psychological isolation experienced by women bound for the most part to their homes. It is not surprising that the cerdes were especially popular in the more isolated areas of the province, such as the Abitibi and the Lac-St-Jean regions. We were to find that similar motivation for membership was still strong more than half a century later. Furthermore, in addition to addressing their social needs, the cerdes initially offered farm women an opportunity to enhance their economic role and to elevate their social status through the public recognition of the importance of their domestic labour. Desilets and his officials sponsored instructors and provided subsidies for purchase of the equipment and materials that cercle members needed to increase their domestic

27 Farm Women's Organizations

production. Common projects included spinning, weaving, poultryraising, and bee-keeping. The Ministry of Agriculture also organized and subsidized regional and provincial exhibitions and sales of the members' products, and produced a journal for the cercles.*5 The organizers of the cercles were engaged in an attempt to reaffirm and defend rural women's roles as artisans, in much the same way as nineteenth-century labour organizers sought to help craftsmen retain their control over production and maintain their socio-economic status within industrial capitalism. Rural life in Quebec changed rapidly during and immediately following the First World War. The rural exodus accelerated as many individuals and families opted for the wages and amenities of urban areas. At the same time, the remaining rural parishes were subject to the influence of rapidly expanding urban centres. New modes of transportation and communication as well as new technologies and values penetrated the countryside, and the farm population was bombarded with alternatives to economic self-sufficiency. Through their catalogues and advertising, merchants urged farm women to lighten their load by purchasing the multitude of domestic products that modern industry could provide. In this context, the focus on craftwork such as sewing and weaving artisanat — that developed within the cercles should not be judged by present-day and masculine standards. Rather than indicating a lack of organizational substance and a preoccupation with the inconsequential, in the interwar period artisanat exemplified the various aspects of farm women's experience that the organization was attempting to validate. Domestic skills were worthwhile because they enabled the farm wife to improve the economic situation of her family by reducing the need to purchase manufactured products. In addition, because her products could be sold to supplement the family's income, she would be able to make a direct economic contribution to the budget of the farm. Several cercles formed their own co-operatives to market the members' handmade articles, and an annual provincial exhibition was held at Dupuis Freres department store in Montreal in order to promote sales. Spinning and weaving in particular not only represented a financial contribution to the family but were also highly regarded for their symbolic value in terms of both national traditions and women's specificity. For all these reasons the cercles repeatedly petitioned the government for instructors and for the equipment necessary to mount courses to increase household production. They also actively promoted domestic education for young women in Quebec through the domestic science schools. By 1933 there were already 166 cercles claiming a total membership of 5,975 members. However, a more remarkable rate of growth was

28

Feminist Politics on the Farm

yet to occur: just six years later, in 1939, there were 560 cercles with 28,759 members.16 This growth in turn stimulated increased interest within the province's Roman Catholic hierarchy, as well as concern about the nature of the cercles. The issue of Church control was an important one. Although the initial impulse for organizing rural women came from government agents, it was rooted in the Catholic Social Action movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Before a cercle was officially recognized and made eligible for government assistance, it had to obtain the approval of the parish priest. Each club was also required to appoint a chaplain, and at the 192,7 provincial congress a resolution was passed asking that the archbishop of Quebec appoint a provincial chaplain, which he did the following year. With their motto, Pour la Terre et le Foyer (for land and home), and their strong emphasis on the importance of the rural family in the context of the Catholic faith and tradition, the cercles articulated a vision of French Canadian society close to that of the Church. Nevertheless, by the 19308 certain elements of the clergy as well as nationalist ideologues viewed the cercles with suspicion. Inspired by papal encyclicals and the ideas of corporatism, they stressed the need for Catholics to be gathered into professional associations organized by the Church and completely independent of the state. Since the rapidly expanding cercles were created and financed by the provincial government, they were suspect in traditional eyes, especially after 1939, when the Liberals came to power in Quebec.17 The Liberal premier, Adelard Godbout, granted Quebec women the provincial vote in 1940 despite the vociferous opposition of the Church hierarchy. One year later his administration launched a new official magazine for the cercles. It had the slightly but significantly different title of La Terre et Le Foyer: still referring to "land" and "hearth," it had dropped the proselytizing "for." This publication was distributed free to all members and was much more directly under government control than the earlier publications had been. The episcopacy was concerned about such close ties to non-Catholic institutions, and perhaps feared the electoral support the fermieres might accord to a secularist government to which women felt indebted for the vote. Perhaps the clergy also felt that the associations' members were becoming too independent: one cure was reported to have opposed the establishment of a cercle in his parish because he felt the monthly meetings would interfere with the performance of familial duties.18 Moreover, the cercles' affiliation with the Associated Country Women of the World, in which secular, anglophone women's organizations played a leading role, could hardly have reassured the Quebec clergy. It has also been suggested that the clergy hoped to increase the influence of the

2,9

Farm Women's Organizations

33,000-member Union des cultivateurs catholiques (ucc), which had been set up in 1918 as a professional association for male farmers, by transforming the 45,000 fermieres into auxiliary members (note the comparative figures of membership).19 In 1944 the Quebec bishops issued a statement in which they announced their official condemnation of the cercles, along with the creation of a rival, Church-affiliated organization, the Union catholique des fermieres (UCF). The central focus of the new association was the reinforcement of Catholicism among rural women; the provision of domestic science courses designed to improve farm life was an important but distinctly secondary consideration.20 However, despite varying degrees of pressure exerted by parish priests to resign memberships in the Cercles de fermieres and join the UCF, only a minority of cercle members appear to have heeded the bishops' directive. It has been estimated that only about ten thousand members - approximately one in five did so. The members of federation 12, the area in which our study was located, were particularly unresponsive.21 According to one of the cercles' official chroniclers, the vast majority of members refused to change their affiliation because they wished to avoid male control: "Did the ucc want to gobble up the whole cake? ... After being taken to its bosom, the cercles would lose their autonomy, they would have to support the attitudes, the orientations, and the demands of those men, and that would create a fine commotion - in the name of family unity - if the women did not share their opinions."22 The loyalty of cercle members to their groups was still being tested as late as 1960 by priests whose tactics included refusing to celebrate mass at conferences sponsored by the Cercles de fermieres or even inviting UCF chaplains to address cercle meetings.23 Even after the establishment of the UCF, and despite the acceleration of rural depopulation in the 19505, membership in the cercles continued to increase. However, although the official statistics kept by the government after 1935 do not indicate what proportion of the membership continued to be farm women, there is little doubt that the percentage of non-farm members increased. By 1986, 52. per cent of the members of federation 12, were women, drawn mainly from small country towns, who did not live on farms.24 In 1996, when the membership of the federation reversed its decline, the two hundred new members were mainly from villages rather than farms.25 Despite the growing participation of non-farm women after the Second World War, the objectives of the cercles remained largely the same. There were, however, some noticeable shifts in priorities and also in the language employed. In 1947, for example, the organization formally declared that it would publicly discuss social issues, starting with a sur-

30 Feminist Politics on the Farm

vey of the economic value of the work performed by women in the home.26 Eight years later the annual congress urged the government committees dealing with the long-overdue reform of the Quebec Civil Code to increase their efforts to improve the legal rights of married women in the province.27 Members were frequently reminded that it was important for them to be informed about public issues. As their official magazine put it, "directly or indirectly, all women will participate one day or another in public life." The statement continued, "Naturally we interpret the term 'public' in the broad sense."28 By the 1960s the status of women was an important public issue, and one that the cercles increasingly stressed. The provincial charter obtained in 1968 stipulated that a central goal was "to promote and develop the material, cultural, and social interests of women."29 In 1980 provincial president Marielle Primeau recalled that improving women's situation and addressing the division of labour between women and men had already been priority issues when she was president of her local cercle fifteen years earlier.30 Increasingly, the issues selected by the fermieres' leaders for action resembled those that animated urban feminists, including child care, violence against women, pornography, sex education, protection of the environment, and pensions for homemakers. At the regional adminstrative council meeting of federation 12 in November 1987, topics discussed included environmental and consumer issues, sexually transmitted diseases, and aid to developing countries. By 1997 environmental issues had become a central concern, along with attention to "women's" issues such as domestic violence. The major difference from the stance of other contemporary women's groups was that the cercles continued to situate their call for reforms in the context of the traditional family. Two of their major objectives, as identified by the 1968 charter, were the promotion of family stability and the continued survival of "worthy traditions."31 In their response to the far-reaching study published in 1978 by the Quebec Status of Women Council, they emphasized their differences from the council's political orientation, which they felt focused too much on the individual rather than on the family. They also criticized the report for not paying enough attention to the social and economic disadvantages suffered by full-time homemakers, for not addressing the issues of the province's declining birth rate and the foetus's right to life, and, in general, for the absence of reference to Quebec's Catholic, Christian traditions.32 The cercles' move towards embracing some of the contemporary urban feminists' agenda thus did not include adopting a pro-choice position. A 1971 survey completed by over 31,000 members showed that 86 per cent were opposed to any liberalization of Canada's abortion law.

31 Farm Women's Organizations

However, in their representations to both the federal and provincial governments the cercles consistently called for more family-planning clinics and for expanded support services for pregnant women.33 This is, we should note, a pattern familiar in other secularized Catholic women's organizations, such as France's Union feminine civique et sociale. During the 19805 membership in the cercles declined, from a reported 74,000 members in 1984 to 68,000 by 1987.34 There is little doubt also that the membership increasingly tended to be made up of older women who were relatively long-time members. Cohen reported in 1989 an average age of 57 for members province-wide.35 The median age of the Quebec club members we questioned was in fact fiftythree, and three-quarters of them had belonged to the organization for at least ten years. The literature suggests that this shift in membership, also found in other traditional women's organizations, was the result of younger women in rural areas combining off-farm labour with their farm and domestic responsibilities, or of their preference for organizations with a reputation for being more activist. By 1994 the cercles were down to 39,000 members, though a resurgence brought them up to 41,400 two years later, and the numbers were clearly continuing to increase. The group had mounted a campaign targeting women in their thirties, and there was a degree of responsiveness; economic conditions had in any case lessened opportunities for women to find paid work off the farm, while day-care facilities continued to be inadequate.36 What seems to have been constant in recent years is the main motivation for joining the cercles. Among our respondents, about two-thirds of relatively new members - those who had been members for less than ten years - had joined to make social contacts, approximately the same percentage as among women who had joined more than twenty years earlier. However, the other primary motivation for members joining in the early days, as reported by analysts such as Cohen - that of acquiring skills to engage in artisanat or cottage industries - no longer seems very important. Despite the persistent image of the cercles as primarily devoted to handicrafts, only thirteen of the hundred members we interviewed included an interest in such activities among their reasons for joining, and only two indicated that it was their primary reason.37 In the 19905 a greater interest in the actual conditions of family life was reflected in programming that endeavoured to educate members about their rights: notaries and social workers were invited to address meetings on issues including marital regimes and family violence. Looking forward to a future when the shrinking agricultural sector would offer even fewer opportunities for young women, federation 12. established a $2,000 scholarship to support a student in training for a non-traditional career such as engineering.38

3 2 Feminist Politics on the Farm

Clearly, the cercles have survived, although they have not survived unchanged. Let us now turn to their younger sisters, the rural groupements feminins in France. LES G R O U P E M E N T S DE V U L G A R I S A T I O N ET DE DEVELOPPEMENT AGRICOLE FEMININS

We should begin with the titles of these groups, which represent two post-war waves of rural organization in France. Vulgarisation refers to a long-established tradition of mass education outside the formal educational system, usually aimed at adults; many French women's groups are to be found engaged in these activities, which have a special status under the French laws regulating organizational life. Developpement has more ambitious social and political implications, but in fact the "development" groups have inherited the standing and structure of their more narrowly educational "vulgarization" predecessors. We use the abbreviation gfs to underline the fact that these were groupements feminins - women's organizations. Although the earliest of the groupements feminins were established almost half a century after the Cercles de fermieres, the similarities between the two organizations, past and present, are striking. The first rural agricultural groupements, which were for men only, represented an attempt by government, social reformers, and farmers in France to restructure agriculture in that country after the massive dislocation created by the Second World War. Whether masculins or feminins, groupements were like the Cercles de fermieres in being rooted in the doctrines of Catholic Social Action. The connection is closer for the groupements, as they were direct organisational descendants of the Jeunesse agricole catholique (JAC) movement, the rural equivalent of the Church's drive to organize young urban workers in Jeunesse ouvriere catholique (joe) groups.39 Founded in France in 1929, the JAC rapidly became one of the most influential movements in the country. As one of the few studies of the JAC notes: "A guiding principle of this youth movement was that even before speaking of religion it was necessary to be fully aware of the realities of social, economic and cultural life in the countryside. Observation of everyday life, of the economic conditions of farming, of the relationships between different rural groups was an intrinsic part of the JAC program."40 Jacistes were committed to organizing farmers into professional associations and to popularizing new agricultural techniques in order to prevent the proletarianization of the French peasantry. In 1933 an aux-

33

Farm Women's Organizations

iliary women's movement was launched in the form of the Jeunesse agricole catholique feminine (JACF), intended to address a crucial problem facing many rural communities, the exodus specifically of young women. It did so by focusing on issues such as the isolation, heavy work demands, and poor living conditions that made farm women's lives unappealing. Sharing the goals and structure of the JAC, the JACF undertook surveys and in general attempted to mobilize rural women to their collective interests. The organization broke down their isolation, gave them opportunities to learn new techniques by organizing stages (study sessions), and provided them with practical advice on how to improve their material conditions. By 1938 there were approximately 12,000 members of the JACF, and its journal, La Jeunesse agricole feminine, claimed a circulation of 86,ooo.41 The JAC and the JACF remained strong through the early post-war years, and young people trained in their ranks increasingly assumed key positions in local, departmental, and national rural organizations. The movement's orientation towards modern, progressive agriculture was reinforced in April 1959, when the government promulgated a Charte de Vulgarisation that stressed the need to raise farmers' living standards by increasing their productivity. The vehicle for this goal was to be the new groupement de vulgarisation (popular education group), designed to bring together the most progressive farmers under the direction of a government-appointed technical adviser, and thus to serve as "the university of the peasant world."41 Women's groups were to follow the same pattern. It was not long, however, before farmers began to question this approach, for its heavy emphasis on technical innovation and its formal hierarchical structure favoured the imposition of decisions from above. What the farmers' associations sought was a more comprehensive orientation that would take into account their social and political concerns as well as their economic situation. Farmers wanted to use collective structures to go beyond the limited goal of increased production and to direct agricultural development in each region. More important, they wanted to assert greater control over the process of change, so that the government would be more responsive to their point of view. As a result, in a 1966 French government decree the concept of vulgarisation was superseded by that of developpement.43 The groupement remained the key to the program, but in most cases the name was changed from groupement de vulgarisation to groupement de developpement to reflect the new direction. More specifically, the women's groupements, like the cercles in Quebec, were born of agricultural experts' recognition of the importance of incorporating farmers' wives into the process of modernizing agricul-

34 Feminist Politics on the Farm ture. In 1977 rural women's role was still as crucial in France as it had been in Quebec in 1915. A national conference explained the logic of the women's groups as follows: "Rural depopulation often begins with the dissatisfaction and departure of women and young people. Collective action undertaken by women recreates a social network, makes women dynamic, and gives them a taste for rural life. The group facilitates the taking of responsibilities, and women are sensitive to the need to organize to assume them better. They carry this 'participation virus' to other organizations, and that also becomes a development factor for the region."44 The groupements feminins responded as well to the desire of farm women to gain professional status for their work at a time when the vast majority were recorded in the census as sans profession (without occupation). In the words of the historian of the JAC, although the agricultural Orientation Laws of 1960 and 1962 laid the basis for the modernization of French agriculture and "implicitly recognized" the economic role of farm women, "the legislative place of the woman was non-existent, for legally the farm remained in male hands; it was his labour that was recognized and counted; his was the signature required for economic transactions."45 The lack of recognition for their economic contribution was one of the major concerns expressed by a thousand farm women who were surveyed in the department of the Gironde in 1976, an area including the cantons in which we were to conduct our survey. One respondent stated: "Like many farmers' wives, I would like to have a status that recognized our work. For some years the elimination of hired men has made us into agricultural workers. In this capacity, as in that of the mother at home, it would be only fair if we were no longer 'without occupation.'"46 The women also wanted to gain access to modern technology, to learn new techniques to make their own work more efficient and rewarding, and in general to improve the quality of life in rural areas. According to the same 1976 study, 48 per cent of Gironde farm households did not have indoor toilet facilities; 58 per cent lacked telephones; and nearly 40 per cent of the women who milked cows did so by hand.47 In addition, the practice of "cohabitation" - the sharing of one farm, and often one household, by two generations of one family - resulted in heavy burdens and severely constrained autonomy for young wives.48 Neither rural amenities nor cohabitation were regarded as important problems by the male owners of family farms or the organizations they ran. Since farm women lacked professional status and therefore had very limited direct access to state-supported agricultural organizations, it was essential for them to establish their own groupings.

3 5 Farm Women's Organizations

Between 1960 and 1980, twenty-seven gfs were organized in the Gironde, nearly all between 1961 and 1964. Initially, their programming resembled what had been offered by the JACF movement, for the focus was on the dissemination of expert knowledge relating to the household and family. In the next fifteen years, moving towards the present, however, the accent shifted more to animation, the individual and collective development of the members. Today rural women are no longer thought of as mere consumers of knowledge but rather as actors with a triple role: professional, familial, and social.49 A significant proportion of the members we interviewed had experienced the changes in the gfs first-hand, since just over half had belonged to their group for ten years or more.50 When we asked about their motives for joining, they spoke of wanting to establish contact with other women, to acquire information, and to participate in activities. One respondent explained that she joined "to educate myself and to inform myself - [the group] allows me to meet other farm women, it lets me talk, realize that I am not alone in having problems."51 Others stressed their desire to break out of isolation, and the opportunities that the group gave them to develop themselves and to participate more fully in the lives of their communities. Of the three groupements we studied, the oldest was the Groupement feminin de vulgarisation agricole et menagere du Bazadais, established in 1962. According to its first president, the group originated from a homemaking course started by the Jeunesse agricole catholique feminine. By the end of the Second World War the direction of this activity had passed to the state-run agricultural agency, the Mutualite sociale agricole (MSA). Involved in providing various types of insurance to the farming population, this agency needed to promote community solidarity and successful farming practices. It also had an interest in ensuring that no significant gap occurred between the technical development of the farm enterprise and the social development of the farm family.52- For their part, the participants in the JACF programs had grown dissatisfied with the homemaking courses because they did not address farm women's principal concerns. Convinced that, in their own words, "women really had nothing," a handful of determined women met to create their own groupement with the assistance of the Mutualhe.53 According to its 1964 statute of incorporation, the gf at Bazas was intended to promote the technical, economic, and social progress of its members, notably by increasing the productivity of their enterprises and improving the income of all those who worked on their farms.54 The MSA agreed to provide the services of a technical adviser (conseillere) in order to help raise the standard of living for the farm women members. Incorporation as a group affiliated with the MSA also

3 6 Feminist Politics on the Farm

gave the women access to funding from local levels of government and from the established, male-dominated agricultural organizations. Membership fees were set at the low figure of five francs per year, then worth approximately one dollar. While their primary objective was economic, the members of the Bazas women's group also wanted to prove to their spouses that they were capable of carrying on their own enterprises, and thereby gain some recognition of their professional role as farm wives.55 One of the first projects they undertook was a study of poultry raising as a means of providing farm women with their own revenue, a modernized version of the egg and poultry money that has historically been so important to farm women. A number of women then formed a poultry cooperative to provide support for members who undertook new ventures such as the production of foie gras. At the time of our study there were approximately twenty-five members of the Bazas group, drawn from nine communes. Some of the members were active as well in a women's collective that operated a ferme-auberge, a restaurant that used agricultural products from their own farms. In 1973 several members of the Bazas group were instrumental in establishing a women's group among the tobacco-producing farms of the area, a CIAPF (centre d'information agricole des planteurs de tabac, feminin).56 Like the gf, the CIAPF had for its goals the social and economic improvement of the agricultural enterprises of its members. The second French organization that we studied, the Groupement feminin de vulgarisation agricole et menagere de Pellegrue-Monsegur, was established one year later than the one in Bazas. In January 1963 thirty-five farm women came together to discuss their common concerns, especially the lack of modern conveniences in rural areas. These women were already aware of the vulgar isation/developpement movement as a result of their husbands' involvement in men's groups.57 By the end of this first meeting twenty-seven women had signed their membership cards; the others felt that they needed to consult with their husbands, reflecting the subordinate role of many French farm women at the time.58 Lussac's group is much younger than the Bazas and Monsegur-Pellegrue groups, for it was set up only in 1979. Its origins were also different, since it was started by one of the MSA'S conseilleres agricoles instead of responding to any direct request from the farm women themselves. It is the only one of the three groups whose title refers to developpement rather than vulgarisation and makes no reference to homemaking. The Lussac GDAF has focused on the professionalization of its members rather more than the others we studied: most of the members are dependent on the highly specialized wine industry for their livelihood.

37 Farm Women's Organizations

All three groups fulfil essentially the same functions. They provide farm women with an opportunity to share and validate their experiences, to learn about new technologies that have the potential to transform their work, and to exchange information and ideas. These goals are clearly reflected in the programming of their monthly meetings, which is developed by the members in conjunction with the MSA adviser. By the 19805 the three groups were regularly sponsoring courses relating to subjects such as farm accounting, communication, health, education, and the legal, social, and financial status of farm spouses. The longer courses sponsored by the gfs are normally open to nonmembers as well, and respond to needs identified by farm women. The zoo-hour courses in accounting are particularly popular, here as elsewhere, for farm women are increasingly involved in keeping the farm accounts and in preparing essential financial documents.59 At the same time, more traditional preoccupations and interests such as sewing and cooking continue to be included in the Monsegur-Pellegrue group's activities. A detailed examination of the yearly reports of the group showed that the more household-oriented sessions continue to draw a larger number of members to meetings than those dealing with more technical, professional topics. Over all, there are many striking similarities between the Groupements de vulgarisation (developpement) agricole feminins and the Cercles de fermieres. From the earliest days both associations have been dedicated to gaining public recognition of farm women's economic and social contribution; more recently, they have pressured their governments to formalize this recognition by improving the legal status of farm women. Both are deeply committed to the support of the family farm and to improving and preserving the way of life this type of farming represents. Reflective of the differences between the political cultures of France and Quebec, however, the cercles have been and continue to be more widely involved in public policy than the gfs. The cercles - but not the gfs - have articulated collective positions on a number of controversial issues such as birth control and abortion, and on women's rights in general. The two organizations are currently facing similar problems as they recognize that their memberships are both declining and aging. Interestingly, in a recent interview the president of the Lussac g/told us that the Gironde groupements have been considering restructuring along the lines of the cercles so that membership would be opened to nonfarm rural women. Her own group was also contemplating adopting a more mixed program of activities, adding some sessions on homemaking. In this way the Lussac groupement, which has been the most professionally oriented, would come to resemble more closely the Monsegur-Pellegrue and Bazas groups as well as the cercles.

3 8 Feminist Politics on the Farm

These organizations have repeatedly addressed the dilemma of how to combine traditional domestic concerns with more professional ones. Twenty years ago (1977) a brochure designed for group leaders posed the question of what activities the gfs should sponsor: "Household topics? maybe: they attract a lot of people. It is a way for women to meet, to begin. But don't be satisfied with that, because these are also topics that amuse men and discredit women's groups ... these topics, by themselves, rarely lead to real training and advancement for women."60 If we put these reflections into a feminist context, we can see that the leaders were not yet ready to reject the male, hierarchical standard of evaluation that privileges only work that is directly associated with production. Yet, as others of their statements suggest, they wished to recognize the social value of the full range of farm women's daily activities: production but also the reproduction of both children and the social world of the farm enterprise. We think that these groups have done remarkably well so far in both Quebec and the Gironde. They have served as a means of modernizing women's work and of empowering the women who are their members. And we see their tasks, like their achievements, as political. In order to supplement our examination of their records and our illuminating but unstructured interviews with individual club members and officers, we now turn to the quantitative part of this study and present a bit more of our methodology, then report our findings in relation to the specific issues around club membership. ANALYSING THE CLUBS AND CLUB MEMBERS

Because the impact of rural women's associations on their members was a central concern of our project, we organized the search for subjects around and through the cercles and the gfs. The first step was to identify respondents: we hoped to have approximately two hundred in each country, half of whom were members of rural women's clubs and half a matched group of non-members. In Quebec, at the invitation of Jeannette Bergeron, president of federation 12. of the Cercle de fermieres, which included the area we had chosen for our study, we attended a regional conference and its executive committee meeting. On the basis of contacts made there we were put in touch with a widening ring of cercle presidents, who turned over to us their membership lists with addresses and phone numbers. Initially we had some difficulty in obtaining full lists, since presidents wanted to direct us to the women who were more active and therefore more "interesting." We followed the same procedure in France, but in a less centralized fashion, since

39 Farm Women's Organizations we went first to conseilleres agricoles to identify the gfs and their presidents, and then directly to the latter. We were put in touch with potential interviewers through the clubs as well as, in France, the conseilleres. In the end we employed no fewer than fourteen interviewers in the two countries together, the majority of whom were club members. We fell slightly short of our goal of 400 respondents: we identified 100 club members in Quebec and 102 in France but only 96 non-members in Quebec and 91 in France. Still, the numbers were close enough to 100 for each category that we felt our sample size would lend itself to meaningful quantitative analysis. The numbers were also such that percentages could have an obvious, intuitive meaning. Because of the size of the group and its subgroups, and also because of concerns about the all-too-common use of inappropriately precise statistical manipulation, we decided to limit ourselves almost entirely to descriptive statistics and simple comparisons in our use of interview data. We had a very large amount of data: our questionnaire had 112 questions, many of which proved to be multiple sources of information. The resulting material was all coded, checked by us, and then machine processed. Most of the questions were pre-coded, but the three important open-ended definitions were classified and coded only after they had been transcribed and analysed. Later, when we were familiar with the broad outlines of the data, we commissioned a logistic regression analysis and a series of factor analyses to search for more complex statistical relationships ajjiong the survey materials we had gathered. Looking at the organizations, we were in general interested in determining whether there were significant differences between the women who joined the cercles and the gfs and those who did not. Were joiners different from non-joiners, apart from any possible impact of the clubs? We also wanted to establish whether there were noteworthy differences between the Quebec and the French participants in our study. When we first designed the study, we had argued for comparison on the basis of an expected similarity: did it exist? And if not, what were the differences? We looked also for any important distinguishing attributes of what we labelled "leaders" (contrasted to "ranks"). These were the women who identified themselves as currently responsables in the rural organizations we were examining, a term covering all officers. Among the cercle members we interviewed there were 19 such leaders, respondents who identified themselves as holding executive positions within those clubs. Among the French members, 22 stated that they held offices in the gfs (see Table 2.1). The similarity of the proportion is striking; we should remember also that many other members

40 Feminist Politics on the Farm Table z.i Respondents' organizational membership and role Quebec

France

n = 196

%

n = 193

%

100

51.0

102

52.8

Leader

19

9.7

22

11.4

Rank

81

41.3

80

41.5

NON-MEMBER

96

49.0

91

47.2

MEMBER

Table i.z Respondents' length of membership in clubs Quebec leader

Quebec rank

France leader

France rank

Years

% (n = 19)

% (n = 81)

% (n = 22)

% (n = 80)

1-5

5.3

17.3

27.3

26.3

6-10

21.1

27.2

27.3

43.8

11-15

26.3

16.0

9.1

' 16.3

More than 15

47.4

35.8

36.4

13.8

Missing

3.7

would have held leadership positions at other times, given the average length of membership. Some of the data specifically reflect club involvement. We looked at the length of club membership directly, using it as a surrogate for commitment to the clubs (see Table 2.2,). More than half of the cercle members had belonged for over ten years, with nearly one in five reporting they had been members for over twenty years. In France, only onethird of gf members had been involved for over ten years, and only one in ten had belonged for over twenty. But the gfs were founded relatively recently. The Lussac club, whose members accounted for over 40 per cent of our gf respondents, had only been in existence for nine years at the time of our study. Given this situation, the length of membership of women involved in the Bazas and Monsegur-Pellegrue groups is quite striking. Like the cercles, the gfs appear to have been successful in retaining members even if they have recently been experiencing difficulties in attracting new ones. Not surprisingly, a greater proportion of the

4i

Farm Women's Organizations

leaders than of rank-and-file members had belonged to the organization for more than a decade. In addition to examining the length of membership, we were interested in the reasons women joined such organizations. Here we posed an open-ended question that produced a mixed bag of answers, combining both the motives or reasons for joining and the mechanics of recruitment. These are not unrelated, for it seems reasonable that those who came because of family contacts might be drawn in less in search of technical know-how and more as part of a general pattern of sociability that would continue in the club. Respondents were allowed to indicate more than one reason for joining, and many did so. Some answers straddled categories; some were difficult to interpret, like the long-term cercle member's statement, "I joined because I believed in the movement." But most of the reasons were unambiguous. The ones most frequently cited by the cercle members we classified as "social" (given by two-thirds of respondents) or "for information" (24 per cent). "Social" reasons were also most frequently cited by g/members (half of them), followed closely by "for information" (45 per cent). However, the most professionally oriented possibility, "for training," was the third most common response in France (2.0 per cent). It seems that while sociabilite remains a prime motivation for women in both organizations, the desire to receive professional training was a stronger motivation for women joining the gfs than for the cercle members. Overall, length of membership did not affect motivation meaningfully. The differences in reasons for joining seem to reflect the organizations' origins but also the way in which the cercles' interest in professionalization has decreased as the organization aged. There does not appear to be any significant difference in the reasons why the leaders and the followers joined the groups - but we should caution, as we shall again, that there are so few leaders that quantitative discussions of them can only be heuristic. We also tapped reasons for joining, in the causal sense, by posing questions about membership in the Jeunesse agricole catholique feminine (JACF). In France, involvement as a jaciste could be expected quite directly to generate affiliation with the groupements feminins. In Quebec, where there was no direct organizational link between the JACF and the cercles, there might nevertheless be a meaningful connection because of the way in which Social Catholicism has provided the rationale for lay organization among Catholics from the nineteenth century to the present. As we had expected, the percentage of women who had been jacistes was higher among the members than among the nonmembers. Indeed, nearly a quarter of the members of the gfs reported that they had belonged to the JACF at some time, while the fermieres

42, Feminist Politics on the Farm Table 2.3 Respondents' membership in the Jeunesse agricole catholique feminine, cross-tabulated with age Quebec member

age

% Yes (n = 17)

1-39

France member

% No (n = 83)

% Yes (n = 24)

% No (n = 78)

4.2

25.6

24.1

40-49

29.4

20.5

29.2

41.0

50+

70.6

54.2

66.7

33.3

Missing

1.2

MEASURES OF SIGNIFICANCE

Pearson Chi-square Quebec member France member

Value

Degrees of freedom

Significance

5.22735 9.73824

2

.07326 .00768

2

had a substantial, though somewhat lower proportion of respondents who described themselves as ex-jacistes (17 per cent). There was, in addition, a statistically meaningful association between age and JACF membership, but only in France (see Table 2.3). There, the older club members had had more opportunity to come into direct contact with the JAC movement, which was strong before the 19605. When we looked for JACF connections among the leaders of the groups, the results were very interesting, particularly in Quebec, where nearly one-third of cercle leaders claimed to be ex-jacistes. Indeed, this was a somewhat higher percentage than among the gf leadership (27 per cent). The meaning of JACF involvement for women - particularly in Quebec - is another subject that has remained largely unexplored. Our figures underline, however, the potential importance of a particular sort of socially active lay Catholicism even after the lengthy period of secularization that was characteristic of Quebec by the time of our survey. In a series of questions separate from the one about the JACF we also inquired about the whole range of our respondents' current organizational involvement, trying to see to what extent their membership or non-membership in the specific rural women's organizations being studied was linked to a possible wider involvement in organizational life. We started by asking how many clubs our respondents belonged to; the club members, of course, all belonged to at least one.61 The results showed that members were indeed much more likely to belong to other organizations than were non-members. Fully 65 per cent of cercle members and 57 per cent of gf members belonged to at least two

43

Farm Women's Organizations

groups; by contrast, only 28 per cent of Quebec non-members and 20 per cent of French non-members belonged to two groups or more. When we put the responses related to organizational membership into national context, it became even clearer that the club women, as a group, qualified as exceptionally active participants in organizational life. This was the more so for France, which is not a country of joiners: a study prepared by the Institut national de la statistique et des etudes economiques (INSEE) found that among the slightly more than 20 million French citizens who claimed organizational memberships in 1982, 61 per cent had only one membership, 22 per cent had two, 9 per cent had three, and 7 per cent had four. Moreover, the same study demonstrated, as have many others, that multiple memberships are much more likely among men, in particular highly educated men, including professors and high-level professionals.6z Our own respondents were, of course, women, and not women with high education or high-status professions. Yet there is some evidence that farm women as a group are particularly likely to belong to associations of various types. A Canadian study by the National Farmers' Union reported that its female respondents had belonged to an average of no fewer than four groups each in the last two or three years; 74 per cent had belonged to at least one farm or community organization, and 61 per cent had belonged to a community organization.63 Among the responsables we found an even higher level of multiple membership for cercle leaders than for other members. Interestingly, a smaller proportion of g/leaders than of members said that they belonged to other organizations; does this mean that the gfs, at least for the leaders, were professional rather than social groups, ones that would be joined by women with no other interest in participating in organizations? We had also asked what sorts of organizations attracted our respondents, apart from the ones we focused on. For both cercle and gf members the most frequently mentioned memberships in other than women's organizations were in social action/charitable groups and in religious/parish associations. However, there were also some cross-national differences alongside these resemblances. Sports organizations were clearly more popular in France than in Quebec, and although only 4 per cent of the Quebec respondents claimed to be members of political organizations, French respondents showed virtually no involvement at all in political parties or movements. However, a small number of them were involved in human rights groups, which no Quebec respondents belonged to. Perhaps more important, in France 20 per cent of both gf members and non-members stated that they were members of union or professional associations. By contrast, in Quebec 16 per cent of non-members said they belonged to these types of orga-

44

Feminist Politics on the Farm

nizations, while the cercle membership distinguished itself by its low level (5 per cent) of union or professional involvement. These responses reflect general differences between the two nations.64 In France, in 1984-86, sports associations represented the largest number of voluntary association memberships (18.9 per cent of all French citizens over the age of eighteen reported belonging to such groups), while only a minuscule minority claimed membership in political parties (3.1 per cent).65 Considering the large number and variety of agricultural organizations in France and their role in administering insurance, credit, and technical services that are performed in Canada by government or by commercial enterprises, it is not surprising that more farm women there than in Quebec, even if not very many, were members of professional agricultural associations. In general, Canada, for the period 1975-85, experienced a decreasing membership in agricultural organizations and only low-level (and declining) membership in church-related, sporting, and union groups, and even lower levels for service clubs and political groups.66 When we looked for differences in kinds of associational membership between leaders and ranks, the contrast between Quebec and France was also evident. What was most striking, though hardly surprising, was the very high level of involvement in social/charitable organizations and religious/parish organizations reported by cercle leaders. It is not clear just how committed members were to their groups. In general we found that, with the exception of the leaders, little time was put into the voluntary activities that are the backbone of women's organizations like the ones we are discussing (see Table 2.4). The distinctive organizational zeal of the fermieres'1 leaders was also apparent here: they reported the highest levels of volunteer activity for each season of the year. After the cercle members, the gf members were the most involved in volunteer work, while the Quebec and French nonmembers had similar percentages reporting no volunteer work whatsoever for each season. When they did participate, however, a larger percentage of Quebec non-members than of the two French categories of respondents claimed they volunteered more than ten hours per week. Finally, to round out our profile of club activism, we looked at the number of meetings and study sessions that our leaders and ranks attended annually. Again, the results were much as predicted, although the level of non-responses (presumably meaning non-attendance) in the case of all but cercle leaders was higher than we expected. The cercle leaders - as usual - distinguished themselves for their high level of involvement in their association, as measured by their attendance at both meetings and study sessions.

45

Farm Women's Organizations

Table 2.4 Volunteer work done by respondents weekly, by season Hours per week

0

1-5

more than 5

n

%

%

%

100

44.0

29.0

27.0

96

68.8

18.8

12.5

102

57.8

39.2

2.9

91

69.2

24.2

6.6

100

57.0

22.0

21.0

96

76.0

13.5

10.4

102

65.7

30.4

3.9

91

74.7

19.8

5.5

100

47.0

27.0

26.0

96

70.8

13.5

15.6

102

61.8

36.3

2.0

91

72.5

22.0

5.5

100

50.0

23.0

27.0

96

76.0

14.6

9.4

102

56.9

41.2

2.0

91

72.5

22.0

5.5

SPRING

Quebec member Quebec non-member France member France non-member SUMMER

Quebec member Quebec non-member France member France non-member FALL

Quebec member Quebec non-member France member France non-member WINTER

Quebec member Quebec non-member France member France non-member

We were left with the clearly delineated picture of two sets of rural organizations with similar histories and goals, and with comparable activities and levels of membership participation. They shared aspirations, issues, and problems. And they shared groups of leaders of quite remarkable energy and levels of organizational activism, if more so in Quebec. We turn now to the description of the characteristics of all our respondents. After this we shall be able to look at the politics of these women, and to ask if their club affiliation (or non-affiliation) matters.

CHAPTER THREE

The Women "II n'y a pas de portrait-robot de Tagricultrice.' " "You can't make an identikit picture of the 'farm woman.''"

Farmers' wives are a much stereotyped group, seen by city dwellers as something remote but on the whole appealing: kindly, aproned, thrifty, lacking in formal education. Yet these women are as varied in many of their demographic characteristics as other comparable segments of the population. Although we limited our subjects by residence, language, religion, and marital status - they resided in certain carefully defined areas, and they were all French speakers, Catholic, and married - the women who participated in our survey differed considerably in many of the most important aspects of their lives. They ranged in age from twenty-three to eighty, and although nearly all had children, some had none, while family sizes ranged from two to fourteen. Most were farmers' daughters who knew no other way of life but that of agricultural producers, but some were urban women who had moved to the farm after they married. Many had only a primary school education, but a few had university degrees. And although we did in fact find some distinctive patterns, they were not always consistent. In this chapter we will describe these varying characteristics. We shall begin by presenting the four women we call "exemplars." THE

EXEMPLARS

From the start of this study we were dissatisfied with the prospect of discussing our respondents solely on the basis of group profiles. So we decided to search out individuals who could stand for the average or typical member of each of our categories, to give us concrete examples of the individuality as well as the generalities that characterized farm women. We liked the idea that four real, specific women could, even if

47 The Women we did not know them by name, embody the distinctiveness of the four groups. This would be possible if we could identify individuals combining the modal - most common - characteristics of the group in which they were to be found. The results of the necessary computer search underlined the variety among our subjects. We had hoped to find three "typical" women from each category, giving us twelve to choose among for our four exemplars. Although we located the number we wanted among the Quebec non-members, we could find only one such "typical" case for both cercle members in Quebec and non-club members in France, and noone at all to represent the members of the gfs.2-22 Only when we relaxed requirements for number of children did we finally generate enough cases to work with, and we selected from among them four cases whose opinions struck us as interesting. The exercise worked for us at an intuitive level, for the exemplars sounded like the women we met, visited, and worked with even though we could not know whether we had met any of these particular women. We named the Quebec exemplars Andree and Brigitte and the French ones Christiane and Diane, looking for names that fitted the respective milieux. The initial letters reflect, in their order, the way we most often discuss our respondents: members of the cercles and then Quebec nonmembers, followed by members of the gfs and French non-members. We will return to these individuals in future chapters as we look at attitudes and behaviour; here we look mainly at their basic demographic characteristics (see Table 3.1). When we conducted our Quebec survey, in the winter of 1989-90, the cercle activist we call Andree was fifty-nine years old, married to a sixty-one-year-old farmer, and the mother of no fewer than eight grown children ranging in age from twenty-six to thirty-six. With her husband she had operated a relatively small dairy farm of about 80 hectares that they had purchased in 1952. Although she now considered herself retired, Andree estimated that she still performed about 18 hours of agricultural work a week in all seasons except the winter, when she did only 10. By contrast, she reported an implausible 100 hours a week of domestic labour - an indication that she considered herself primarily a housewife, though one who still had farm duties. In fact, when we asked, she identified herself as a "cultivator's wife" and also, spontaneously, as a mother. Unusually, she brought in income for the farm from her own conserverie (canning). A farmer's daughter, Andree had not completed secondary school but nevertheless worked as an elementary school teacher for three years, as was still possible in Quebec in the late 19408; she did not work off the farm after that. Her first child was born the year after she and her husband purchased their farm. This was

48 Feminist Politics on the Farm Table 3.1 Description of the exemplars Andree

Erigitte

Christiane

Diane

Cercle de fermieres

non-member

Groupement feminin

non-member

59

29

47

31

Background

farmer's daughter

farmer's daughter

farmer's daughter

not a farmer's daughter

Education

some secondary

some secondary

primary completed

junior high completed

Children

8

3

5

2

mass weekly

mass monthly

mass weekly

mass only for ceremonies

worked before marriage

worked before marriage

never worked

worked before marriage

feminist

feminist

not a feminist

feminist

quite happy

quite happy

quite happy

very happy

Club membership Age

Religious observance Paid employment off farm Beliefs Contentment

a woman with considerable experience of organizational life: she had been a member of the Jeunesse agricole catholique and was currently president of the local Societe Saint-Jean-Baptiste, as well as a long-time member of the local Cercle de fermieres (twelve years). She attended mass at least once a week. At the same time, Andree was also one of the minority of self-identified feminists among the cercle members, and one of the very small group who emphatically refused to classify types of farm work as more appropriate for women or for men. Brigitte, a Quebecker who did not belong to the cercle^ did not belong to any other organization either. She was only twenty-nine years old and lived with her thirty-one-year-old husband on a farm that she described as zio arpents (127 hectares) in size, purchased in 1986. The principal products of this prosperous farm were milk and cash crops; it was run as a business and provided her with a pension and retirement plan. After she completed high school, she had worked for two years as an ouvriere (blue-collar worker), although she was not doing so any more. Her three children were all under ten years, but she called herself a farmer, estimating that she put in a average of 35 hours a week of farm work and 45 of housework. That is, Brigitte carried out regularly something pretty close to a full-time farm job along with a rather longer week of housework, including care of young children. Like An-

49 The Women

dree, she was a farmer's daughter, but she had not been a JAC member. She also attended mass less frequently than Andree, on average only once or twice a month. She too considered herself a feminist. In 1990 our representative gf member, Christiane, was forty-seven years old, married to a forty-nine-year-old farmer. They had a 4 5-hectare mixed farming operation whose principal products were milk, wine, grains, and fruits and vegetables, as well as the eggs and chickens that Christiane sold. Her five children were between the ages of thirteen and twenty-three, a large number for women in this category, and all still lived at home; in fact, Christiane indicated that there were eight persons in her household, so she may have had an elderly relative there also. Not surprisingly, she did not work off the farm. A farmer's daughter and former JACF member, recipient of a CEP (Certificat d'etudes primaires, indicating completion of primary school), she had never worked for wages. She estimated that she spent an average of 30 hours a week on farm work and 2,5 on housework. Here was another organizational activist: she had been a member of the local groupement for twenty years, which meant that she was probably a founding member. She was involved also with parents' groups and religious ones, though not an officer currently in any. She attended mass weekly, and, no, she did not consider herself a feminist. For her part Diane, the French non-joiner, was living on a 12.5hectare farm that specialized in wine production. She and her husband had received it by donation (inheritance) in 1986 from his family; she was the only one of our exemplars not to have put any of her own money into the enterprise. Diane was thirty-one years old and had the BEPC (Brevet d'etudes du premier cycle - roughly equal to completion of junior high school); her husband was a year younger and had completed secondary education. She had worked at a baggage company for eight years, and apparently stopped work and had her first child when the family acquired the farm. The couple now had two children, one aged four years and the other seven months. Diane reported that she spent an average of zo hours a week on farm work and a whopping 70 on housework - which presumably reflects the responsibility for two pre-schoolers. Her father was a labourer, not a farmer. Never a member of the JACF, Diane did not belong to any organizations at all, and she attended mass only when it was part of ceremonies such as baptisms, weddings, and funerals. She also considered herself a feminist. Over all the four women were typical, as indeed they would have to be, given how we had identified them. At the same time, their atypicalities are obvious. For one thing, three of the four considered themselves feminists, in a population where only 2,8 per cent of respondents identified themselves that way. We did not, it should be stressed, search for

50 Feminist Politics on the Farm feminists when we were identifying exemplars. Nor would we be so foolish as to argue that the more "typical" of our respondents were more likely to be feminists! In the remaining sections of this chapter we look at a selection of the socio-demographic characteristics of the respondents to our survey, nearly always dividing them into subgroups related to nationality and club membership. Again, we usually start with those in Quebec who belonged to the cercles, going on to the non-member Quebec respondents, followed by French members of the gfs and then non-members; we discuss "leaders" and "ranks" (or "followers") when the relevant data are interesting. Because this sort of discussion so easily becomes a sort of laundry list of percentiles, we have severely limited the amount of data provided. For the same reason, tables are included only when it seems necessary to amplify the information given in the text, or when statistically significant relationships emerged. The numbers of leaders are so small that the figures related to them are never statistically significant, but sometimes they are worth thinking about anyway. Regression analyses that examined opinions and behaviour in the light of demographic characteristics covered in this chapter - age, education, family size, religiosity, participation in the paid labour force - are also cited when they are statistically significant; the relevant percentages are to be found in Appendix A. We have tried to provide here everything needed for the presentation of our respondents and, in later chapters, their political and politically relevant behaviour and beliefs. We start our descriptive statistics with basic information about the geography of the survey - the farms and farm production. We then look at the subjects' personal characteristics: age, background (farmer's daughter or not), education, family size, and religious practice. This is followed by a section on "legal relationships," in which we look at the acquisition of farm property and at matrimonial arrangements. We next report material about involvement in work on the farm, including the amount of time the respondents say they spent on agricultural and domestic work at different seasons. We conclude with a brief discussion of off-farm work. THE FARMS

The 196 women in the Quebec portion of our survey all lived on working farms in sixteen communities located southwest of Montreal near Salaberry de Valleyfield (see Map i). From Sainte-Barbe in the west, our survey area extends across the flat, fertile plain south of the St Lawrence River some thirty kilometres east to Saint-Etienne-deBeauharnois. This is the Beauharnois-Salaberry and Huntington re-

51 The Women

gion, a diversified agricultural area in which the dairy industry is none the less the single most important type of production, as it is for Quebec in general. Parishes (paroisses) continue to be the primary census and electoral units of Quebec, a reflection of the long period of dominance by the Catholic Church that ended only in the 19605. That we had to go to so many communities indicates the degree to which the number of farm families is on the decline in this area; we started with a much smaller area but found we had repeatedly to extend it. Nevertheless, a substantial number of prosperous farms still flourish in our survey area, and so do a good number of active cerdes. In 1991 there were 426 farms in the Beauharnois-Salaberry region, averaging 78.5 hectares (194 acres) in size.3 Quebec farm wives live on individual tidy farms, close to their neighbours along the rang (concession) road, since most farms are long and narrow, a reflection of the original seigneurial pattern of settlement.4 Widows or elderly couples retired from active farming sometimes live in smaller homes built on the same farm, as did our Quebec organizer. The small towns are within easy driving distance of one another, and the urban agglomeration of Montreal is close; many sons and daughters commute there to work. We located our respondents, here and in France, by starting with lists of club members, then going to neighbours at either side or across the road for matching nonmembers; in some areas, where most women belonged to clubs, we moved further along in the neighbourhood. For the French portion of our study we initially chose three townships (the cantons of Lussac, Monsegur, and Bazas) in the department of the Gironde; in order to obtain sufficient numbers of gf members, we had to include a fourth canton, Pellegrue (see Map z). Bordeaux is the principal city of the Gironde, which in turn is part of a newer, larger administrative unit, the multi-departmental Aquitaine. Lussac is located in a historically rich and fertile area approximately fifty kilometres east of Bordeaux and noted for its excellent vineyards (StEmilion) and beautiful, rolling countryside. It had 584 farmers in 1990. Monsegur and Pellegrue, to the south-east of Bordeaux, also encompass fertile, rolling farmland from which, in 1990, 860 farmers and their families produced a variety of products including wine, milk, grains, fruits, and vegetables. These three cantons were distinctive for the production of wine, which was pretty much omnipresent. Many farms that did not list it as a principal product nevertheless had a small vineyard to produce their own vin de table; family-produced grapes were sent to wine co-operatives for pressing and bottling. The fourth canton, Bazas, about seventy kilometres from Bordeaux in the southern part of the Gironde, is less fertile and less prosperous; we included it from the start because of the absence of wine-making and also because it did not share the generally favourable conditions of the other French farms in our study. Much of the land in Bazas is either wooded or un-

5Z

Feminist Politics on the Farm

improved pasture; it is sparsely populated, and by 1990 fewer than 300 farmers made their living there in mixed farming and by raising livestock.5 There were substantial differences in the size of the farms on which our Quebec and French respondents lived.6 The average farm size for the Gironde sample in 1991 was 15 hectares (9 hectares for wine). Approximately four-fifths of the French respondents lived on farms of less than 50 hectares, with over one-third living on exploitations of under zo hectares, at a time when the average size of farms in France was 18 hectares. In Quebec, by contrast, the average farm size in 1991 was 90 hectares, and, among the Quebec farm women we interviewed, more than half lived on farms that were larger than 50 hectares.7 These differences reflect the very different nature of the agriculture of the parts of Quebec and France that we chose to study. The dairy, beef, and cash-crop enterprises of the Beauharnois-Salaberry-Huntingdon region require relatively large farmsteads. By contrast, the canton of Lussac is almost entirely given over to the production of expensive specialty wines, and the cost of a hectare of land is extremely high. Without the inclusion of the much larger farms where the Bazadais raise their renowned beef cattle, the average national differences in farm sizes in our study would have been all the more striking. The primacy of dairy farming for the Quebec respondents and of wine production for the Gironde respondents appeared when they were asked to identify the principal products of their farms. Over 60 per cent of the Canadian respondents were involved in the production of milk, compared to under zo per cent of the French respondents.8 In the Gironde, dairy production has declined dramatically over the past two decades; four-fifths of the dairy operations recorded in 1970 no longer exist. The decline in Quebec has been far less dramatic, though still substantial: in 1976 dairy farms accounted for 69.5 per cent of all farm income; during the period 1976-91 the number of dairy farms had been reduced by half.9 By contrast, more than two-thirds of the French respondents lived on farms that produced wine. Apart from the decline in dairying and the overall shrinkage of the agricultural population in the Gironde, agricultural conditions have not changed much in the last few decades; a 1976 study reported that z8.i per cent of the agricultural enterprises in the departement produced only wine and iz.3 per cent were occupied in raising only cattle, but all the rest combined two or more products.10 In fact, relatively few French respondents' farm enterprises were entirely dependent on a single product: about half of their farms produced some combination of "principal products."11 The volatility of agricultural commodity prices and the resulting vulnerability of farmers who rely on a single product

53 The Women Table 3.2, Respondents' ages Quebec member

Quebec non-member

France member

France non-member

Years

%(n = 100)

% (n = 96)

% (n = 102)

%(n = 91)

1-39

20.0

54.2

20.6

45.1

40-49

22.0

18.8

38.2

29.7

50+

57.0

26.0

41.2

25.3

1.0

1.0

Missing

explain why most of the girondin farms in our study are poly cultures.12The wine producers of Lussac were, again, the main exception. Theirs was the non-member group in France that had the largest number of women who were associated with monoculture farming, and nearly 40 per cent of their exploitations produced only wine.13 AGE

The members of the cercles were the oldest of our respondents, considerably older on average than the women in any other category (the Quebec non-members, the members of the gfs, and the non-members in the Gironde) (see Table 3.2). Their median age was 53, as compared to 38 for the Quebec non-members, 47 for the g/members, and 40 for the French non-members. Nearly 60 per cent of the members of the cercles were over fifty, and only one in five was under forty. But they should not be thought of as past their prime, for the largest group were in their fifties, and only two women were in their seventies. The oldest woman in the survey, aged eighty, was a Quebec woman who was not a member of a cercle. The age profile of cercle members appears to be typical for members of that organization; a 1986 study conducted among the cercles belonging to federation 12, in the Valleyfield region, which includes the groups in our study, reported that the average age of the members was 51, and Yolande Cohen found an average age of 57 among members -interviewed in connection with the cercles' conference in 1989.14 The non-members in Quebec were noticeably younger: only about a quarter were older than fifty, and more than half were under forty. In France as well, membership in the gfs appeared to be more attractive to somewhat older rural women, though the difference was not as

54 Feminist Politics on the Farm

great as in Quebec. Just over 40 per cent of the group ements' members were over fifty, compared to about a quarter of the non-members. These data agree with the findings of other surveys: Annie Rieu found that most of the gf members in her study were between 45 and 55, and Danielle Ransinangue reported that more than half the members of associations of women working on tobacco farms were over 50.15 Farm women told us that their organizations were concerned about the absence of younger members, the under-forties whose children are in school.16 Few women were now available to become the next key cadre of experienced members, in the forty-to-fifty age-range. We may be seeing here some impact of the high level of women's involvement in farm work that we will be discussing, but we should note that nearly all women's voluntary organizations have to struggle today with aging membership.17 More recently established groups, including Quebec's Association feminine d'education et d'action sociale (AFEAS), are said to enjoy the reputation of being more activist, and possibly therefore more attractive to the younger generation of Quebec farm women than are groups like the cercles. We found no strong evidence to that effect. Of the ninety-six women among our respondents who had not joined the cercles, only five said that they were members of other associations feminines. Three of these belonged to the AFEAS, though, and these were two twenty-eight-year-olds and one who was thirty. For our purposes it: is important to underline the differences in the age structures of the different groups of farm women we interviewed. Given that the members of the organizations were considerably older, we would have expected to find equally notable differences in their other demographic characteristics, such as number of children, level of education, and participation in religious activities. Furthermore, according to conventional social science theory, organization members would be expected to provide more conservative responses to many of the questions designed to measure social and political attitudes. BACKGROUND

Over the past two decades the number of farmers has declined dramatically in both Quebec and France, and the increased contact between city and country provided by the automobile and mass communications has made it less likely that farmers' wives will have grown up on farms.18 Although the majority of women in each of the four groups were, in fact, farmers' daughters, for the French non-members this majority was only a slight one. The highest percentage of women who were not farmers' daughters (36 per cent in Quebec and 44 per cent in France) was to be found among the two groups of non-members, com-

5 5 The Women

posed as they were of younger women. By contrast, three-quarters of the members of the cercles said that their fathers had been farmers, as did only a somewhat smaller percentage of the gf members (72. per cent).19 The variation in the proportion of women whose fathers were farmers was therefore greater between the members and non-members in each country than it was between the women located in Quebec and those located in France. In both countries, having grown up on a farm seems to be linked to membership in the women's organizations we were studying; Ransinangue found it true of no less than 89.7 per cent of the club members in her study of women on the tobacco farms, and Cohen had similar results in Quebec.20 This simple fact would seem to predict decline for the Quebec groups, and to explain their efforts to find program and recruiting innovations that could draw in a wider group of rural women. EDUCATION

There were some striking differences in the educational profiles of our four major groups of respondents, with members tending to be less highly educated than non-members. Nearly 60 per cent of the gf members indicated that they had not continued beyond primary school, compared to only 3 6 per cent of the French non-members. In Quebec 18 per cent of non-members had left school with only a primary education, compared to 38 per cent of the cercle members; the Quebec average for women was 20 per cent.21 These differences reflect at a statistically significant level the differences in the age structures of our group (see Table 3.3). In each of the four subcategories women over fifty were the most likely to have left school with only a primary education. There were some noteworthy national differences as well, which presumably says something about different national traditions of rural education: among women under forty, over 90 per cent of the Quebec respondents reported having completed secondary schooling, compared to less than 60 per cent of the French women. We were also interested in knowing whether there were any noteworthy differences in education between the leaders of organizations and the rest of the membership. Here our findings were mixed. In Quebec there was a considerably higher proportion of leaders who reported having either a secondary or post-secondary education: 68 per cent, compared to 59 per cent of the regular members. In France, however, the rank-and-file members were in fact better educated on average than their leaders: only 36 per cent of the gf leaders said that they had proceeded beyond primary school, compared to 44 per cent of the rest of the members. The finding concerning the educational profile of the

56 Feminist Politics on the Farm Table 3.3 Respondents' education, cross-tabulated with age

Age

n

Primary %

Secondary %

Post-secondary %

90.0

10.0

QUEBEC MEMBER 1-39

20

40-49

22

27.3

63.6

9.1

50+

57

56.4

41.8

1.8

3.8

QUEBEC N O N - M E M B E R 1-39

52

3.8

92.3

40-49

18

16.7

83.3

50+

25

50.0

45.8

4.2

1-39

21

35.0

55.0

10.0

40-49

39

53.8

33.3

12.8

50+

42

71.4

23.8

4.8

FRANCE M E M B E R

FRANCE N O N - M E M B E R

1-39

41

17.1

58.5

24.4

40-49

27

48.1

44.4

7.4

50+

23

56.5

43.5

MEASURES OF SIGNIFICANCE Pearson Chi-square Quebec member Quebec non-member France member France non-member

Value

Degrees of freedom

Significance

21. 10309

4 4 4 4

.00019 .00006

24.64773 8.69703 16.38161

.06913 .OOZ55

cercle leadership is interesting, for, as we have noted, other historians have claimed that the local cercle leadership was frequently dominated by the wives of the village elite, in part perhaps because they tended to be better educated than the farmers' wives who joined the organization.22 In fact, all the cercle women in our study were farm wives, but it seems that leaders continue to be more highly educated than the rank and file.

57 The Women FAMILY SIZE Given the age structure of the cercles' membership, as well as the importance placed on large families in Quebec until the 19605, we expected the Quebec club members to have significantly more children than the women in the other groups. This was indeed the case: the average number of their children was considerably higher (3.9 compared to 2.7 for non-members). Nearly zo per cent of cercle members reported that they had more than five children, compared to only 4 per cent of the Quebec non-members, and it was among these club members that we found families of up to twelve children. The number of children a woman had was clearly associated with age, however, and there were no significant differences between members and non-members when age was taken into account (see Table 3.4). It was among the cercle leaders, incidentally, that we found the largest proportion of women with really sizeable families: nearly a third had six or more children. If this study were to be carried forward to the point where all the respondents had reached the end of their child-bearing years, it is highly unlikely that a significant percentage would have borne more than five children. Even in rural Quebec, children are no longer the economic assets nor the national and moral imperatives they were once considered to be. Even so, a notable difference between Quebec and France was the considerably smaller families apparently preferred by French farm women. For example, although an identical proportion of the members of the cercles and the gfs were over the age of forty (80 per cent), and therefore likely to have already completed their families, only 6 per cent of the French club members had more than five children. Nearly 60 per cent of them, in fact, had no more than two children, while only about a quarter of the cercle members had equally small families. The much smaller family size in rural France even among older Catholic women is to be expected: it is well known that the French rural population has practised family limitation - though not necessarily through the use of contraception - since the early nineteenth century.23 RELIGIOUS PRACTICE

Given our interest in challenging the stereotypical image of rural Catholic women, it was important to look at the degree to which our respondents identified themselves as practising Catholics. In a French context and, though to a lesser extent, in Quebec as well, such religious commitments have tended to have an important political impact, usually interpreted as conservative. We did not want to ask the slippery

58 Feminist Politics on the Farm Table 3.4 Number of respondents' children, cross-tabulated with age

0 %

1-2

n

%

3-5 %

1-39

20

10.0

60.0

30.0

40-49

22

27.3

72.7

50+

57

1.8

10.5

54.4

33.3 1.9

Age

6 or more

%

QUEBEC MEMBER

QUEBEC NON-MEMBER 1-39

52

11.5

50.0

36.5

40-49

18

5.6

27.8

66.7

50+

25

20.0

72.0

8.0

FRANCE MEMBER 1-39

21

4.8

61.9

33.3

40-49

39

2.6

59.0

38.5

50+

42

2.4

47.6

35.7

14.3

FRANCE N O N - M E M B E R 1-39

41

4.9

82.9

12.2

40-49

27

11.1

51.9

33.3

3.7

50+

23

47.8

47.8

4.3

MEASURES OF S I G N I F I C A N C E

Pearson Chi-square Quebec member Quebec non-member France member France non-member

Value

Degrees of freedom

Significance

36.8x488 15.53109 9.68808 15.59290

6 6

.00000 .01650 .13841 .01611

6 6

questions about beliefs or individual devoutness that might possibly be measured by frequency of prayer, and decided instead to query formal participation in the institution of the mass (see Table 3-5). 24 The members of the cercles clearly distinguished themselves: nearly three-quarters attended mass at least once a week, compared to well under half of the Quebec non-members. The percentage of weekly mass attenders was exceptionally high even among the non-members: according to a

59 The Women Table 3.5 Respondents' attendance at mass Quebec

Leader Frequency Once a week

94.7

Occasionally

Never

Nonmember

Leader

Rank

Nonmember

% (n = 19) % (n = 81) % (n = 96) % (n = 22) % (n = 80) % (n = 91)

Once or twice a month

Major celebrations

Rank

France

5.3

69.1

42.7

36.4

28.8

17.6

12.3

21.9

13.6

17.5

15.4

9.9

27.1

31.8

31.3

31.9

6.2

8.3

13.6

18.8

30.8

4.5

3.8

4.4

2.5

1990 survey, only 29 per cent of Quebec Roman Catholics reported attending church "almost every week" or more.25 Among cercle leaders, all but one reported weekly attendance at mass. Corresponding to the greater degree of secularization of French society, there was a substantial transatlantic difference in levels of religious observance. In France, weekly attendance at mass was much lower for both groups than it was for the Quebec women. None the less, it was higher among the g/members (30 per cent) than among the non-members (18 per cent). In fact, the gf members' level of religious observance was a multiple of what was recorded in 1988 for the French agricultural population in general, when only 17.8 per cent reported the far lower involvement of attending a mass at least once or twice a month. Once again, the difference in the age composition of the member and non-member groups explained much of the difference in church attendance between them (see Table 3.6). For the Quebec respondents, there was a perfect correlation between age and attendance at mass, with the frequency of mass attendance increasing with age. In France the relationship between age and frequency of attendance was less straightforward. Although women under forty were much less likely to attend mass at least once a week, a much larger proportion of younger women who were gf members reported fairly frequent religious practice compared to those who were not members (42 and 17 per cent respectively who attended mass at least once a month). By French standards, all the reported rates of attendance were high, well above what was reported by people aged twenty-five to thirty-nine (8 per cent in 1990).26

6o Feminist Politics on the Farm Table 3.6 Respondents' attendance at mass, cross-tabulated with age

Age

n

Once a week

Once or twice a month

Occasionally

Major celebrations

Never

%

%

%

%

%

10.0

QUEBEC MEMBER

1-39

20

30.0

15.0

30.0

15.0

40-49

22

63.6

18.2

4.5

13.6

50+

57

93.0

5.3

1.8

QUEBEC NON-MEMBER

1-39

52

26.9

25.0

38.5

9.6

40-49

18

50.0

22.2

16.7

11.1

50+

25

72.0

16.0

8.0

4.0

FRANCE MEMBER

1-39

21

19.0

23.8

38.1

19.0

40-49

39

23.1

10.3

35.9

25.6

5.1

50+

42

42.9

19.0

23.8

9.5

4.8

FRANCE NON-MEMBER

9

41

4.9

12.2

34.1

43.9

4.9

40-49

27

25.9

14.8

29.6

22.2

7.4

50+

23

30.4

21.7

30.4

17.4

1-39

MEASURES OF SIGNIFICANCE Pearson Chi-square Quebec member Quebec non-member France member France non-member

Value

Degrees of freedom

Significance

41.70378 16.37026 10.84326 13.86504

8 8 8 8

.00000 .01190 .11074 .08535

Over all, then, in both Quebec and France our respondents, whether members or non-members, demonstrated a much higher level of church attendance than did the general population. Therefore, once more, they might well be expected to prove generally more conservative in their social and political attitudes.

61 The Women LEGAL RELATIONSHIPS

By definition, all our respondents were living in situations that were simultaneously agricultural enterprises and marital units. At this point we examine some dimensions of the legal structures that fit them into the two dimensions of the family farm. We begin with the agricultural side, looking first at the women's role in the acquisition of the farm, which of course includes the acquisition of their family home. Here the most noticeable differences were, as so often, national. It was far more likely in France than in Quebec for farms to be assembled through a number of transactions. This situation was reflected in the fact that the French respondents sometimes gave several answers to the question of how the farm was acquired; for example, one part might have been inherited, while another parcel was purchased.27 In addition, the French women more frequently lived on land that had been inherited, whereas, overwhelmingly, the Quebec women lived on farms that had been purchased. Nevertheless, the French women were more likely than the Quebec respondents to have invested their own personal funds in the farm. Fully 68 per cent of the gf members and 58 per cent of the French non-members said that they had put their own money into their farms, compared to just under one-third of all our Quebec women.28 It is difficult to explain why the French women were so much more likely to have invested in the farm enterprise, since they were far less likely to have worked before marriage, and in any case the jobs at which these women worked were not lucrative ones/9 In fact, just over 60 per cent of those French respondents who had inherited farms lived on land inherited from their husband's families, and the remainder owned farms as a result of inheritances from both spouses' families. In Quebec, male inheritance also predominated among the few couples who had inherited property: most of them (75 per cent of the relevant cercle members and 86 per cent of those non-members) lived on farms inherited by their husbands. Perhaps the French women had contributed some form of cash bequest or an advance on an expected inheritance, since daughters were so unlikely to take over the farm they grew up on.3° But this is also the family farm, where agricultural property overlaps with marital property, so that issues related to marriage and inheritance have always been important for rural women activists. Such enterprises have the potential to be particularly disadvantageous for women, since explicitly work-related pensions and benefits are likely to be absent or restricted to a single designated farm operator - almost always the owner-husband - and ownership of assets is likely to be in the man's hands. In Canada the historically definitive legal case concerning

62. Feminist Politics on the Farm

family property was in fact one dealing with a farm wife.31 The relevant judicial frameworks regulate the financial arrangements and property rights of spouses both during a marriage and when the marriage is terminated by death or divorce. In the past, both Quebec and France each provided a single set of property arrangements governing married women, but it is now possible to choose from a number of alternatives.31 When we therefore asked our respondents which of the available matrimonial property arrangements they had selected, we hoped to infer some element of economic independence in the context of the family farm. In both countries the system called "community of property" (communaute des biens} prevailed until relatively recent reforms. Under this regime, although the wife retained ownership of any property she had inherited from her family, her husband administered it and (with certain exceptions giving the wife a degree of veto power) also administered and controlled real and personal property acquired after the marriage.33 In Quebec, for couples married before i July 1970, which would be a very large number of our Quebec respondents, community of property continued in force unless they opted otherwise. For all others there, community of property was replaced by societe d'acquets "partnership of acquests" - as the automatically applicable matrimonial arrangement unless a couple explicitly chose otherwise through a marriage contract.34 Under partnership of acquests each marriage partner owns and administers the property she or he brings into the marriage or accumulates during it (biens propres)-^5 other property accumulated during the marriage that is not the personal property of either spouse is identified as "acquests" (biens acquets), jointly controlled and administered but equally divided at the end of the marriage. This system is considered more equitable since it recognizes women's unwaged contributions to the accumulation of family assets (that is, to the family farm). The other matrimonial regime available in Quebec, the one that seems to offer the greatest flexibility for each spouse, is "separation of property" (separation des biens). Under this system each partner retains absolute control over her or his property and there is no sharing of acquisitions. At the dissolution of the marriage, there is no division of assets as the property remains the sole possession of each recognized owner or that individual's heirs.36 Separation of property was the choice of no less than 5 8 per cent of the respondents in Suzanne Dion's 1980 study of Quebec farm women.37 Reform of marital regimes was somewhat different in France. Communaute reduite aux acquets (community reduced to acquests) became the default system there in 1965.1* With this reform, married women

63 The Women were legally entitled to administer their own property, though the husband remained the sole administrator of communal property; in 1985 this control became a joint matter. In the event of divorce, partners kept their own property and the communal property was divided equally, while in the case of death all communal property passed to the heirs undivided unless there was a prior settlement between spouses.39 Other options remained available through pre-marital contracts, which are more common in Europe than in North America. The regime most frequently chosen by contract is "separation of property" (separation des biens), under which, as in Quebec, each spouse exercises unrestricted control over her or his property, whenever acquired. Separation of property can be an unfavourable legal arrangement for the farm wife, for if the agricultural enterprise is registered in her husband's name, as it usually is, the wife has no right to a share if her marriage ends in divorce. However, because this regime allows for property transfers between spouses, it is possible for couples to form husbandwife agricultural companies within which both exercise specific rights. French notaries regard separation of property as potentially providing young farm husbands and wives with the best legal protection.40 Reflecting in part the changes in the laws during the lifetimes of the couples we were studying, there were some noteworthy differences in the matrimonial property arrangements of respondents. Half of the members of the cercles .and nearly the same proportion of both French members and non-members were under the regime of community of property. By contrast, less than one-quarter of the Quebec non-members had chosen this system; instead, just over half opted for separation of property. Of our four exemplars, three had selected community of property, while Brigitte, the young Quebec non-member, was under the relatively unusual partnership of acquests. When we cross-tabulated marital regime by age, we found that in Quebec, but not in France, there was a strong relationship between being older and being under community of property (see Table 3.7). In fact, the same proportion of French respondents under forty as over fifty were likely to be under community of property. Rieu also found that separation of property was not widespread; 86 per cent of the rural women she interviewed were under the community of property provisions, even though most of them were middle-aged. And no less than 92..6 per cent of Ransinangue's respondents were also under this regime.41 Perhaps the propensity of French farm women to opt for communaute des biens reflects the fact that they brought only modest amounts of personal property into the marriage. Finally, the women may still tend to regard the farm enterprise as something men are entitled to control.

64

Feminist Politics on the Farm

Table 3.7 Respondents' matrimonial property regime, cross-tabulated with age

Age QUEBEC

n

Community of property %

Partnership of acquests %

Separation of property %

Other %

MEMBER

1-39

20

10.0

35.0

55.0

40-49

22

36.4

9.1

54.5

50+

55

70.9

7.3

16.4

5.5

55.8

3.8

QUEBEC

NON-MEMBER

1-39

52

5.8

34.6

40-49

18

38.9

16.7

50+

25

52.0

44.4 48.0

FRANCE M E M B E R 1-39

19

47.4

36.8

15.8

40-49

39

51.3

38.5

10.3

50+

41

43.9

41.5

12.2

2.4

FRANCE N O N - M E M B E R

9

1-39

40

55.0

25.0

15.0

5.0

40-49

26

38.5

34.6

23.1

3.8

50+

22

59.1

31.8

9.1

MEASURES OF SIGNIFICANCE

Pearson Chi-square Quebec member Quebec non-member France member France non-member

Value

Degrees of freedom

Significance

33.64x57 28.39988 2.05155 4.31503

6 6 6 6

.0000 1 .00008 .91490 .63413

WORK ON THE

FARM

Thus far, family dominates farm. But the picture changes somewhat when we look at what, specifically, our respondents do on those agricultural enterprises. We began this research project with a set of assumptions about farm women's agricultural tasks, drawn in large

65 The Women

measure from historical and contemporary studies. We expected to find that women were actively engaged in farm labour, particularly since in both Quebec and France family farms rely heavily on the unpaid labour of family members to keep the cost of production low; as Alice Barthez and others argue forcefully, this has been the necessary condition of the continued survival of such enterprises. Since children are now no longer available for much of the day, farm wives are regularly called upon to assist in the farm work. In Canada, it was reported that women accounted for 15 per cent of the farm labour performed in 1981, and in 1988 the figure for France was 2.0 per cent; these were certainly underestimates.4* We thought that women were most likely to be involved in the care of poultry and dairy cattle, in milking, in gardening, and in accounting and secretarial tasks related to the farm operation. We also knew that at particular times, such as seeding and harvest, women's agricultural labour became more intense as they assumed tasks such as driving tractors and trucks, making trips to dealers for machine parts, or feeding extra farm labourers. We asked first about the persistence of independent income from activities that women did separately from the main work of the farm. No fewer than seventy-nine of the respondents reported that they derived personal income from sales of items such as eggs, poultry, baked goods, preserves, or handicraft work: about a fifth of the Quebec women and slightly fewer of the French (18 per cent). Poultry and eggs were the most frequent sources of income, very traditional ones. We noted that almost no one, even in Quebec, sold handicrafts. This last was worth attention, given the early orientation of the cercles towards making such "women's work" economically productive. But was this level of independent, personal income a significant one? It is impossible to know, since we have no figures for its frequency in the past, and we do not know how substantial the income was for our respondents. Nor do we have information about how genuinely independent from farm accounts this income was - to what extent it really represented resources that women could control by or for themselves. In this connection it seemed clear that those of our respondents who were engaged in the relatively new atelier or niche productions, such as farm tourism (for example, the ferme-auberge in Bazas) or force-feeding geese, considered the resulting income part of farm revenue rather than belonging specifically to themselves. This was the case although such activities, which are of growing importance for the farm enterprise, are quite clearly understood as women's tasks, like the handicrafts, preserving, or poultry care that in earlier times provided "egg money."43 But even at their most profitable, such activities appear to be of marginal importance for women's economic and other roles on the farm.

66

Feminist Politics on the Farm

Table 3.8 Agricultural work done frequently by respondents on all farms Quebec member % (n = WO)

Quebec non-member % (n = 96)

France member % (n = 102)

Building upkeep

29.0

41.7

11.8

9.9

Cleaning

24.0

46.9

21.6

25.3

Mechanical

10.0

8.3

1.0

1.1

Transport

22.0

25.0

15.7

11.0

Packaging

19.0

10.4

31.4

22.0

Grading

23.0

12.5

25.5

17.6

Processing

5.0

5.2

5.9

4.4

Supervision

15.0

15.6

12.7

8.8

Sales

22.0

16.7

43.1

34.1

Reception

53.0

52.1

47.1

26.4

Research

17.0

7.3

13.7

9.9

7.0

5.2

8.8

11.0

Accounting

74.0

78.1

61.2

57.1

Crop management

13.0

8.3

8.8

5.5

Administration

45.0

44.8

55.9

52.7

Purchases

11.0

8.3

23.5

12.1

Representation

France non-member % (n = 91)

Far more important are the central agricultural tasks that women were doing, where some consistent patterns emerged along with variations among the four groupings of women. In order to get a more accurate view of what work women were performing on their farms, we separated out activities into those which might have to be done on any working farm and those linked to a particular, principal farm product. That is, whenever a type of work was specifically related to a certain product (such as milk or wine), we examined responses only from women listing such items as a principal product of their family enterprise (see Tables 3.8 and 3-9).44 Consequently, we can show what proportion of women in each of our basic categories carried out activities such as processing or accounting, and also how many who lived on dairy farms did milking, what proportion of women whose farms produce wine actually worked in the vineyards, and so on. To make the

6j

The Women

Table 3.9 Specialized agricultural work done frequently by respondents on farms with relevant principal products Quebec non-member

Quebec member

France non-member

France member

%

n

o/ /o

n

o/ /o

n

%

n

Field-work

53.2

94

50.6

91

35.5

62

46.5

43

Animal care

64.7

56

59.7

72

47.1

34

75.0

20

Milking

54.7

53

51.5

68

45.5

22

66.7

12

Flock management

14.3

56

17.3

72

8.8

34

15.0

20

Vineyard work

55.9

68

64.5

62

Grape harvest

55.9

68

56.5

62

Wine-making

16.2

68

16.1

62

images sharper, we decided to analyse only the reports that work was done "frequently." Looking at the more widely distributed tasks, then, the ones done on all farms, we found that the work most commonly performed by our respondents consisted of accounting, administration, and reception (accueil) - tasks pinpointed in other studies of farm women.45 With the exception of the members of the groupements, about half of relevant respondents frequently carried out field-work. But accounting had the highest level of involvement across the board. About eight-tenths of the Quebec women were involved in accounting, and 2,0 per cent fewer of the French; administration was often done by about 45 per cent of both, and reception by about half (a figure lowered by the French nonmembers' 2.6.4 Per cent frequency). One of the principal reasons historically for women assuming responsibility for farm accounting was that they often had more education than their husbands; we did not find this discrepancy in the educational levels of our respondents and their spouses.46 It seems clear that farm women are increasingly moving beyond straightforward bookkeeping to assuming a significant role in the financial management and planning of their operations. Is this part of what they understand by "administration?" This aspect of their work perhaps combines with their long-established responsibility for welcoming and feeding visitors to explain the large proportion of our respondents who reported that they were involved in "reception,"

68 Feminist Politics on the Farm

defined in a number of surveys as receiving sales representatives and other visitors to the farm. 47 As we were able to observe, in wine-growing regions such as Lussac women are regularly involved in public-relations work, including entertaining prospective buyers, sometimes by the coachload. Of course, the managerial or secretarial dimensions of women's agricultural work were far from completing their responsibilities. One Quebec commentator described farm women's work in the following way: "In fact their work is as remarkable for its quality as for its quantity. Accounting and caring for animals are tasks where their reputation no longer needs to be made: we can even consider these tasks to be female specialities. Management consultants also know that women often have a more realistic and less emotional vision of the development of the enterprise than their husband. "48 It is interesting to see accounting linked with animal care as a task that might be taken for granted as part of women's responsibilities. An important study of farm women in the Gironde noted that birthing and care of young animals was particularly likely to be assigned to women, and also that milking tended to be not just their task but also their responsibility.49 In our survey this latter was the case for just over half of the women on farms where milk was a principal product.50 On those farms a rather larger proportion than we found over all reported frequent involvement in care of animals. The French women on wine-producing enterprises, reported a relatively high level of involvement in vineyard work, including the grape harvest. The range of activities performed thus showed a high level of involvement in the agricultural enterprise, as did the hours spent on agricultural work. At the time of our study a full-time agricultural worker in France was expected by government regulators to work 2,400 hours a year, which amounts to about 46 to 48 hours a week; a paid non-agricultural employee was expected to do 36 hours a week.51 In Canada 40 hours constituted full-time work.52 However, it has been estimated authoritatively that the work week is actually far longer on the French and, by implication, the Quebec agricultural enterprise: 70 hours a week for men and 73 and a half for women, of which 43 and a half hours are "domestic work" and 30 agricultural.53 This estimate fits pretty well with what our respondents reported. Like Dion, we asked how many hours were spent on farm work per week in each season of the year (see Table 3.io). 54 Time budgets are notoriously suspect: many individuals have difficulty in accurately estimating how much time they spend on specific tasks, and the farm woman's work is particularly difficult to classify. An American study reported in 1983 how one respondent showed the artificial nature of

69 The Women Table 3.10 Agricultural work done by respondents weekly, by season Hours per week

n

0 %

1-15 %

16-39 %

40 or more %

100

18.0

13.0

26.0

43.0

96

17.7

31.3

19.8

31.3

102

9.8

16.7

35.3

38.2

91

8.8

22.0

35.2

34.1

100

17.0

8.0

20.0

55.0

96

14.6

15.6

29.2

40.6

102

9.8

17.6

24.5

48.0

91

13.2

17.6

24.2

45.1

100

18.0

12.0

22.0

48.0

96

20.8

20.8

24.0

34.4

102

12.7

21.6

36.3

29.4

91

15.4

23.1

28.6

33.0

100

45.0

17.0

24.0

14.0

96

44.8

25.0

18.8

11.5

102

11.8

23.5

41.2

23.5

91

14.3

18.7

33.0

34.1

SPRING

Quebec member Quebec non-member France member France non-member SUMMER

Quebec member Quebec non-member France member France non-member FALL

Quebec member Quebec non-member France member France non-member WINTER

Quebec member Quebec non-member France member France non-member

work categories: "when asked to enumerate the hours spent in farm rather than home tasks, [she] opened the lid of her washing machine, revealing a common mixture of barn suits, children's jeans, and furniture slip-covers all tumbling around in the soapy water."55 We asked our respondents and interviewers to look together at minutes per day and then add up the results, and this may have inflated totals. However, such figures do provide a general outline of how women apportion their time, even if some respondents miscalculate their actual time

70 Feminist Politics on the Farm

commitment. And the image emerges of women who are very busy indeed, much of that activity being unarguably agricultural. All four groups of our respondents reported substantial amounts of time spent on agricultural work, even though about a fifth of the Quebec and a third of the French farms employed agricultural help.56 National variations reflected the different climates in the two geographical areas as well as the different agricultural commodities produced. Quebec winters are long and severe; field-work comes virtually to a standstill for several months. Quebec respondents accordingly indicated considerable fluctuation in the amount of time devoted to agricultural work. In France, by contrast, hardly any seasonal variation in agricultural workloads was reported. In this countryside snow is a rarity, and even frost infrequent (though a draft of these pages was written during the unprecedented "Siberian" storms of January 1997, when the news pictures featured ice on the vines near Bordeaux). Regardless of the weather, for those farms whose principal product is wine, late fall and winter demand considerable time for bottling, labelling, and packaging wine in preparation for shipment. An account of the work of the vineyard notes that the vintner's "work does not allow any rest"; it begins its account of the year's round in November.57 Within each country, all the same, there were some differences in the number of hours of reported agricultural work. In Quebec it was the cercle members who claimed to contribute the highest number of hours: during the spring 43 per cent spent forty hours or more per week (the equivalent of full-time work) at farm labour; 55 per cent did so during the summer months, 48 per cent during the fall, and only 14 per cent during the winter (when, presumably, the men also were more likely to be working shorter hours). The proportion of non-members in Quebec who put in forty hours or more weekly was considerably lower, though with the same seasonal variation. The greater propensity of cercle members to engage in agricultural labour looked as if it might reflect the fact that the competing demands of child care had lessened for them, but when we cross-tabulated age with number of hours of agricultural labour performed, there were no significant differences related to age. In France there was generally less difference between members and non-members in the proportion of respondents who did forty or more hours of farm work each week (about a third to a half in each case), though the gf members were rather less likely to do so in winter.58 The only other sources we could find with seasonal time budgets had much the same findings, and we can say with confidence that, regardless of season, farm wives spent a great deal of their time each week engaged in work directly connected with the farming operation.59

7i The Women Table 3.11 Domestic work done by respondents weekly, by season Hours per week

n

0 %

1-15 %

16-39 %

40 or more %

100

5.0

13.0

38.0

44.0

26.0

29.2

44.8

SPRING

Quebec member Quebec non-member France member France non-member

96 102

4.9

22.5

57.8

14.7

91

1.1

25.3

49.5

24.2

100

5.0

15.0

37.0

43.0

30.2

26.0

43.8

SUMMER

Quebec member Quebec non-member France member France non-member

96 102

4.9

21.6

59.8

13.7

91

5.5

24.2

47.3

23.1

100

5.0

13.0

38.0

44.0

28.1

27.1

44.8

FALL

Quebec member Quebec non-member France member France non-member

96 102

5.9

22.5

56.9

14.7

91

5.5

24.2

47.3

23.1

100

7.0

9.0

24.0

60.0

15.6

24.0

60.4

WINTER

Quebec member Quebec non-member France member France non-member

96 102

3.9

20.6

58.8

16.7

91

6.6

23.1

46.2

24.2

The respondents' other job was, of course, domestic. Here too they did a great deal. Ransinangue remarks that her respondents spent an "enormous" amount of time on "travail familial'1'': at any given time of the year, from 60 to 80 per cent spent more than forty hours a week on housework, and some spent as much as eighty hours.60 Our respondents thus claimed that they spent as much or more time at domestic as at agricultural labour (see Table 3.11). Once again, there were some noteworthy differences between the estimates of the Quebec and the French

yz

Feminist Politics on the Farm

women. The former reported not only a much heavier assignment of time to domestic chores but also a much greater increase in the winter months compared to the other seasons. This pattern is even more marked when the groups are broken down into leaders and ranks. Regardless of the season, about 15 per cent of the gf members, leaders and followers alike, reported forty hours or more of domestic work a week; among the cercles, for three seasons of the year, about 60 per cent of leaders and 40 per cent of followers did that much housework, and in winter the figures leapt to 84.2 and 54.3 per cent. We will discuss later the very small amount of housework that men do - or, rather, help with. But this is hardly needed, for our respondents' estimates of time spent on domestic work speak for themselves, particularly when we remember how much time they spent on agricultural activities. OFF-FARM

WORK

It seems likely that our respondents' levels of housework and even of agricultural work are typical of farm wives. By contrast, with respect to off-farm employment our respondents are thoroughly exceptional. Many recent studies have pointed out the growing importance of wives' working off the farm to supplement farm incomes. In Canada in 1990, 36 per cent of farm women had non-agricultural employment. However, the percentage of wives with jobs away from the farm was considerably lower in both Quebec and France - 22 per cent and 18 per cent respectively.61 Even by comparison to these latter data related to our specific geographic areas of study, we found a noticeably low level of off-farm employment, with the exception of the cercle leaders, of whom 3 2 per cent reported that they currently worked for wages off the farm, as did 14 per cent of the ranks and 13 per cent of the nonmembers (see Table 3.12). These proportions are similar to the figures reported by Dion.62 The percentage of French respondents gainfully employed off their farms was even smaller; 7 per cent for gf members, and 12 per cent for non-members. By contrast, INSEE reported that in France in 1990, 18.3 per cent of wives on working farms not only worked away from the farm but had this as their principal occupation.63 We should note also that, among our respondents, the majority of the "unemployed" women were satisfied with that situation (see Table 3.13). In Quebec about a fifth of all such respondents said that they "sometimes" or "often" regretted not having paid non-farm employment. The level of regret was considerably higher among those working only on the farm in France: one-third of the gf members and just under 45 per cent of the non-members. Another noticeable national differ-

73

The Women

Table 3.12 Respondents' paid employment off the farm France

Quebec

NonNonLeader Rank Member member Leader Rank Member member % % % % % % % % (n = 19) (n = 81) (n = 100) (n = 96) (n = 22) (n = 80) (n = 102) (n = 91)

Never

15 .8

30.9

28.0

18.9

Current

31 .6

13.6

17.0

13.7

Past

78 .9

65.0

67.7

77.9

63..6

36,.4

42,.3

47.0

40.7

9.,0

7.0

12.1

52 .6

49.0

56.0

Table 3.13 Respondents' regrets for not currently having paid employment off the farm

Frequency

Quebec member % (n = 100)

Quebec Non-member % (n = 96)

France Member % (n = 102)

France Non-member % (n = 91)

1.2

1.2

8.6

13.8

Sometimes

19.3

22.0

25.8

30.0

Rarely

19.3

17.1

12.9

6.3

Never

56.6

58.5

49.5

48.8

3.6

1.2

3.2

1.3

Often

Missing

ence appeared when respondents were asked to indicate if they had worked before settling on the farm. Once again, the French respondents were less likely to have worked for wages; indeed, some 40 per cent fell into this category. This figure included over 60 per cent of the current officers of the groupements (compared with only 15.8 per cent of the Quebec leaders). Among the few women currently working off the farm, the largest single occupational group was reported as employee, which we interpret as white-collar work, most likely in the form of service work such as a shop assistant or clerk in the small towns dotting our survey regions. This finding is characteristic of the situation reported for all French farm women employed off the farm: in 1988 half of them described their professional status as employee.64 More generally, such jobs represent the reality of the limited off-farm employment opportunities for farm women.

74

Feminist Politics on the Farm

We may note that our respondents' husbands were also unlikely to work off the farm. But in Quebec the percentage among the spouses was roughly equivalent to the standard for men from family farms: 2.7 per cent of all male farm operators worked for pay off the farm, as did almost the same percentage of the husbands of our respondents, 2,5 per cent. By contrast, in France, where far fewer male farmers worked off the farm, husbands of club members were even less likely to do so. On average one in five French farmers combined off-farm employment with farming in 1990, but only a minute 6 per cent of the spouses of gf members did so (as compared to 18 per cent of the non-members' spouses).65 Off-farm work thus seemed unlikely to be a significant factor for our respondents. Because so few of our respondents were currently working off the farm, for other discussions in this study we combined categories to analyse them together with the women who had been in the paid labour force at some earlier time. This combined measure, referring to women who had ever had paid employment off the farm, is used for our regression analyses, on the basis that many scholars insist that working for pay, even briefly, can have a continuing effect on women's attitudes. There were thus a number of distinctive characteristics associated with each of our four groups of respondents. For the cercles we would be talking of women over fifty who were farmers' daughters, who had large families (more than four children) and some secondary education (like their husbands), who lived under a community-property relationship and were frequent attenders at mass. For the other group of Quebec respondents, the typical women were less than forty years old, also farmers' daughters but with smaller families, possessing about the same level of education but not living under community property or attending mass as often. In France the typical members of the groupements were middling in age, between forty and fifty years old, farmers' daughters with three or fewer children, possessed of only a primary education, and frequent attenders at mass. Their non-club counterparts were younger, under forty years of age, and they had more education (at least secondary). Most likely not farmers' daughters, they were only infrequently present at mass. In both cases the French women were under the matrimonial regime of community of property. When we gave them names - Andree, Brigitte, Christiane, Diane - we reminded ourselves that they were also individuals, and that there was variation even within the groups. At the same time, we can surely generalize a bit, in some cases across all categories. These women mostly did not work off their farms, but

75 The Women

they did a great deal of work in the agricultural enterprise. In general, and more particularly in the case of the club members, who were older, with larger families, less well-educated, and more religious, our subjects looked like the conservative women that the literature predicted. When we looked more closely at each group, and compared leaders and ranks, we found some interesting, possibly important differences. In both cases the leaders were better educated than were the ranks. Particularly in Quebec there was a noticeably higher proportion of leaders than non-leaders who had a university-level education. These same cercle leaders tended to be the oldest of the leaders and indeed of the groups over all. They also included the highest percentage of individuals with six or more children. And the gf leaders, even though more professionally oriented than any other category, were also more religiously observant than the other French respondents. The picture was thus a contradictory one, even for the leaders, with higher education and professional orientation pulling in different directions from frequent religious observance, larger families, and more advanced age. To understand - to try to understand - all this, we now turn directly to the attitudes and behaviour that we see as political, beginning with the sectors usually, undeniably seen as such: mainstream, or elite and electoral politics.

CHAPTER FOUR

Mainstream Politics "La politique, c'est ... gerer un pays dans son bien. "Politics means ... managing a country's goods/ well-being."1

Towards the end of our questions on politics we asked our respondents, "Would you like to tell me what you understand by 'politics'?" "It just doesn't interest me," was one response, and a fairly frequent one. But most were ready enough to comment. "Those jumping jacks," said one woman sourly. "It must be a good job, since so many people want it," said another. Usually, we got serious and informative answers, including perhaps the most relevant of all: "politics is those men who govern us." This respondent, who was French, may not have meant to emphasize the gender of the governors. The emphasis was there, however, and it came to inform our analysis. We shall begin this chapter by looking at the range of definitions we received. DEFINITIONS

An innovative aspect of our study was the inclusion of three openended definitional questions. Following other surveys, we asked our respondents whether they were interested in politics, whether they discussed politics, and so on, as we have indicated. But we did something different when we followed up by asking what the respondents understood by the term "politics."2 Like many feminist analysts, we had suspected that women rejected "politics" because they thought of it as a matter of parties and electoral competition. Politics would then focus on the legislature, which is an unwelcoming environment where there are very few women. Therefore we suggested in our initial research proposal that scholars should redefine politics to include what women do in support or at the margin of politics. We still think that some such project of redefinition has in-

77 Mainstream Politics

tellectual urgency. But since our survey we have changed our views on what women think politics is. We are now persuaded that for a large number - and this may be true of many men also - politics is basically a question of the management of the country, with a large element of attention to finances (budgetary matters) and to foreign policy, as well as, with respect to domestic politics, an ideal of social well-being. Our questionnaire was somewhat weighted towards explaining politics in terms of partisan and electoral processes: the first questions in the section about politics were about voting. We therefore take the more seriously the fact that the most frequent definitions of politics given were not partisan or electoral at all.3 Our exemplars can serve as an introduction once again, but with a reminder that they were typical only in the broadest sense. Andree, a cercle activist, defined politics as "those who make the laws." Brigitte, also from Quebec but not a joiner, the youngest of the exemplars, told us that politics was "all the same - whatever the party is." She thus gave us an answer that apparently acknowledged partisanship, but distanced herself from it. Christiane, long-time member of a groupement, also mentioned parties but she did not focus on the electoral process. Instead, she moved on to the next stage, governance itself: "different parties that form the government." And Diane, mother of two preschoolers and not very interested in politics, could not give a definition: "I don't know how to express it." These four women managed to supply examples of all of the responses we received most frequently (see Table 4.1). The single most common definition of politics was like Andree's. It often took the form of something like "running a country." We called it "management"; the responses given by Andree and Christiane were coded as such. We got many variations: "the socio-economic management of a country," "trying to run a country," again (and often) "managing a country," "shared ideas that get put in practice for the country to function properly (liberty, equality, fraternity)." These were responses from France, as the reference to liberte, egalite, fraternite suggests. The Quebec women gave similar definitions, sometimes explicitly adding a provincial dimension: "organization of the country and of finances," "someone able to manage our province properly so that we won't be in deficit," "management of society, putting in place methods of operation so that all goes as well as possible," "the demands that we make to the government to supervise us for the sake of everyone's well-being," and, finally, "people able to make the best decisions for Quebec." The figures we give for this response probably understate it, for some "other" responses might in fact be references to management, such as those concerning the collectivity or the com-

78 Feminist Politics on the Farm Table 4.1 Respondents' definitions of the concept politics

Quebec member % (n = 100) Hostility

Quebec non-member % (n = 96)

France member % (n = 102)

France non-member % (n = 91)

6.0

7.3

9.8

8.8

Management

38.0

44.8

31.4

38.5

Partisan

12.0

7.3

8.8

8.8

Other

13.0

18.8

20.6

23.1

Missing

31.0

21.9

29.4

20.9

mon good. "Management" responses were given by just under 40 per cent of all the farm women. Leaders were more likely to give a management definition, and the Quebec leaders most of all, more than half of them giving this sort of answer. Quebec leaders were also the least likely to avoid hazarding a definition, only two of them doing so. In general, inability to give a definition - as with Diane - was moderately frequent, running at from about a fifth to a third of the answers for every category except that of the Quebec leaders. As a group the French women were more idealistic and more intellectual, referring more frequently to the classical political concepts. Government, they told us, means not just management but something more: "the affirmation of profound thoughts that men try to adapt to running the nation," "to foresee the future of the country in the best interest of the citizens and the proper place for our country in the world from an economic point of view." There were not many positive responses that identified politics as a matter of partisan competition: only a tenth. Politics in an ignoble sense, something to be rejected - la politique politicienne - we included in "hostility." This is where electoral politics appeared the most often: "a muddle, no matter who's in power; promises, they don't give a hoot about them," "ministers and deputies squabbling and all wanting to be right." References to electoral politics were not frequent, however, even if we added in such hostile comments. Finally, we classified under "other" the responses that suggested, for instance, that politics was everywhere: "everything or almost everything is political: parish, school board, province," "everything is political, law, liberty." We also included here the idea of the non-partisan representation of citizens. The last, catch-all category was, therefore,

79

Mainstream Politics

far from vacuous; it included some of the more sophisticated, non-standard understandings of politics. These definitions did not, we thought, imply a naive or uninvolved set of images of politics. However, it was not obvious what they implied in terms of political action or inaction. We therefore looked directly at the activity and attitudes that were associated: the respondents as political actors. ELITE POLITICS

A quick scan of any newspaper in the world shows who the generally recognized political actors are - those people who have politics or governance as an occupation. There are very few of them, and they are nearly all men. This is elite politics, which, in both France and Canada, centres on elections, the route through which individuals aspire to and sometimes achieve influential positions in the different levels of government. Elite politics usually involves competition among political parties, so that participation in the command structure inside political parties is relevant. Elite politics also includes corporatist activities, which for our study meant the important producers' associations and agricultural unions in France and Quebec.4 The leaders of such groups are also elected, though only from a certain limited membership.5 In both nations of our study women are formally eligible for all elected positions, outside as well as inside government. In practice, for both, women are still the exception in the upper echelons of the elite and only scantily represented in the lower ranks. Nor are women numerous in appointed political positions. As a result, studies of women in politics tend to focus on the mass and community levels. There is a study waiting to be done of the role of farm women in elective and appointive office and their participation in the activities of agricultural producers' associations and farm unions.6 For our own small project, less a sample than a universe, we did not think it made sense to ask about such infrequent behaviour as municipal or other public office-holding and aspirations to it.7 However, we did ask about the very lowest levels of participation in elite politics, the pre-conditions for other roles there: membership and office-holding in political parties or (agricultural) unions. Very few of our respondents even belonged to political movements or parties (seven in all), but they were slightly more involved than we expected with unions or professional organizations (fifty-six said that they were members). Only a tiny fraction of them, however, were officers: one in a political party and six in unions. In our informal discussions with women active with the agricultural unions, cbambres d'agriculture, and mutualites in France, we

8o Feminist Politics on the Farm

were constantly told about the "first" woman to hold this or that position - but these women were not members of our groups.8 We can only agree with INSEE'S comments in 1990: although something like one out of every three French farmers belongs to a "professional organization," women farmers are "pretty well absent from the professional organizations that thus remain men's business."9 Much the same picture emerged for municipal office, although that is the area in which women's participation is increasing the most rapidly world-wide. Rural women have a long way to go here, however. Although most French mayors are farmers, so that at the time of our study 2.2 per cent of the heads of farm enterprises held elective office, only 1.3 per cent of the farmer-mayors were women.10 Cercle and g/presidents confirmed to us that our respondents were not among the small group of rural women who were currently local office-holders or aspirants.11 To study these elected women, a different technique from ours would be appropriate, possibly a far larger survey followed up by selected interviews of those identified as unsuccessful or successful candidates. There is reason to expect that the club-member subjects of our survey will become more active in elite politics in both Quebec and France. Some officers in the cercles have already played a consultative role. For example, provincial president Noella Huot was consulted by the Quebec Ministry of the Family, and a cercle board member, Kristiane Pilote, represented the Cercles de fermieres at a national conference on agriculture held in New Brunswick in I988.12 In addition, it seems clear that the cercles have already had for some of their members the sort of politicizing effect that has been noted in other studies of traditional women's groups. In Yolande Cohen's history of the cercles^ the prototype "young farm woman" described her own group as a "second family," and also a "trampoline" for self-development and public activity. Because of her experience in the group, she was planning to stand for the municipal council.13 By 1992 the departmental federation of GDAFS in the Gironde was using similar language: "The group is a place for training to take responsibility, and serves as a trampoline for daring to get involved elsewhere."14 Three years earlier, the French gf members present at our 1989 conference in France responded enthusiastically to what they heard about the pressure-group activities of the cercles. Over time, if the groupements survive, they may well take on a similar role. But most of this is for the future. MASS-LEVEL POLITICS: ACTION

Alongside elite participation, underpinning it, lies the larger area of mass politics, including political action and also attitudes and prefer-

81 Mainstream Politics ences. Here women are far more involved, though rarely to a degree proportionate to the half of the population that they represent. We asked respondents about the two areas of mass politics that correspond to the elite ones already mentioned: the lower levels of electoral political behaviour and voluntary pressure-group or other non-elected volunteer activities. When we planned this study, a central focus was our belief that women's organizations would make women more politically active in terms even of conventional, electorally related citizen politics. That is, we expected to be able to show that club membership, along with certain associated beliefs, was connected with, possibly even caused a higher and more meaningful level of politicization. Such hypotheses, of course, flew in the face of scholarly characterization of our subjects as those women most likely to be less active than men and, if active, less perceptive. What we found was that the club women were not less active or political than the non-members, and this is itself meaningful. Within our entire group of farm women respondents, the club members, particularly the Quebec ones, were older, more religious, and had more children. They might well have been expected to be less involved in politics, whether of the conventional sort or of the varieties of feminism that we discuss. Furthermore, among the Quebec club members we identified a smaller group of women who were more active even in conventional terms. These were the current officers of the cercles, the ones we labelled "leaders." In them we think we identified a subgroup that was relatively dynamic, that to a large degree fitted our original expectations for the club women as a whole. Note that we define leaders on the basis of their role in the women's organizations we studied. That role we would already regard as political because it involves some degree of authority and also some responsibility for dealing with the various representatives of the state. Over all, the farm women showed a respectable level of involvement in the citizen activities most commonly studied (see Table 4.z). To begin with, they were enthusiastic voters. At a time when voting levels have declined in Western countries, nearly all of our women vote regularly. Because just about all of our respondents voted "regularly," we used figures of actual reported votes in specific elections as our preferred indicator of voting.15 Our subjects reported only fourteen failures to vote in all (this was for almost four hundred people in a total of four elections in two countries). Their devotion to the vote was unaffected by the fact that some two-thirds of them believed that elections did not make much difference in people's lives, and a rather higher percentage thought that all the parties could get together to fix things up if only they wanted to.

82. Feminist Politics on the Farm Table 4.2. Respondents' involvement in mainstream politics, set in context Quebec Quebec member non-member

Canada/Quebec

%(n = 100)

%(n = 96)

%

Quebec provincial election 1985, voted

95.0

95.8

75.6

Canada national election 1988, voted

97.0

90.6

89.0

Give money to a party

17.0

10.4

12.4

Volunteer during a campaign

13.0

13.5

12.9

Contact an elected official

17.0

15.6

18.9

Watch television news

90.0

92.7

67.6

France member

France non-member

France

% (n = 102)

% (n = 91)

%

France legislative election 1988

87.3

90.1

65.7

France presidential election (2d round) 1988

92.2

94.5

84.1

Give money to a party

1.0

2.2

na

Volunteer during a campaign

2.0

6.6

na

Contact an elected official

8.8

13.2

14.3

91.2

93.4

59.0

Watch television news

Since records of women's involvement in politics have not been compiled systematically for Canada as a whole, Quebec, or France, the figures available for establishing a context are scanty and often not strictly comparable. In most cases it is necessary to rely on sample surveys from approximately the same time as our own survey. The figures in the columns headed Canada/Quebec and France have the referents indicated below. In the column Canada/Quebec the figure for 1985 Quebec provincial turnout is for all Quebec women and men, based on official records, from Lachapelle, The Quebec Democracy, Table 5.3. The figure for 1988 federal turnout is for Canadian (including Quebec) women only, from CNES 1988. All other figures in this column are for Canadian women, from CNES ^84. Voter turnout in France, for all women and men, based on official records, is from Wright, Government and Politics of Prance: first round of legislative elections, Appendix 9; second round of presidential election, Appendix 6. Our respondents reported the second round of both elections. For France, the figure is for contacting a municipal councillor frequently in Merignac, a suburb of Bordeaux, in ^85, using a sample that included both women and men; see Quantin, "Une ville en France: qui participe?" 77. The figure for watching television news is for all France in 1990, using a sample that included both women and men; see Ranger, "Les Francais s'interessent-ils en politique?" 131. For our respondents, for data drawn from the CNES, and for Ranger, the figures combine the answers with the two highest levels of intensity: regularly and very often plus occasionally and fairly often. We have reported only the highest of the three levels of intensity in Quantin's study.

83 Mainstream Politics Voting was virtually unanimous behaviour even for France, where our respondents' level of voting was lower, just under 90 per cent for the second round of the assembly elections in 1988.16 That the French level was only slightly different (we are never talking about as much as 10 per cent difference) is itself noteworthy, for France has recently been experiencing an exceptionally low level of voter turnout, down in June 1988 to two-thirds of those registered. In Canada, by contrast, officially tabulated voter turnout has stayed at around 75 per cent for recent federal elections; Quebeckers have tended to vote at roughly the national level. All of our groups of women were well above these frequencies, with our French respondents slightly above even the exceptionally high French figure for the second presidential round in 1988.17 Jean Morin, writing for INSEE, identifies "a hard core of assiduous voters," and our respondents seem to be part of this group in both countries. 18 The issue of women's failure to vote featured for many years in the discussions of women's alleged incompetence or lack of interest in politics.19 However, once women acquire the vote, the voting level of women tends over time to converge with that of men.20 There is even one French case recorded when women actually had the higher voting rate, in Privas in the Ardeche; here a campaign by 1'Union feminine civique et sociale (UFCS) was responsible.11 This case is worth mentioning, just as voting is worth discussing, because the UFCS is a Social Catholic women's organization with a clientele very like our respondents, and its effective campaign can be taken as an indication of the importance that such women attribute to the vote. Our subjects' level of voting was one of the two areas of political life in which they were more active than the corresponding men (the other was attention to radio and television news). Voting has been described as the easiest form of political participation, and it is in fact relatively easy in both the locations under consideration. But there is some evidence that women see the vote as political, and recognize it as a collective act necessary to justify future complaint or concern.Z1 Often, it looks as if analysts include votes as an indicator of political activity mainly because this information is available and already quantified (but we should note that level or content of female or male voting as such has in almost all cases to be based indirectly on self-report from sample surveys). One exception that we found useful was a recent study of political behaviour at the municipal level in Britain and France that explicitly included voting as a meaningful political indicator. This study interested us particularly because its French segment was set in Merignac, a suburb of Bordeaux. It identified a group, mostly male, of "associational specialists" who voted regularly but were, in addition,

84 Feminist Politics on the Farm

active in voluntary civic groups. Although these individuals were not involved in any other sorts of political activities, the study's analysts identified them as having a meaningful pattern of political involvement, different from those who merely voted. Our club respondents, with their relatively high level of organizational activity and voting, looked like Merignac's "associational specialists" and like them differed from most French citizens.23 French farm populations are seen as relatively uninterested in group membership. A club president told us that they were too "individualist" as she explained to us the difficulties of getting and keeping her group going. However, the more usual explanations focus on the overriding importance of family connections/4 Accordingly, we feel justified in assigning real meaning to the associational component of our respondents' activities. However, unlike the various social and political clubs to which the men of Merignac belonged, which tended to be linked to the Socialist Party that dominated that suburb, the cercles and the groupements were not systematically integrated into mainstream political structures. When we looked at those remaining conventional indicators of masslevel political activity for which we could find comparative information - contributions of money and time to political parties or campaigns, and tendency to contact elected officials - our Quebec women seemed at about the level of Canadian women in general. We say "seemed": these were difficult comparisons to make since, as we have noted, neither France nor Canada has been included in the various large crossnational studies of political behaviour over time. We accordingly had to rely, for Canada, on election studies, and for France on a few fragments reported by miscellaneous surveys. Apart from votes in actual elections, it was necessary to combine our own categories indicating "regular" and "occasional" activity to get some comparability with studies that asked about involvement in the limited context of a given campaign or election - but with awareness that campaigns mobilize activity to a higher level than was implied by our own questions about action over time. Today, during political campaigns and presumably at other times, Canadian women report patterns and levels of volunteer work for political parties, money donations, and attempts to contact elected officials that are very similar to those reported by men/ 5 The Quebec respondents in our survey were, in most of these respects, pretty much at the level of the whole population of Canadian women, even reporting slightly more frequent contacts with elected officials. By contrast, the French respondents reported virtually no "political" activity; only z.z per cent of French non-members reported regular or even occasional donations to a politi-

85 Mainstream Politics cal party, and only i.i per cent of members of gfs - one person - did so. Only slightly more did any volunteer work for parties. Finally, we collected information on an activity usually seen as relatively unimportant and even less meaningful than voting: regularly or occasionally listening to radio news and watching television news. Here we found a different pattern, one resembling voting. The figures were very high for both sorts of news, but we decided to use television, which seemed to us the slightly more difficult activity: television news programs tend to occur either around dinner-time, when they cannot easily be watched by women with responsibility for preparing meals and caring for small children, or late in the evening, at a time of great fatigue. The 1976 Gironde survey of farm women reported that 67 per cent of respondents got news and information from radio and television; a 1993 poll of Quebeckers found that 55 per cent identified television as their principal source of news; and a 1988 French poll found a figure of 59 per cent/6 In both countries over 90 per cent of our respondents followed television actualites\ this meant watching "the news" as much as 50 per cent more often than the general population did. We were reminded of the historical studies suggesting that radio was a crucial technological innovation from the point of view of rural women, who found in it a source of contact with the larger world/7 Only a small number of respondents mentioned a feeling of isolation as a major problem; perhaps the high level of devotion to television (and radio) was part of the explanation. Voting and following the news are both activities that can, we think, be seen as measures of interest in politics and as dimensions of participation; both are usually discounted. This rejection reflects the way in which political activities are visualized - as a unidimensional progression from passive to active versions of political action, a range influehtially described as moving from "spectatorial" to "gladiatorial."28 This progression also moves from sites where there are many women to ones where there are few. It sometimes seems as if any category wherein women become as active as men is then dismissed as easier, less demanding, less valuable. Office work experienced just such a devaluation as it came to be dominated by women; something similar seems to be occurring as women become more active in municipal politics. In the same way voting, an entitlement that required decades of struggles by feminists to secure, is now discounted. And attention to media does not count as interest in politics. In relation to mass-level political participation, we also looked to see if there were any meaningful differences between leaders and ranks. As far as voting goes, the women in all our groups voted with such enthusiasm that there was no room for variation. Similarly, because so many

86 Feminist Politics on the Farm

of them watched television regularly, there was no noteworthy difference among them, though we should perhaps mention that all the Quebec leaders reported that they followed the news on television. With such small numbers of participants, percentages are not very informative - even when we say that more than a quarter of the Quebec leaders served as volunteers for political parties, for instance, we are talking of only five people. Still, the Quebec leaders were most likely to work for a political party or contact an elected official, and the French leaders did even less than their followers. In fact, the French women, leaders and followers alike, were virtually uninvolved with conventional political action. We have no comparable figures for the whole French population, let alone for male farmers. However, the latter's involvement with municipal politics, which is often associated with partisan politics in France, suggests that their spouses would have had somewhat more local political activity than did our respondents. In short, we found a population of women who combined regular voting with attention to political news, as well as, for half of them, membership and, sometimes, leadership in the women's groups we were examining (as indeed the nature of our sample dictated). But there were no systematic or significant differences within or between groups of members and non-members, leaders and followers, such that we could infer anything about the effects of their involvement (or non-involvement) in rural women's organizations. The Quebec leaders' slightly greater activism in these respects explained, statistically speaking, why their groups over all did not appear less active than the comparable non-club group or the whole female or male populations in Canada. Is it possible that the issue-oriented programs of the cercles had some impact, if mainly on their officers? We may note also that in these small groups many women would have taken their turn at leadership positions. IDEOLOGY

Let us turn now from political action to political beliefs and to one of the more widely used measures of political views: the left-right scale. Perhaps the most common way of classifying political stances or issues, the left-right distinction refers to thinking about politics in terms of class difference, and also in terms of how much state control over society is appropriate. When it comes to specific content of the opposing poles, the labels are likely to be "communism" and "fascism." Opting for a definition that European and North American intellectuals would feel comfortable with, Ronald Inglehart suggests that left-right identification should be interpreted in terms of "whether one supports or op-

87 Mainstream Politics poses social change in an egalitarian direction."29 France is one of the countries where citizens are likely to describe their beliefs - as well as themselves and their political parties - in such terms (not surprising, given that this classification is traceable to the French revolutionary assemblies). Unfortunately, the left-right scale is a much less useful measure in North America, and Quebec, within Canada, is one of the places where it is the least helpful.30 We nevertheless decided to look at this ideological dimension because, in general, women are seen as less apt than men to respond to such classifications.31 They are less likely than men to be willing to say where they would place themselves on a scale of left-right beliefs; they are less likely to be willing to try to explain what these beliefs mean; and they are less likely to give definitions in the expected terms of class and of governmental power. Since the left-right axis and its accompanying mode of analysis are often seen as central to politics, women's incompetence in this respect constitutes an important part of an indictment of being less political. As in many other studies, we asked respondents to locate themselves on a left-right continuum laid out physically as a horizontal line on a diagram shown to them, and then to define the concepts of left and right; we made the choice to ask for definitions from all respondents, not just that smaller group willing to hazard a self-identification. Such questions do not produce high response rates among Canadians. Of our own Quebec respondents, about 60 per cent were willing to place themselves and some 3 5 per cent to give definitions, not far from what studies of the Canadian 1984 national election (CNES) had found. 32 Since within Canadian national samples Quebeckers responded to leftright queries less frequently than the average, our Quebec farm women were in fact at a reasonable level in respect to ability - or willingness to make such a placement, as well as to try to explain what it meant. The French respondents were both more willing and more knowledgeable, with some 80 per cent placing themselves and only about 10 per cent fewer prepared to give definitions. By comparison, in a French study conducted in 1988 all but 3 per cent of the respondents were prepared to place themselves on the scale - but two-thirds of them also indicated that "today, the ideas of left-right don't mean much." 33 Even for Canada, then, our respondents' level of substantive responses in both self-placement and definition was acceptable, though the French did much better, particularly at definition. We think this is important because the mere fact of women's relatively frequent non-response to survey questions has also been used as an indication that women lack both political knowledge and political efficacy: they are humbly aware of their ignorance and abjure opinions.34 Feminists have

88 Feminist Politics on the Farm

dissented from this interpretation, arguing that "don't know" is a reasonable response to complexity, preferable to male insistence on showing a spurious confidence (we think of the common male refusal to ask directions when lost).35 We felt no need to accept the suggestion that our farm women respondents withheld political comment in deference to superior male knowledge and entitlement; the large majority were emphatic about not leaving politics to men. Given unfriendly interpretations of women's non-responses, we looked with some care at our subjects in this respect before we examined their understanding of left and right. In this survey we asked very few questions that had obviously correct answers, with the exception of information about the women's own experience and situation - and these last were not verifiable. However, we did ask about political actions that were sufficiently recent that women could not easily be mistaken: specific votes, of which the earliest had occurred four years earlier and the two French examples only months before our survey. We also asked for self-identifications in relation to a controversial category (feminism) and in terms of controversial activities that women would be likely to be aware of (the women's movement). And we asked for definitions of difficult terms that at least looked as if they might have correct meanings: left-right, politics, and feminism. We had been warned to expect many refusals to discuss politics on the part of the French women and sex on the part of the Quebec women; feminism we expected to be a touchy topic for all, for it has become a very negative term and one not easy to define.36 It seems to us now that our advisers - and we ourselves - were making some rather conventional assumptions that our subjects might be ignorant or hostile about politics, embarrassed to talk about sex, and unwilling even to consider feminism. Our use of local interviewers very much in tune with the respondents may explain why very few women explicitly refused to answer questions. Nor did they very often give the evasive response of "don't know." However, even the Quebec women were relatively reticent about specific past electoral choices, mostly by pleading an implausible ignorance. This was also the only time we got any noticeable number of actual refusals to answer, though still fewer than 10 per cent for each election. The French women were even more resistant to reporting how they had voted, and for them also actual votes were the main cases in which they selected the relatively aggressive option of "refusal" (about iz per cent of the French respondents explicitly refused to specify their presidential votes, and slightly fewer did the same for left-right placement, which in France is equivalent to electoral options). Unexpectedly, without refusing to answer, the French women were also markedly uninformative ("don't know")

89 Mainstream Politics

about feminist self-identification, their opinions of women's liberation, and the likelihood of their becoming involved in the women's movement. Since we consider all these areas political, because related to public life and also to issues of autonomy and control, we would argue that the French responses showed a consistent pattern of uncommunicativeness about a range of political acts. Did the explicit refusal to talk about votes mean that our respondents took the notion of the secrecy of the ballot especially seriously, in France even more so than in Quebec? In any case, when we move away from the actual vote, another logic would seem called for, particularly since the Quebec respondents were also conspicuously uninformative in response to two other questions: the definition of left-right and the completely unrelated question about acceptability of pre-marital sex. They were, we should note, completely forthcoming with their views about adultery and with the facts of their own contraceptive practices. Certainly, among our respondents, non-responses did not seem to correspond to lack of information, as one analyst of the European data has suggested. We can hardly accept that in France the recent memory of one's own choice between two presidential candidates, mere months earlier, was dependent on knowledge about politics, or that in Quebec views about sex before marriage were genuinely unclear in people's minds.37 Finally, we were convinced that non-response was less meaningful than the fact that a large number of women were willing to tackle three complex definitional issues - all of which we think are political. At least two-thirds were willing to confront the meaning of significant dimensions of politics, with the single exception of the Quebeckers on the topic of left-right - who resembled in this a comparable larger Canadian population. So what did left-right mean to our farm women? Let us begin with how they placed themselves in relation to the diagrammed spectrum of beliefs (see Table 4.3). In Quebec almost half of the women who gave a self-identification placed themselves at the centre and a very small fragment at the left, with about 15 per cent at the right.38 They seemed to be showing a tendency to seek out the centre that many commentators have found among women.39 Among our French respondents, by contrast, just under a fifth located themselves at the left, and the remaining respondents ended up somewhat more towards the right than the centre (about 35 per cent). The French respondents placed themselves further towards the right than a group of their countrywomen surveyed for INSEE in 1988: in that study 43 per cent placed themselves at the left, and a quarter each at the right and at the centre.40 However, in terms of our survey the French respondents were still tilted more towards the right than our Quebec ones. Being a leader made a notice-

9O

Feminist Politics on the Farm

Table 4.3 Respondents' self-placement on the left-right scale of political beliefs Quebec

France

NonNonMember member Quebec Member member France % (n = 100) % (n = 96) % (n = 196) % (n = 102) % (n = 91) % (n = 193) 5.0

4.2

4.6

16.7

19.8

18.1

Centre

41.0

47.9

44.4

23.5

24.2

23.8

Right

15.0

14.6

14.8

39.2

33.0

36.3

2.2

1.0

Left

Other

35.0

31.3

33.2

13.7

7.7

10.9

Refuse

1.0

1.0

1.0

5.9

9.9

7.8

Blank

3.0

1.0

1.0

1.0

3.3

2.1

Don't know

able difference only in two cases: compared to their followers, the French leaders were more likely to place themselves at all, and more to the right; the Quebec leaders and followers were equally (un)likely to place themselves, but the leaders who did so were rather less to the right. National differences were thus noticeable in this case, both in level of responses and in general patterns. The national differences were clearer when we looked at the substance of attempts to define left and right (see Table 4.4). Here we looked for awareness of polarities or of party alignments, and for identification of parties or leaders as they are conventionally placed in a political range in each country.41 In France such identifications are constantly and explicitly made during and also between election campaigns. Perhaps for that reason our French respondents were relatively sophisticated, with about one-third of them and somewhat more of their leaders specifically and correctly identifying contrasts in terms of both ideologies and parties. Among the Canadians we found little more than awareness of polarities and party differences.42 In one respect, however, all of our women were relatively well-informed: none of them got the meaning of the key terms backward. When a massive cross-national study of political participation asked in I974 _ 75 for definitions of left and right, "a sizeable proportion" of respondents either could not give any meaning or completely reversed the terms; in an American study a fifth of those surveyed reversed the terms' meanings, as did 19 of Carbert's 117 Ontario farm women.43

9i

Mainstream Politics

Table 4.4 Respondents' definitions of the concepts left and right Quebec member % (n = 100}

Quebec non-member % (n = 96)

France member % (n = 102)

France non-member % (n = 91)

Polarities

4.0

4.2

2.0

4.4

Political parties

3.0

4.2

2.0

4.4

5.9

4.4

Ideas or ideologies Identified parties or leaders

2.0

1.0

16.7

4.4

Identified class or ideology

2.0

1.0

32.4

31.9

Other

21.0

24.0

11.8

20.9

Don't know

66.0

63.5

25.5

23.1

3.9

6.6

Refuse

1.0

Missing

1.0

2.1

We also looked at the practical application of ideology as a possibly better indication of understanding of political life. Researchers have had considerable interest in - and difficulty with - the project of comparing people's ideological self-placement to their objectively defined situation with respect to class, using indicators such as occupation or education. We could not differentiate among our respondents in terms of current occupation or occupation of the head of household, since they were all chosen because they were living and working on family farms, and we did not find education a useful systematic indicator of possible class differences. However, voting choices can in principle be lined up along the familiar spectrum from communism on the far left to fascism on the far right, and those who are ideologically - politically competent should cast ballots for the appropriate parties. Women are often still criticized for evading or eliding a "real" class placement, as shown by the fact that they vote differently from men who are in the same class situation. Thus, Mossuz-Lavau and Sineau express a common concern over working-class women's historical tendency to vote further to the right than their male counterparts. There is a certain grudging quality to Mossuz-Lavau's description of women's voting patterns in France in 1984, which saw them increasingly supporting the socialists: "We should, for this analysis, renounce the classic bipolar schema (right/left) and underline instead the feminine tendency to place themselves on the moderate wing of one or the other [political] families. "44 Moderation is obviously not seen as a legitimate

92, Feminist Politics on the Farm Table 4.5 Respondents' votes

*.

n QUEBEC PROVINCIAL ELECTION 1985

Quebec o/ /o

142

New Democratic Party

4.2

Liberal

63.4

Parti quebecois

32.4

CANADA F E D E R A L E L E C T I O N 1988

160

New Democratic Party

7.5

Liberal

41.3

Conservative

51.3

FRANCE LEGISLATIVE ELECTION (2.ND R O U N D ) 1988

Franci o/ /o

126

Parti socialiste unifie

.8

Parti socialiste

27.0

Centre des democrates sociaux

4.0

Parti republicain

3.2

Rassemblement pour la republique

53.2

Front national

.8

Union pour la democratic francaise

5.6

Union du rassemblement et du centre

4.0

other

1-6

FRANCE P R E S I D E N T I A L E L E C T I O N ( 2 N D R O U N D ) 1988

136

Mitterrand

30.9

Chirac

69.1

political choice; little attention is given to the fact that French women have been relatively unsupportive of the new rightist National Front (only one of our respondents reported such a vote).45 In general our respondents' party choices were distributed in ways typical of the elections we studied (see Table 4.5 for the reported votes).46 What these votes mean for ideological self-placement is more difficult to determine, but only because of Quebec. In that province it is currently impossible to identify any provincial party as "right," al-

93 Mainstream Politics though it is reasonable to put the currently tiny New Democratic Party, whether provincial or federal, on the left and to identify the Liberal parties of Quebec and Canada as centrist.47 In any case, the very few of our respondents to vote NDP (eighteen votes in all) were more likely to place themselves at the centre or, less often, the right than the left, while voters for all the other parties were distributed roughly proportionally to the overall left-right distribution of self-identifications, with Liberal voters more likely to see themselves on the right than were voters for the Parti quebecois or Conservatives. This suggests to us that the tiny NDP vote we recorded represents some sort of protest about the available choices, which in present-day Quebec politics tend to focus on issues related to possible separation from Canada; our respondents did not report abstention, voting Green, or deliberately spoiling ballots, the other possible modes of dissent. For example, Brigitte, who said it did not matter which party was in power and that all parties could get together, voted NDP in 1985 and Conservative in 1988 (an election when the Conservative Party presented itself to voters as supportive of Quebec autonomy). A Canadian study using data from the 1984 CNES concluded that class voting is "minimized in systems in which the substance and rhetoric of politics is cast in non-class terms, as in Quebec." Here "appeals to regional, ethnic and other loyalties" are seen as dominant, which presumably includes the identities assigned to political parties.48 It is also well established that, particularly in relation to federal parties, Quebec electors tend to be willing to cast what looks like an expedient vote unrelated to deep dimensions of belief, or at any rate belief systems of the sort usually tapped by left-right formulations.49 And so apparently were farm women we surveyed. For France a potentially more complex situation turned out to be much simpler. The definitions of left-right supplied by our French respondents convinced us that a fair number of them understood the concepts ideologically; this conclusion was confirmed by the almost perfect correspondence between ideological placement and vote. Thus, not a single self-identified rightist reported voting for a leftist party or for the socialist Francois Mitterrand in the second round of the presidential elections in 1988, while only one person who saw herself as at the left of the ideological scale then voted for the right's Jacques Chirac.50 Chirac, it should be noted, had earlier been a fairly popular minister of agriculture.51 These results suggest to us that our respondents voted, in class or ideological terms, in a way appropriate to their position and their beliefs. In general we felt that our respondents understood the meaning of left-right (if we allow the NDP vote as a protest, given that in Quebec

94

Feminist Politics on the Farm

such dimensions had little importance). We see no reason to think that our respondents were particularly incompetent in their understanding of either ideology or the meaning of political parties. They reflected national patterns and sectoral responses. And, indeed, why not? GRASS-ROOTS ACTIVISM

Although our subjects were not intensely involved with the conventional, electorally linked political activities available to them, we were convinced that they did understand them. We then turned to the more informal sectors of politics, to look at voluntary associations (see Table 4.6). We have already discussed involvement with the cercles and the gfs as a prime location of political activity outside of political parties - for half of our respondents, anyway. But in the survey we included a question that focused on a more conventional indicator of grass-roots activism: willingness to take part in citizen action around the sort of topics that have tended to engage the attention of groups made up wholly or mainly of women volunteers. For this inquiry we used a question devised by Mossuz-Sineau and Lavau. In our translation, it reads: Which of the following actions would you be prepared to participate in if the opportunity arose? i opposition to establishment of a nuclear facility 2, action in support of the environment, to fight against pollution 3 action to set up a creche (day-care facility for infants) 4 action to set up a garderie (day-care facility for older children) 5 action to set up a centre to supply information about contraception.5Z

The last three of the listed projects are characteristic of women's groups, while environmental and anti-nuclear groups, although often mixed in membership, tend to have a large majority of women activists. As issues, all attract more support from women than from men.53 The responses were enthusiastic, and showed some relationship to group membership. All the leaders of the cercles indicated support of environmental activism, a topic that has become a favoured theme for the Women's Institutes as well as the Cercles de fermieres themselves. The meaning of the responses is, of course, ambiguous. As Carbert noted, respondents may see provision of information about contraception as the opportunity to take a conservative, "pro-life" line, and environmental attention could include action like opposition to the installation of a garbage dump in the vicinity.54 We used this question to get approximations of relative concern about various issues, and of general support for related pressure or organizational activities.

95

Mainstream Politics

Table 4.6 Respondents' willingness to participate in grass-roots political action

"Yes %

No %

68.4

31.6

Maybe %

Missing %

15.8

QUEBEC LEADER

Against nuclear facility For environment

100.0

For infant day-care facility

26.3

15.8

42.1

For day-care facility

68.4

26.3

5.3

For contraceptive information

78.9

21.1

Against nuclear facility

43.2

48.1

88.9

9.9

6.2 1.2

2.5

For environment For infant day-care facility

27.2

33.3

21.0

18.5

For day-care facility

61.7

28.4

For contraceptive information

49.4

43.2

6.2 4.9

2.5

Against nuclear facility

52.1

35.4

9.4

3.1

For environment

93.8

6.3

For infant day-care facility

21.9

20.8

For day-care facility

61.5

20.8

3.1

For contraceptive information

47.9

32.3

49.0 14.6 15.6

Against nuclear facility

36.4

40.9

22.7

For environment

90.9

4.5

For infant day-care facility

54.5

22.7

For day-care facility

68.2

13.6

For contraceptive information

45.5 42.5

QUEBEC RANK

3.7

QUEBEC NON-MEMBER

8.3 4.2

FRANCE LEADER

4.5 4.5

31.8

13.6 13.6 18.2

28.8

22.5

6.3

9.1 4.5

FRANCE RANK

Against nuclear facility For environment

83.8

7.5

6.3

2.5

For infant day-care facility

47.5

23.8

8.8

For day-care facility

52.5

21.3

For contraceptive information

45.0

27.5

20.0 18.8 18.8

Against nuclear facility

40.7

40.7

16.5

2.2

For environment

82.4

12.1

4.4

1.1

For infant day-care facility For day-care facility

62.6 68.1

19.8 12.1

2.2

For contraceptive information

57.1

23.1

14.3 17.6 14.3

7.5 8.8

FRANCE N O N - M E M B E R

3.3 5.5

96 Feminist Politics on the Farm

We found that the cercle members (as compared to the Quebec nonmembers) and, even more so, their leaders were relatively likely to express interest in a centre to provide information about contraception: 78.9 per cent of the Quebec leaders. We would point here to an important comparison: even the members of the cercles, the most religious subgroup of all, were not surpassed to any great extent by the French non-members (the least religious) in their willingness to join in a campaign related to contraception (Quebec non-members and French members were in between). As we have already noted, the cercles have a well-established tradition of opposing abortion but also of actively supporting family planning and sex education. A general association of younger age with interest in anti-nuclear activities and in day care for infants showed up significantly in our logistic regression with respect to our whole Quebec population (and we should remember that these calculations allow for the effect of the other variables, including religion and work experience as well as club membership; see Appendix A). In addition, again according to the regression analysis, interest in anti-nuclear activities and child care increased significantly among our Quebec respondents along with the number of children. This would suggest that young mothers were the activists, which fits with general impressions and with the history of anti-nuclear groups. 55 In France the non-members indicated more willingness than the members to be active on our list of "women's issues," particularly infant and other child-care facilities, and contraceptive information. Though not statistically significant, the differences in potential activism between members and non-members were greater here than in Quebec. Such differences in interest may have some connection with the professional or training dimension of the gfs, which might draw in women less interested in more family- or child-oriented goals. Unlike MossuzLavau and Sineau, however, we did not find in either Quebec or France that housewives (women who had never worked for pay) were interested in activism only "when it was a question of solving the problems all too often considered women's special responsibility: day care or contraception."56 Arguments about the liberating effect of participation in the paid labour force, believed to make women more activist and also more progressive in interests and opinions, are crucial to the denigration of traditional women. They were not supported by our data (see Appendix A again). We found among all our respondents what seemed to us a very high level of interest in environmental issues, a lower but still quite high level of interest in the "women's issues" of day care and contraception, and a somewhat lower level of interest in anti-nuclear activities. Thus,

97 Mainstream Politics

while Mossuz-Lavau and Sineau had found that only 15 per cent of housewives but 2.9 per cent of those actually or previously working would work for a centre of information on contraception, we found about half of our respondents ready to do so, regardless of whether they were or had been in the paid labour force.57 The most striking result in Quebec was the relatively high propensity of the housewives (women who have never worked for pay) to support action for family planning. These responses have a logic of their own those not in the paid labour force might well be aware that more effective contraception would have opened more choices - but it is not the logic of the literature, which links appreciation of the desirability of control over reproduction to work experience. We should note also that the Quebec leaders were more involved than their followers in nearly every category, about 2.5 per cent more likely to be interested in action about nuclear issues and almost 30 per cent more in access to contraceptive information. In France, by contrast, it was non-members who were slightly more enthusiastic about information related to contraception, and also about support of child-care facilities. Over all, the figures were such that we could discard the suggestion that our club women, or our whole groups, or our housewife respondents, were uninterested in grass-roots action. The cercle leaders emerged again as conspicuously more inclined to be active, and in areas that their identity would not have predicted; once more we could say that for the cercles as a whole club membership possibly counteracted some other demographic characteristics. ATTITUDES

Let us now turn to the final group of relationships to politics as it is normally understood: attitudes. Few people spend much time on electoral politics apart from election day itself, nor, in modern mass society, are we expected to. Few of us spend much time even in the less formal grass-roots activities that are nowadays often interpreted as political. We may well, nevertheless, have a psychological investment in politics, so that we pay attention to it, care about it, and have views about who should be carrying out both the mundane and the more dramatic necessary tasks of politics. Accordingly, those studying political participation tend to include attitudes and opinions among the indicators they use. Here again women have tended to seem inferior to men. For this section of our inquiry we had available a fairly large number of questions about political attitudes that have been repeatedly used on different populations, though only occasionally on Canadian or French women. In analysing these we examined not just the highest level of re-

98

Feminist Politics on the Farm

sponse, the strongest: positives or negatives, but also the next level: "discuss occasionally" as well as "discuss often," "disagree somewhat" as well as "disagree strongly," and so on. We think that including this second set of responses makes appropriate allowances for a reluctance to exaggerate responses that is possibly more typical of women than of men; we ourselves are inclined to say that we do things "fairly often" rather than "always." Our tabular report therefore combines, for greater informativeness, the two greater degrees of intensity of agreement or disagreement; in the text, we break down these composite figures when it: is helpful (see Table 4.7). In addition, we looked at the differences among leaders and followers, and we discuss them when they seem usefully informative.58 The political opinions or attitudes that we examined can be divided into four categories. First, we employed two standard, widely used measures of politicization: expressed interest in politics and reported discussion of politics.59 Discussion might look more like political action, but it is usually grouped with attitude since it represents attention rather than anything that feeds directly into government composition or policy change. Next, there are two measures of feelings of political efficacy or competence: disagreeing with the argument that politics is complicated and therefore should be left to specialists, and convincing others of strongly held beliefs.60 We then discussed six assessments of the role of women in politics: unwillingness to leave politics to men, desire for more women in elected office, reasons for electing more women, reasons why so few women are elected, the acceptability of a woman as the nation's executive head (prime minister in Canada, president: in France), and views about the sex of a parliamentary representative. In the last case we chose to focus on the minority who preferred a woman instead of the majority who saw no difference between rnen and women in a legislature: we were interested to see if any linkage existed between such a choice and the other pro-woman opinions that we could tap. Finally, we included a less commonly used question about discussion of what Eurobarometer calls "the great problems of society." Many studies have found that women's attitudes towards mainstream politics tend to be more intense, more involved than their actual practices. A good deal of the study of women and politics is in fact concerned to trace the external constraints, including domestic responsibilities or internal "inhibitions," that might prevent women from putting their psychological involvement into practice.61 However, with respect to direct attention to politics, our respondents tended to be less involved than the whole national populations of women, whether we looked at interest in politics or at discussion of it. Only a few reported

99 Mainstream Politics Table 4.7 Respondents' views about politics Canada/ Quebec

Quebec

Non-

NonLeader

Rank

Interested in politics

26.3

Discuss politics

21.0 38.0

Leader

member

% % % (n = 19) (n = 81) (n = 96)

France/ Europe

France

%

27.1

56.2

51.0

58.1

Rank

member

% % % (n = 22) (n = 80) (n = 91)

27.3

30.0 57.8

%

36.3

36.0

53.9

64.0

Politics does not require specialists

63.2

37.0

56.3

27.5

36.4

43.8

48.4

na

Convince others to adopt an opinion

73.7

50.6

55.2

13.9

31.8

25.0

46.2

48.0

Politics should not be left to men

8 J.5

79.0

90.6

na

90.9

86.3

86.8 75.0

Woman acceptable as chief executive

94.7

92.6

97.9

96.0

95.5

76.3

87.9

77.0

Prefer woman parliamentary representative

15.8

9.9

11.5

na

13.6

8.8

9.9

12.0

Discuss major problems of society

89.5

76.5

78.1

na

77.3

82.5

84.6

76.0

Since records of women's views about politics have not been compiled systematically for Canada as a whole, Quebec, or France, the figures available for establishing a context are scanty and often not strictly comparable. In most cases it is necessary to rely on sample surveys from approximately the same time as our own survey. The columns headed Canada/Quebec and France/Europe have the following referents. All figures in the column Canada/Quebec are for Canadian women, from the 1984 CNES, with the exception of the figure for acceptability of a woman as prime minister, which is for all Quebec women and men in 1992., combining those as likely (71 per cent) or more likely (z$ per cent) to support a party if a woman were chosen as its head; see Bozinoff and Turcotte, The Gallup Report. In the column headed France/Europe figures for frequency of political discussion and level of interest in politics are for French women in 1989; see EC 1991, 5. The figure for acceptance of a woman as president is for French women and men in 1990 willing to vote for a woman for political office at any level; see Women of Europe 64 (Mar./Apr. 1990): 14. All other France/Europe figures are for all European women in 1987; see EC 1987, r8, 32., 38. With the exception of the responses of those in France willing to vote for women at any level of political office, the figures combine the answers with the two highest levels of intensity: very, often, more likely, and strongly plus somewhat, occasionally, as likely, and quite strongly.

ioo Feminist Politics on the Farm

that they were very interested in the subject of politics. Among the tiny groups of "very interested," even the highest subgroup - the Quebec ranks, at 7.4 per cent - was well below a comparable national figure (15.5 per cent). Not a single one of the leaders in the gfs said that she was very interested in politics, and only one individual among the Quebec leaders said so. Here we should remember again that the latter were, in terms of behaviour, at least as active as other Canadian women. Adding in "quite interested" changed the picture somewhat for France but not for Quebec. The French non-members, at 36.3 per cent, then equalled the figure for all French women, although the gf members were still a few percentage points lower. But all categories of Quebec respondents remained at under half the level of Canadian women as a group, just over a quarter of them expressing much or some interest, compared to three-fifths of the national sample. In this case the fermieres were the least involved of all, the leaders ahead of the followers by only a trivial 5 per cent. These were clearly not women who expressed any significant interest in "politics." The second set of answers we looked at was related to discussion of politics. This question, whatever it means, is widely used as a measure of women's politicization. Ronald Inglehart, for instance, was prepared to use it as the only measure of the "gender gap" in "political involvement" in twenty societies.62 With respect to discussion of politics, our respondents' involvement was again, in both nations, below national averages for women (and in both places, women as a group were already about 15 per cent less interested in politics than men). However, we need to give some context to this finding, for the situation in relation to political discussion and interest differed strikingly between Canada and France. The reported level of interest in politics was much lower in France, so that men in France were slightly less attentive than women were in Canada. The relationship between interest and discussion varied in the populations of the two countries as well. In Canada as a whole in 1984, for both men and women, interest in politics was at about the same level as discussion of it. By contrast, in Europe in 1989, discussion of politics ran substantially higher than the relatively low interest in it, again for both men and women. In France specifically, 2,0 per cent more men discussed politics than said they were interested in it, and the difference was no less than 3Z per cent for women.63 There is some implication here that "interest" was read, at least in Europe, as a more continuing sort of commitment. In any case, in 1989 frequent or occasional discussion of politics was reported by 64 per cent of French women queried by Eurobarometer, though their interest was at only 3 6 per cent, while in Canada close to 60 per cent of women reported both interest and discussion. Among our Quebec respondents,

ioi Mainstream Politics 2,4 per cent were very or somewhat interested in politics and 44 per cent discussed it sometimes or often; the French figures were 33 per cent and 56 per cent.64 The French women were thus very like the comparable population, but the Quebec women, though reporting more discussion than interest, were substantially lower than their countrywomen. Typically, none of our exemplars was more than slightly interested in politics, nor did any of them discuss it often, though Christiane (the g/member) occasionally discussed the topic with friends. With respect to our respondents' very scanty discussion of politics, the cercles stood out - but in this case for their even greater inactivity. Half or more of the non-club members in both countries as well as those belonging to the gfs discussed politics frequently or occasionally, but only 3 8 per cent of those in the cercles. Furthermore, in this case the cercle leaders were actually below the average of the organization's members as a whole, for fewer than a third discussed politics even occasionally. We should note at this point that such a score would in many contexts irreversibly label the cercle leaders apolitical, with all that is implied about lack of modernity, incapacity, and so forth, in spite of what we have already chronicled about their conventional and grass-roots activity and interest. Our next set of questions related to "political efficacy." Here we used the most ordinary or obvious meaning of the term: feelings of competence and comfort in relation to government. Such feelings would seem to be necessary if someone is to venture into the political arena.65 Questions designed to tap such qualities have frequently been asked in mass surveys. The relevant questions ask, first, whether politics is so complicated that it has to be left to specialists. Those likely to be active in politics robustly deny that only experts are capable of understanding the subject. The second relevant question is about reported success in persuasion, which seems to be equivalent to self-confidence and possible ease in relation to political disagreements. In their answers to both questions related to political efficacy, the cercle leaders again stood out once we included more than the most intense categories of response. A commanding 63.2 per cent of the cercle leaders disagreed a lot or somewhat that politics was beyond their understanding; this is the more remarkable because the entire cercle group was dragged down to 42, per cent by the ranks' relatively diffident responses. In addition, almost three-quarters of the cercle leaders showed confidence in their persuasive ability, and not a single one reported herself unable to convince others of strongly held beliefs. The French answers to these two questions were more tipped towards deference to experts, two-fifths of both leaders and followers among the French gfs reporting that they never convinced anyone of strongly held views.

102 Feminist Politics on the Farm

We cannot really set the Canadian responses in context, since once again we lack adequate comparable questions. The question asked in the North American election surveys was about persuading people how to vote, and the respondents to such questions were apparently, quite sensibly, dubious about influencing votes (that is, they reported being less persuasive than our respondents seem to be). With respect to France, the non-members in our survey look much like their counterparts who were asked the same question by Eurobarometer, while the members are significantly less confident than any comparable group (see Appendix A). Our exemplars mirror this national variation: Andree often convinced people; Brigitte did so occasionally, Christiane rarely, and Diane never. The responses to questions about persuasiveness are not trivial, for reported persuasive ability (using a question such as we used) is often interpreted as influence. Thus the 1978 Eurobarometer survey constructed an "index of leadership" based on the same two questions on political efficacy we used (politics requires specialists, convincing others). In the 1983 EC study, convincing others of an opinion was one component of an analysis looking at male-female ratios of "involvement in different kinds of social and political activities." We may note that in 1983 voting was omitted from the discussion because of compulsory voting in some European Community countries (not including France), as was membership in clubs and organizations, because of "heterogeneity." These measurements thus excluded relatively frequent activities of our respondents, to focus on ones that they did not do.66 And, more to the point here, by looking only at frequent persuasiveness, the index once again missed what seems to us significant - those views that women will describe only as "occasional" rather than frequent or habitual. Thus the Quebec leaders who denied that they were incapable of persuasion also refused to say that they were "often" persuasive. If we look at both top layers of response, however, it seems reasonable to conclude that the cercle presidents saw themselves as persuasive - influential? And they did indeed strike us as being that in reality, and also in their self-images. In the next chapter, in relation to feminism, we shall discuss our understanding of the apparent lack of persuasiveness reported by so many of our respondents. For now, we shall interpret it as an indication of reluctance to participate in mainstream politics. We therefore see the leaders among our Quebec clubwoman informants as relatively confident of their ability to participate, but them alone, and we conclude that our respondents as a group still believed that politics was a specialist matter and should be left to those competent. Apart from those Canadian leaders' relatively high level of efficacy and practice of mainstream mass-level politics, we had at this point a

103

Mainstream Politics

picture of relatively but not exceptionally unconcerned citizens without a high degree of involvement. They also turned out to be sceptical about the standard forms of mainstream - parliamentary or union politics, about three-quarters of them agreeing that the parties could fix things if they would only get together and that elections did not change things much. Nor were they very committed to unions and the right to strike, about half of them feeling that losing this right would not matter much. Here the French women were somewhat more supportive than the Quebec women, and they and the cerde members were approximately at the levels that Mossuz-Lavau and Sineau had reported for French housewives ten years earlier.67 Elections are certainly the central stuff of male-defined politics. But that is a politics in which women play only a small role. We accordingly next shifted to look at views directly related to the role and level of women in politics. And we found that these rural women disagreed strongly with leaving politics to men, that they would like to see more women in politics, that the very large majority of them would accept a woman as prime minister or president, and that about a tenth of them would prefer a woman as representative in Parliament. Furthermore, over all, the leaders of the clubs emerged in both nations as strikingly more pro-woman. We take this last set of responses as indications of politicization, since we interpret preferences for or support of women in politics as such.68 Such views are, after all, a disruption of accepted, traditional views that bar women from political roles. April Morgan and Clyde Wilcox have even suggested that the view that politics should be left to men is an appropriate measure of anti-feminism (in 1987 about a quarter of the population of Europe, including 17 per cent of the women in France, still thought that politics was men's business).69 Among our respondents, the highest level of agreement that women should stay out of politics was to be found among the cerde members as a whole, at the low level of 7.4 per cent; only one of their leaders felt that way. And why did our respondents want more women in politics? Here we asked the question only of those who told us that they would like to see more women at any level of politics, from the local up to the national: just under half of the gf members, and somewhat fewer of the other respondents. Eurobarometer had supplied a rather peculiar list of possible reasons for wanting more women in elected office, two of which were substantive: more attention to women's issues and to "issues not much dealt with previously." Two other possible reasons were related to process, suggesting that women might make legislative processes more serious or reduce the amount of politicking that goes on. The relevant respondents to our survey were quite clear about their

104

Feminist Politics on the Farm

reasons: although about a third of those who wanted more elected women aimed at fixing up the conduct of politics, twice as many focused on women's issues and issues "not normally considered." Perhaps these last included the social issues that, as we shall see, they found worth discussing when "politics" was not. And to what, incidentally, did our respondents attribute there being so few women elected? It was not, most of them thought, because the wrong women stood as candidates (well under a fifth in any category listed that reason). Rather it was, according to a large majority, because not enough women stood as candidates - which is in fact the reason now given by most political scientists as the immediate cause of the continuing scarcity of women office-holders.70 This question allowed multiple responses, and about half of the relevant respondents also blamed parties for not supporting women candidates. It is of course as national leaders that women are most conspicuously underrepresented in politics. By the 19805 the populations of both France and Canada had come to agree in principle that it was acceptable for women to be national leaders. Thus, in 1990 a French survey reported that 77 per cent of the public would be willing to accept a woman as candidate for president.71 For Canada, in 1976, at the time of popular MP Flora MacDonald's unsuccessful bid for the leadership of the Progressive Conservative Party, 86 per cent accepted the idea of a woman leader. A more recent poll, taken in December 1992., a few months before Canada briefly had a non-elected woman prime minister, found these figures virtually unchanged. In Canada's parliamentary system, being as willing or more so to vote for your party with a woman leader should mean that you would accept that woman as prime minister; by that interpretation no less than 96 per cent of the Quebeckers polled would have found it acceptable in 1992 that the highest elected official should be a woman (2.5 per cent in Quebec in fact had a positive preference for a woman leader). Ji The farm women we interviewed shared these views. All of the four exemplars found it acceptable to have a woman as chief executive. More generally, we found that our Quebec respondents were at about the national levels in this respect (though not quite at the level for their own province), while the French ones were rather below.73 However, all the French leaders (the gf officers) agreed about the acceptability of Mme le President, and all but one of the leaders from Quebec thought Mme le Premier Ministre would be just fine. It would seem that: if it is now acceptable for women to be executive head of the nation, it might well be preferable, from the point of view of some women, to be represented by women in Parliament and, in general, to have more women elected to political office. Indeed, women

loj Mainstream Politics as a whole, in every case, choose such options much more frequently than men. So did, among our respondents, the leaders. Here, one figure stood out among our data: the 54.5 per cent of the French leaders who would like to see more women in their municipal councils - twelve women who might possibly themselves be potential candidates? We now turn to our final question about political attitudes, the one about discussion of "the great problems of society." This unusual question has an unusual history. According to the analysis prepared for the European Community, "in 1983 the hypothesis was advanced that [the reduced level of interest in politics] concerned 'pure' politics rather than the interest in 'public affairs' understood in a broader sense."74 Eurobarometer accordingly started posing this question, which we had not seen elsewhere: "When you are with friends, do you ... find yourself discussing the great problems of society (such as the rights of man [human rights], poverty, the Third World, equality between the sexes, etc.)?" It became evident that, indeed, interest in such issues continued high in every country, higher than interest in "politics" as such. We were particularly struck by the discovery that women's reported involvement in discussion of social problems was as high as men's, and in five countries, including France, even higher. By direct contrast, the more usual questions about interest in or discussion of politics have continued to produce less response from women than from men, even though men's response levels have themselves decreased in recent years. It is, we think, interesting what examples are given of great problems of society (and that no examples are felt needed for "politics"). " Rights of man, poverty, the Third World, equality between the sexes, etc." - these are precisely the sort of issues that tend, first of all, to escape partisan politics and, second, to provoke the gender gap. They look, in fact, like the "compassion" issues that separate women from men, the persistent "women's issues."75 Such topics also correspond to those issues in the Eurobarometer studies concerning which women showed significantly greater willingness to give opinions.76 The great social problems mobilized, if only for discussion, three out of four of our exemplars (the exception was Christiane, the French gf member). The topic once again had the greatest impact on the cercle leaders (89.5 per cent as compared to the very low 31.6 per cent for discussion of politics - and only 2,6.3 Per cent f°r interest in politics). Non-members and members were similar in each country, and there was no great gap between countries. In general the figures - over half discussing these issues occasionally, almost a quarter "often" - were consistently and strikingly different from those about politics as such. For us these findings support the suggestion that issues might play a significant role in activating even quite traditional women in relation to

io6 Feminist Politics on the Farm

politics - if we include in politics the "social" areas not usually seen as political, as well as considerations of the extent and nature of women's role in politics. DIMENSIONS OF POLITICS

Thus far we have been talking in terms of group characteristics. The data we have reviewed here discourage generalization of a sort that we might have felt free to make on the basis of, for example, the study of club records or interviews with a small group of club presidents, or especially the select groups of active members whom the club presidents wanted to single out for our attention. Therefore, we were conservative in speculating about any patterns of belief that might underlie the counts and cross-tabulations we had performed. We disagreed, as we have noted, with the indicators commonly used to show women as incompetent or conservative in relation to politics. We doubted the way in which these indicators were used implicitly to tap deeper dimensions of female response or non-response to politics, as when, for example, an analyst would build an argument about female backwardness on the lesser likelihood of women's saying they were interested in politics or discussed politics.77 But our own arguments also relied on assumptions about the importance of certain reported attitudes as surface markers of positive relationships between women and politics. For illumination we turned to factor analysis, and we conclude this chapter with a discussion of our attempt to find what we call "dimensions of politics" among the responses to our survey. Factor analysis comprises a series of techniques that are used to map overall correlations among a large set of variable characteristics. It has most persistently been used to search for "intelligence," as indicated in responses to standardized tests: those who answer related questions correctly can be inferred to understand the underlying logic of the queries. They are therefore assumed to be "intelligent," to possess a general mental capability that their correct answers demonstrate. Technically, the approach is best thought of as a sophisticated method of summarizing associations, with indications of whether they are statistically significant or not. It is, of course, a limited technique. To begin with, it can analyse only the information supplied. Furthermore, the naming of resultant "factors," which are patterns of association, is always speculative, and the titles given them are intuitive and interpretive (thus it is now argued that the results of intelligence quota - IQ - tests are related to problem-solving ability rather than to intelligence as such). Nevertheless, with all its faults, factor analysis is a logical procedure to adopt in order to trace what we have already described as "belief systems" -

icy Mainstream Politics

non-random ways of understanding the world. At the least, factor analysis serves as a means to summarize and simplify data streams such as the ones in which we sometimes felt ourselves drowning. We therefore commissioned factor-analytic exercises in order to simplify and sum up data, and also to search for patterns of association difficult to discern as we moved stage by stage through our findings.78 More important, for each main area of our study - politics, feminism, private or domestic politics - we searched for bundles of belief that would hang together technically and would also make sense to us intuitively. Our initial procedure, for each belief area, was an attempt to find patterns that might apply to all our respondents. Next, we divided each set of responses by nation, and these are the patterns we concentrated on explaining.79 So - what happened with politics (see Table 4.8)? Here we included in the analysis the most important of the relevant opinion questions: attention to politics, political efficacy, views on the role of women in politics, and discussion of the great social problems. We also added willingness to participate in grass-roots activities and, finally, views about the importance of union action, in the form of a question about whether loss of the right to strike would be serious. Though the frequencies on this last question had not struck us as particularly meaningful, some of the French literature lays considerable stress on women's lesser support for syndicalism. It is worth noting in this connection that in Canada women are unionizing far more rapidly than men, and are in fact somewhat more likely to be members of both national and governmental unions than are their "brothers."80 For the whole group of respondents to our survey, in relation to politics we could derive no useful factors at all. This finding was a message that national political cultures or context are likely to have an impact. It also casts doubt on a shared, universal "women's culture" in this area (or perhaps in any other?). We also discovered that the likelihood of carrying on different sorts of grass-roots political activity was not associated with any of the other possible attitudes about politics, either for the whole group or for the national subcategories. This meant that willingness to carry out such activities was not systematically related to interest in conventional politics: women were neither more nor less likely to be involved with grass-roots activism if they were involved with conventional politics. This suggested to us, as indeed we might have expected, that our respondents did not think of action related to women's issues and community activism as political.81 We accordingly moved to analysis on the national level, and dropped grass-roots politics from the mix. Although this factor analysis of political attitudes remained relatively unhelpful even when divided up on a national basis, there were two ex-

io8

Feminist Politics on the Farm

Table 4.8 Dimensions of mainstream politics: factors derived from respondents' views QUEBEC 57.8% OF VARIANCE EXPLAINED Political Attention Discuss politics

.76915

Interested in politics

.74405

Politics does not require specialists

.60681

Elections make a difference

.51540

Loss of right to strike would be serious

.40871

Too few women candidates

- .74466

Parties prefer male candidates

.73222

Discuss major problems of society

-.75376

Parties should not get together

.66067

Prefer woman parliamentary representative

-.78369

FRANCE 59.1%

OF VARIANCE E X P L A I N E D

Political Attention Interested in politics

.70665

Discuss politics

.69885

Politics does not require specialists

.68121

Discuss major problems of society

.52816 ProWoman

Politics should not be left to men

.71946

Woman acceptable as president

.63003

Prefer woman as parliamentary representative

.57683

Parties should not get together

.79113

Elections make a difference

.71373

Convince others to adopt an opinion

.77842

Should be more women in municipal office

.66171

Factors have been given identifying labels only when three or more elements are associated at a meaningful level. In general, positive figures correspond to more progressive views. A minus sign indicates that the most common direction of association has been reversed: the absence of women is not to be explained by scarcity of women candidates; major problems of society are not discussed; women are not preferred as parliamentary representatives.

io9 Mainstream Politics ceptions, factors that we labelled Political Attention and Pro-Woman.82 Respondents in both countries showed a plausible factor connecting interest in politics with discussion of politics and also rejection of the belief that politics is something that needs a specialist. The logic of Political Attention was clear: the same women were likely to be interested in politics, to discuss the topic, and to feel that it was not the affair of specialists alone. These women were a minority among our respondents, and without the factor analysis we would not have been able to pick them out. They are the few women whom usual analyses are prepared to accept as politically aware. For the Quebec respondents, in addition, two more components were also present in the factor labelled Political Attention, though less strongly: the rejection of the belief that elections were meaningless, and support of the right to strike. Looking for the meaning of the last of these, we noted that in Quebec unions have been exceptionally active on issues important to women; members of Quebec public service unions were the first women to obtain substantial maternity-leave provisions in Quebec.83 For France, the Political Attention factor did not include support of strikes, which did not turn up in that country's factor solution at all.84 Instead, discussion of great social problems was part of Political Attention.85 The first factor related to politics, then, gave us an image of a group of Quebec women attentive to a conventional political world that included elections and union activity. For France, by contrast, we had women whose interest in the political world was combined with an interest in the great social problems. The second meaningful factor that we found, Pro-Woman, was present only for the French respondents. For them, rejection of the claim that politics should be left to men was associated with finding a woman president "normal" and also with preferring a woman as a parliamentary representative. The Pro-Woman factor looked a bit like the gender-linked pattern of political beliefs that many feminists search for. Given what we know about the respondents' reasons for preferring more women in politics (which we did not include in the factor analysis), we may perhaps infer here some interest in the issues that would be pursued by women politicians.86 The factors that emerged were, together, technically fairly powerful (almost 60 per cent of the variance was explained). It was all the more interesting that persuasion did not appear as a component of political views (as some of the literature would lead us to expect). Instead it formed part, though only in France, of a relatively simple two-way association with views about the desirability of increasing the number of women in municipal politics.87 That is, persuasion was meaningful in this analysis only for the French, the group that was so strikingly not

no

Feminist Politics on the Farm

self-confident or insistent - and it was linked only to a desire to enlarge the role of women in electoral politics, so that the more self-confident were the ones who wanted more of a women's presence in municipal office - perhaps themselves? There were twenty-seven such women in France. We may recall that a clear majority of the leaders among the French clubwomen thought it would be a good idea to have more women present at that level. It seemed clear that a single coherent gender-linked, non-partisan, issue-oriented, non-mainstream, and pro-woman pattern could not be tapped by our questions, if indeed it existed at all. The Political Attention factors made sense, if in no very complex fashion, and those clusters of associations led us back to the subject of the first section of this chapter: the definitions our respondents gave us of the concept of politics itself. For the factor analyses suggested that most of our respondents did not see politics as we would have expected, in the form of a conventional partisan conflict. It was in fact our subjects' definitions of politics that explained why so many of them were prepared to say that they did not discuss or take any interest in politics. As we have shown, they participated at least adequately in mass-level activities, including belonging to a variety of community groups, and were both interested in social problems and supportive of women's participation in elected office. Such patterns were strongest among the Quebec leaders. But for most of our respondents such activities and opinions did not mean "politics," and here they shared widely held views. Their responses supplied further support for our belief that many of our respondents thought of politics as something that was pretty far removed from daily life. When we looked specifically at their own definitions of politics, we ended up with the national interest, the common good, general financial management, the deficit, social well-being writ large - subjects that one would not often discuss or be interested in even if aware that they mattered. At the same time, the majority of respondents tended to be optimistic, believing that ideals would prevail and that someone (most likely not the political parties or the groups identified as "left" or "right") was trying to run society for the good of all. Politics as such was therefore not their direct concern, except at election time, when they would vote, mainly on the basis of what they saw on television. The epigraph at the head of this chapter defines politics as "Gerer un pays dans son bien." This is not good French, but it is an accurate transcription of one woman's definition of "politics." We understand it to mean something about running a country for the common good, somewhere between two correct possibilities: "gerer un pays pour son bien" and "gerer bien un pays" - manage a country for its well-being or

in Mainstream Politics manage a country well. Meaning these things, this phrase represents our respondents' non-classic awareness of what politics is or should be. We now turn to our respondents' feminism, another dimension of their politics, and one even more elusive than their involvement with mainstream politics.

CHAPTER FIVE

Feminism "Feminisme va un peu trop loin, mais il en faut un peu.' "Feminism goes a little too far, but we need a bit of it."1

When we turned to feminism, among the four exemplars we found three who were prepared to call themselves feminists. But of course the representativeness of the four was limited, and what we were seeing was no more than a reminder that a quite conventional woman might well think of herself as that radical thing, a feminist. What was more typical was that even the one non-feminist, gf member Christiane, reported that she supported some of the views that are usually associated with feminism. It is not surprising that she did not want to describe herself as a feminist, since she thought that term referred to "a woman who spends lots of time being concerned about herself." In spite of her long membership in a gf, Christiane thought that the status of women was changing too fast (the three others thought it not fast enough). But she nevertheless joined the other exemplars in approving of what we call role equity, the goal of "those women who think that there should be less difference between men's and women's roles." At the other extreme with regard to feminism, cercle member Andree told us that she was indeed a feminist, and that feminism meant "protection of women." She was one of the few who refused to characterize farm work as men's or women's work, insisting that "women can do anything" and "everything suits women." But she had the worst possible opinion of the women's movement, and would never consider joining it. The Quebec non-member, Brigitte, who had a good opinion of the women's movement and thought she might perhaps join it, defined feminism straightforwardly: "equality of men and women - same work, same pay - sharing [household] tasks if the woman is going to work." By contrast, her French counterpart, non-member Diane, was a different sort of feminist who defined feminism as "to be equal and

ii3 Feminism therefore complementary to men." She had a fairly good opinion of the women's movement but still would not consider joining it. Their responses thus gave us examples of almost all the definitions of feminism we encountered among our respondents, and also of the important disjunction we found between feminism and the women's movement. These are the subjects of this chapter. Up to now we have concentrated on trying to show that farm women are political beings, active at a low but not negligible level even in relation to conventional measures of politics. We want now to expand our definitions, not just of political activity but of politically relevant opinions and goals, of politics itself. In this chapter we consider feminism as a set (or sets) of beliefs and as the basis of feminist organizations. In the following chapter we shall look at the area we call private politics, examining the complex mix of attitudes and practices that is connected to the way in which the farm enterprise combines the household and the workplace: attitudes about paid labour, agricultural labour, family and farm roles, and sexuality. The focuses of this and the next chapter are the two attitudinal areas - feminism and private-sphere values - that analysts are most likely to use to identify our subjects as non-political, even reactionary. Catholic, married, contentedly absent from the paid labour force, our respondents are expected to be hostile to feminism and to be rigid and punitive in relation to changes in domesticity and sexuality - the women from whom women's liberation will free us all.2 As we shall see, this is not an accurate description of our respondents' beliefs. We want to argue that both feminism and the women's movement are always political, the first as a set of belief systems about human relations of power and the second as a set of processes for generating social change. To identify oneself as a feminist is a political act; to define feminism is to think politically. Still, we do not think it appropriate to restrict the understanding of feminism to those women who are ready to claim that name. Nor do we think that there is a single constellation of beliefs that constitutes feminism, even in a single country or smaller geopolitical setting. Instead, we propose simply to look at our subjects' beliefs and then to relate them to what has been delineated empirically in other cases. For this portion of our survey we were much luckier with respect to potentially comparable queries, for in 1975 and 1983 Eurobarometer had posed a wide range of questions directly and explicitly related to feminism and the women's movement.3 We were therefore able to include, along with questions about feminist self-identification and definition, some measures of approval of sectors of the women's movement and also of such groups' goals. We accordingly asked, following Eu-

ii4 Feminist Politics on the Farm robarometer, about views regarding "those movements that have appeared recently and whose goal is the liberation of women" as well as about the likelihood of the respondents ever joining such groups. In this way we were able to refer to the ideology of feminism as well as to views about autonomous feminist organizing. Eurobarometer's question about "those women who want less difference between the roles of men and women" was used to tap what is often called liberal feminism, the work- and equality-focused views of the mainstream American women's movement that is the model for most American studies. In addition, we asked for views about sexual mores, including access to abortion, since the latter is often seen as the key, most radical feminist goal. Most importantly, our request that our respondents define feminism made it possible to get, directly from the women themselves, some indication of their own understanding of feminism. DEFINING FEMINISM/ IDENTIFYING FEMINISTS

A major activity of feminists in the 19808 was the delineation of types of feminism. We did some of this ourselves. Now we are inclined to accept self-identification more or less at face value on the condition of also including in our analysis some women, both past and present, who are not willing to call themselves "feminist," as well as excluding those whose actions and attitudes can be shown to restrict women's potential.4 We like the discursive definition provided by Elsa Schieder: "To be feminist ... is to be consciously and actively in favour of girls and women being able to develop and invent lives of our own choosing, within human limitations, and provided the choices don't violate others', female and male."5 We also found helpful a definition and an argument presented by Mary Katzenstein that in general outline are very close to ours. Using a definition of feminism as "a general oppositional stance to gender hierarchy," she notes that many whom she would call feminists prefer not to be so labelled "because they see a feminist as someone who must subscribe to a requisite set of views on particular subjects (only some of which they adhere to) and because they wish to avoid the political costs of labelling."6 We welcomed her reinforcement of our belief that self-identification as feminist might well be limited even among women we ourselves would consider feminists or close to it. In addition, we liked her linking "everyday resistance," one of the focuses of our next chapter, to the "politics of associationalism" as seen in "the voluntary association, small organization, caucus, or interest group." What she describes as the "decentralized, dispersed form of associational politics that ... operates outside the national political

ii5 Feminism arena" was our original topic, and we agree that analysts have been negligent of it.7 Our own specific concept of feminism was derived from the study of group action, including our personal experience in contemporary action groups as well as what we derived from our previous studies of earlier women's organizations. We felt that we had an understanding that accommodated the historical women's movement and also the varieties of feminism visible in the contemporary one. The resulting definition of feminism is, in broad terms, the desire for an increase in women's autonomy. We use the term "autonomy" to emphasize the way in which women, as women, have historically been seen, even by themselves, as subject to men's authority, judgment, control.8 In Teresa de Lauretis's words, "woman" is "a gendered and heteronomous subject"; it is the links between gender and heteronomy that are the focus of feminism.9 Only one subordinating classification, the designation "female," is omnipresent, inescapable by all humans, superimposed on and often reinforcing other kinds of servitude. Thus autonomy (the opposite of heteronomy) represents those reductions of controls over women that would follow removal of male dominance. Legal equality, reproductive freedom, equivalent pay and equitable working conditions, the end of sexually based violence, unoppressive systems of marriage and family - all these and many other feminist goals are instruments for women's autonomy. This is a definition that fits comfortably with a variety of goals and of institutional alternatives. It even has room for those who dislike feminists while supporting their goals.10 Of our subjects, 27.8 per cent over all were prepared to say that they were feminists (see Table 5.1). This means that they were about as feminist as comparable national populations of North American women; we have no figures at all for France. Jane Mansbridge, who has studied the available u.s. figures carefully, suggests that "between a quarter and a third" of American women have been willing to call themselves feminists in the period 19 86-92.IZ This figure is slightly below what we have for Canada, where we have been able to discover a few, rather limited attempts to survey the frequency of feminist self-identification among women. In 1979, 42 per cent of urban Canadian women in a national poll were prepared to identify themselves as feminists.11 Seven years later (1986), 47 per cent of a sample of readers of the women's magazine Chatelaine said they would call themselves feminists, a very high percentage.13 But in another national poll of women taken in October 1991 only approximately a third of the respondents called themselves feminists.14 A 1993 poll taken only in Quebec gave similar figures: 22.5 per cent of the women who responded said that they were

n6 Feminist Politics on the Farm Table 5.1 Respondents' self-identification as feminists Quebec member % (n = 100)

Quebec non-member % (n = 96)

France member % (n = 102)

France non-member % (n = 91)

Yes

26.0

16.7

33.3

35.2

No

71.0

78.1

50.0

46.2

3.0

5.2

16.7

18.7

Missing

Table 5.2, Respondents' definitions of the concept feminism Quebec member % (n = 100)

Quebec non-member % (n = 96)

France member % (n = 102)

France non-member % (n = 91)

Equal rights

13.0

11.5

5.9

14.3

Self-assertion

22.0

22.9

25.5

20.9

Hostility

41.0

44.8

20.6

25.3

10.8

4.4

Femininity Women's culture

6.0

7.3

11.8

9.9

Complementarity

8.0

3.1

2.9

5.5

10.0

10.4

22.5

19.8

Missing

"surement" feminists.15 None of these polls is likely to have included rural women. However, Carbert reported that 2.3 per cent of her small group of southern Ontario farm women would call themselves feminists, a fraction not that different from what we found among our own rural respondents (see Table 5-2.).16 Among the French respondents, identification as feminist was on the face of it markedly higher, averaging 34 per cent, while in Quebec the non-members pulled the level down to zi per cent. However, it turned out that about a tenth of the French respondents thought that the term meant something like femininity. For example, when asked to define feminism, one woman replied, "to go to the hairdresser, to dress oneself well." Another stated that "a woman is always feminist when she is charming." And surely the woman who said that feminism means "a sexy woman, cover-girl style" was confused? Yet we did not want to dismiss such responses as simply ignorant or muddled. It is true that

ii7 Feminism those who picked this response often showed distaste and unconcern in relation to questions about both politics and self-placement on the leftright continuum, but a substantial number of them gave sophisticated definitions of the most difficult concept, left-right. Thus, the woman who defined feminist, to our amazement, as meaning a sexy cover-girl (Gloria Steinem?) also said that politics means "the labels you put on people" and "the Left means the communities, [but] the Right are the traditional parties, Gaullists." She thus placed correctly the one party she identified, caught the right's appeal to tradition, and was aware of the communitarian dimension of the left.17 "Feminist" and "feminine" are close in French; there are none of the old-fashioned, even pejorative connotations that "feminine" has in English today, three decades into the second wave of feminism. Feminin(e) is still used routinely to identify women's groups, serving as a more succinct equivalent of de femmes, as in the titles of French rural women's groups: groupements ... feminins. Knowing that feminisme, like "womanism," made its first appearance historically as praise of women's qualities, we wondered whether the term retained some residue of this meaning, possibly enhanced by the attention to women's culture that is a part of modern feminism. Yet both of our populations were francophone, and we got the confusion between feminism and femininity only in France.18 Initially, we adjusted our measures of feminism to remove the responses of those who had confused feminism with femininity.19 However, we were uneasy about the implication that we could override a respondent's willingness - however implausible - to take on a term that many find too radical to tolerate. We finally decided to retain selfidentifications unadjusted by our own higher wisdom.20 Our factor analyses of the responses related to feminism supported this decision; as we will discuss below, we found that self-identification as feminist was associated with various positive definitions of feminism but not consistently with any of the opinions usually believed to define feminism. We did, however, finally set up a separate category of definitions, women's culture, for those who said, when asked to define feminism, something like "I prefer feminine work like recipes, sewing, women's outings," or "a woman must stay a woman; that does not prevent her from being valuable." Such responses were clearly distinguishable from the simple identifications (confusions?) of feminism with femininity. Women's culture was very much a minority response among definitions of feminism. Equal rights, whether in the workplace or not, were mentioned by about 12, per cent of those responding/1 In addition, there were a few scattered responses referring to sex-role stereotyping, but this concept was not prominent. Reproductive and sexual issues

n8 Feminist Politics on the Farm

were virtually absent: there was exactly one reference to contraception and one rather ambiguous one to abortion, none about violence in or outside the family (recall that we had responses from almost four hundred women). There apparently was not even unfriendly awareness of radical-feminist goals related to women's bodies, even though by 1988 abortion had been a highly visible and volatile topic for feminists for a considerable period in both France and Quebec. It is interesting to speculate whether, if we posed the same questions today, we would have some mention of violence after the 1990 Montreal Massacre of female engineering students who were explicitly targeted as "feminists." Finally, importantly, only one respondent referred to the status of farmers' wives, the issue that French analysts see as central to feminism among farm women. All the same, a good number of responses, if unspecific, seemed to us to refer to a set of goals that were not the same as what we have labelled "equal rights" but had coherence and plausibility in terms of feminism as it actually existed. We saw these responses as related to women's "self-assertion." Such definitions were given by about 2,3 per cent of respondents over all and a considerably higher percentage of the Quebec leaders (42 per cent). We placed under this heading the answers that seemed to us to seek a change in the situation of women, but without defining it in terms of a comparison with men. We also included those that seemed to be aware, in a positive way, that some sort of women's movement or set of organizations had such goals. Women existed conceptually as a group in such responses, more than by the minimal assumption that they had a shared situation of disadvantage: "[Feminism] is to not let people walk all over you" or, less colourfully, "to defend the position of woman in society and her right to autonomy," and also "to seek to improve the conditions of life for all women." Some responses referred to women's joint action indirectly, talking of "all women," or of "us" ("feminist for us means to defend our points of view"), but others made specific, approving reference to women activists: feminism means "that women take more space, more advancement in society. A woman who takes action to empower women." In such responses we heard an echo of the farm women interviewed by Martine Berlan about their work in the context of agricultural unions: "if women want to find their places, they will have to insist, because men will never let them have their places ... you mustn't let them walk all over you."" Over all, our standard four-way national/organizational comparison was interesting only in the substantially lower likelihood of the French club members to pick an equal-rights definition. A further breakdown into leaders and ranks among the club members showed the leaders in

ii9 Feminism Quebec much less likely to pick equal rights and more likely to pick self-assertion; there was very little difference between leaders and followers in France. It is also worth noting that the leader/rank division had virtually no relation to hostility to feminism, in which the Quebec respondents were some zo per cent higher across the board; the French respondents were much more likely not to give an answer ("don't know"). In general, responses to our question about the meaning of feminism help to make sense of the low level of feminist identification found in so many studies at a time when it seems clear that feminism has had a major impact on both attitudes and behaviour in most parts of the world. Most commonly, goals were accepted - and not just equality goals - but with an admonition that extreme means were inappropriate. Extreme means obviously included participation in demonstrations, something used as a measure of politicization in a number of studies. Nor would our respondents identify with any militant group. In one woman's words, feminism is "to fight to have your place. They do it for nothing. You have to talk to each other. I am against labels." It sounded to us as if this woman, and our respondents as a group, now accepted a need for self-assertion and were willing to speak out explicitly to the point, but they were against marches and other such confrontational and, in their view, ineffective means of working for change. Jeannette Bergeron, the regional president who supervised our Quebec interviewers, made similar observations about appropriate strategies for Quebec separatism when we were in France with her in 1989. We came to believe that many of our respondents (and presumably many other women) were unwilling to identify themselves as feminists for a particular set of reasons: reluctance to be aggressive or militant, rejection of the excessive and unreasonable, and identification of "feminisms" with such behaviour on the part of the organized women's movement. That is, women's preferences for moderation are accompanied by the belief that "feminists" are militant and extreme. Our analysis has been confirmed by other scholars interested in the topic. Elizabeth Adell Cook and Clyde Wilcox have suggested that the term "feminist" drew the coolest response in a list including "women's movement" and "women's liberation" because it had become "the focus of anti-feminist rhetoric" in the media/3 Similarly, when Jane Mansbridge questioned a number of American working-class women, some white and some African-American, about what feminism meant to them, she found that the term "feminist" implied political activism, something few American women (or Canadian, or French) saw themselves as committed to. Even more important is another point made by

izo Feminist Politics on the Farm Table 5.3 Respondents' views about the rate of change in the status of women Quebec member % (n = 100)

Quebec non-member % (n = 96)

France member % (n= 102)

France non-member % (n = 91)

Too fast

6.0

5.2

13.7

3.3

Just right

44.0

44.8

35.3

29.7

Too slow

43.0

42.7

38.2

45.1

Missing

7.0

7.3

12.7

22.0

Mansbridge: feminism was also seen as extremist, and that majority who saw themselves as "middle of the road" were not attracted. "They are not 'bra-burners,' " she writes of the women she interviewed.14 As one of our respondents put it, when you ask about feminists, she thinks of "those women who brandished their bras," and, no, she is not one of them.25 At the same time, almost all our respondents agreed that the status of women was changing, and over all about two-fifths of each group felt that the rate of change was too slow (see Table 5.3). When we asked for definitions of feminism, many of the critical or hostile responses that we gathered focused on militancy. Feminists are "women who exaggerate," we were told over and over again. Other comments conveyed the same message: "these are women who go to extremes" and "those women are a bit too zealous." At the same time, some critical responses implied that extreme action might in fact be necessary even if it was something that the respondent did not contemplate for herself: a feminist is "a militant who uses extreme situations in order to change things." In other cases, it seemed that the speakers were not so much afraid of aggressiveness as convinced of its ineffectiveness: "I am a realist rather than a feminist." As another put it, feminists are women who "square off against men. There are other ways of defending oneself." Dominating the hostile responses was our respondents' unhappiness with confrontation: "It's fine to say that we should be recognized, but I don't agree with aggressive demands." We classified as "hostility" the many expressions of disapproval of the women's movement, whether by name or by implication, such as the respondent who commented, "If [feminism is] about the WLM, I think they really scream too loudly; they're aggressive and often stupid." Preference for the non-coercive and non-impositional came through particularly clearly in such expressions of distaste for the tactics pursued by the women's movement. In this connection, however,

izi Feminism though the members and non-members of clubs shared views, such remarks were not made by the women who considered themselves feminists. We found that, for non-feminists, disapproval of all or part of the women's movement or its tactics could very well co-exist with approval, even in the same statement, of what were undeniably feminist goals: "seeking one's rights but pushing too hard" was what feminism meant to one woman, and many others gave similar responses. Feminism is "certainly not the WLM with placards in hand and street demonstrations," said one respondent who was able to make finer distinctions than most, and added that feminism is "simply to wish to reduce the inequalities in the roles of men and women in society (salaries, forbidden occupations, etc.)."26 In their definitions the Quebec respondents were considerably more likely to be critical of feminists and the women's movement than the French, who in turn were more likely to say they did not know how to define feminism (as well as to misdefine it, as we have already noted). Once again, we suspect, the French were avoiding making statements that would be seen as critical; it was a Quebec, not a French respondent, who said, "I think unhappy women take part in an organization like that one." The more confused and distant French responses also possibly had something to do with the nature of the French women's liberation movement (MLF); even sympathetic observers have noted that it has tended to be relatively uninterested in popular activism and popular support, mired down in internal theoretical disputes, and more concerned with leftist politics than with changes in public policy.17 It may be that there was an element of homophobia in some of the hostile descriptions of women activists as those "who don't like men," or who "don't need men." "Doesn't need a baby. Masculine" was one woman's terse comment. But the words "lesbian" or "woman-lover" were never used. More common was a repeated description of feminists as those who wished to focus only on women, disregarding or disadvantaging men and, in some cases, aggressively antagonistic to men: "those harpies who eat men raw all day." "I am not feminist but feminine," added this respondent complacently, making a distinction that some others seemed unable to make. As another put it, a feminist is "someone who thinks just of women. Woman master everywhere, man slave. Woman should have her place, but man isn't a little dog." Or, less picturesque but more typical, if exceptional in awareness of the distinction between sex and gender: feminism refers to "women who seek to improve the situation of women, to extend their rights in denigrating men, 'the male.' " Such commentators would, it appears, agree with the woman who said "a world without men would not be interesting any

izz Feminist Politics on the Farm more"; she had preceded that statement by defining feminism as "thinking that you could live without men." Perhaps we can best read some of these responses as awareness of the conflictual implications of women's moving into a wider range of occupations and activities. Thus, for example, feminists are "women who wish to take men's places." The French woman who gave this definition added, "I myself am 100 per cent a woman; I am there to aid my husband, not to take his place." Similarly, a Quebecker defined feminism as "trying to steal men's jobs. Not letting men succeed." The unease about conflict was pervasive, and it has significance for more than feminism. We first became aware of our respondents' feelings about confrontation or even insistence when we were pre-testing our questionnaire in Quebec. We wanted to use a Eurobarometer question that reads, in English, "Do you agree or disagree with women who claim that there should be fewer differences between the respective roles of men and women in society?" In French, the key phrase is les femmes qui reclament, which means women who demand. Those present, a cercle regional president and her friends, objected to the wording and its implications. We finally changed the wording to veulent - want - which seemed to us to have more of the resonance of the English version; the English-language analysis of the 1983 survey refers in its text to "the women who think there should be fewer differences between the sexes in our society."z8 The women with whom we discussed this question insisted that they approved of changes in the status of women; what they objected to was the implied aggressive insistence on change (and, as we have noted, they were speaking for a group of whom more than two-fifths felt the rate of change in the situation of women was too slow). On the face of it, the Eurobarometer question sounds like a query about role change. Looking at this question, analysts of feminism have suggested that feminism encounters obstacles when it can be perceived to promote an enlargement of women's roles.29 However, the question could also be read as concern to give equal value or credit to women's roles. The Community commentator in 1983 implied as much, discussing the question under the heading of "agreement with the claim for equality of roles for men and women in society."30 This question was asked in the European Community in 1975 and 1983 and has consistently had a "massive approval": 74 per cent of French women in 1974 and 76 per cent in 1983 gave a positive answer, as did 81 per cent of our own respondents (see Table 5-4). 31 The role-equity question probably corresponds to a relatively moderate, non-confrontational - liberal - version of feminism. This seems clear when we contrast it to another Eurobarometer question that

iz3 Feminism Table 5.4 Respondents' views about those wanting role equity for women and men Quebec member % (n = 100)

Quebec non-member % (n = 96)

France member % (n = 102)

France non-member % (n = 91)

They are right

80.0

83.3

81.4

79.1

They are wrong

12.0

12.5

9.8

5.5

8.0

4.2

8.8

15.4

Missing

asked explicitly about redistribution of work in the household. The egalitarian answer proposed for this new question, asked in both 1983 and 1987, suggested the model of "a family in which both husband and wife have equally absorbing tasks and in which household tasks and looking after the children are shared equally between husband and wife"; the other choices were for a conventional patriarchal family with a wife at home or a family in which a wife with a "less absorbing job" had primary responsibility for domestic arrangements. The first alternative, which might well be the actual goal of those who want to make roles more similar, got approval from fewer than half of French women in 1987, although three-quarters of them supported role equity.32 We wondered whether the European respondents took the question as describing reality or as prescribing some sort of ideal goal.33 And thinking about how these alternatives would fit a family farm brings up an interesting question: can a farm wife be described as having "a less absorbing job" than her spouse? In any case, there was markedly less support for the version of family life that was at the same time least accurate as a description of reality and most radical in its implications. Interpretation of the role-equity question is further complicated by the responses to another question asked in 1983 about support for the "specific aims" of the "many different movements and associations concerned with the situation of women." These were: fight against prejudice that keeps women subordinate to men in the family and society, obtain true equality in work and careers, persuade political parties to give women equal access to politics, arrange that men as well as women can take time off work to care for sick children, get payments for women who stay home to raise children, and "organize women into an independent movement to achieve a radical transformation of society." Like respondents in the rest of the Community, those in France were not very supportive of a radical women's movement (the last alternative). However, along with Belgians, the French were nota-

124 Feminist Politics on the Farm ble for support of pay for housewives and, over all, had about threequarters of respondents either completely or somewhat supporting not just public-sphere equality in employment and politics but also male participation in the private sphere as care-givers for ailing children.34 These latter Eurobarometer questions asked only about the endpoint of the process of improving the status of women; the role-equity question included both goals and procedures. And both our interviewers and our respondents had very clear ideas about what sort of procedures would be appropriate, as their responses to questions directly about the women's movement demonstrated. Predictably, our interviewers also disliked the wording of the Eurobarometer question about membership in the women's movement. The most hostile possible response, "completely against being a member," was in French the even stronger "ne voudrait absolument pas en etre membre," and during training sessions some of the interviewers, farm women like those they were to interview, objected to so absolute a judgment. Reluctance to be categorical about group membership fitted with another finding that we discussed in the last chapter: that many of our respondents, particularly the French club members, felt that they could not convince others of strongly held opinions. At first we found this, one of our few examples of a meaningful correlation with organizational membership, quite baffling. Volunteered comments recorded by French interviewers finally suggested an explanation that echoed the resistance we found to the words reclament and absolument. One of our French non-members explained that she "never" convinced anyone because "I respect the opinions of others." She defined the right (which she supported) as those who "respect others' ideas" and the left as those who "confuse social [commitment] and socialism" and therefore do not respect others' opinions. It seemed possible that other women shared these views, though without necessarily sharing the ideological orientation. Such a response could in principle be rationalization for ineffectiveness or timidity, but we had met many of these women and they were neither ineffective nor timid. The European Community commentator interpreted the questions about persuasion as tapping "influence in their circle of acquaintances," even though in some surveys the question is worded in terms of attempting to convince rather than actually convincing (we used the stronger formulation - persuasion).35 We now doubt if it is correct to interpret the question as related to influence. In addition, we are dubious about its value as an indicator of women's efforts or success in imposing their ideas, and even more dubious of its value in measuring women's political competence or involvement. Rather, a negative response seems to represent, at least in some cases, the feeling that insis-

12,5

Feminism

tence or even overt efforts at persuasion are somehow rude and disrespectful of others. It is less a question of can you persuade anyone than should you make explicit efforts to do so. The implications of lack of enthusiasm for activism seem obvious. But perhaps they are not. To get at activism more directly, we posed two questions about the women's movement, and we now turn to these.

THE WOMEN'S MOVEMENT Following Eurobarometer, we asked our respondents both what their opinion was of "the movements which have come about recently and whose aim is the liberation of women" and also the more demanding question about possibly joining them. This is Eurobarometer's wording, and, as we have discussed above, it seems reasonable to take it as referring to what is usually meant by either the women's movement or the women's liberation movement. It appears as though details of wording are ignored when people respond to opinions about the new social movement that is concerned with the situation of women. A Canadian survey taken in 1979 found 60 per cent willing to say that they supported the "women's movement," even though fewer than a quarter called themselves feminists.36 In 1992,, 60 per cent of respondents to a national poll in Canada - 67 per cent in Quebec - supported "the goals of the feminist movement"; a year later no less than 84.5 per cent of respondents to a Quebec poll supported "the work of the women's movement."37 We shall use the second wording here. The first question (opinion) has been fairly frequently used, but the second (membership) and the combination are to be found only in Eurobarometer studies. Let us look first at opinions about the women's movement, as distinguished from willingness to join it (see Table 5.5). We expected a good deal of hostility here on the basis of the comments volunteered in the definitions of feminism. However, when we grouped those few women who had a very high opinion of the women's movement with the more numerous ones who had a fairly high opinion of such groups, we got a surprisingly high overall figure of 55.8 per cent approval. We found that the leaders of the cercles had the most positive views, while the French, leaders and followers alike, were less favourable than the bulk of French women but at about the Community level. For our respondents more generally, then, hostility to the women's movement was on the low side of the various scales. Again, only Quebec leaders were much different from followers with respect to opinion, and even they were only slightly more enthusiastic about possibly joining; the differences here were nevertheless in the directions expected, with leaders more positive.

12.6

Feminist Politics on the Farm

Table 5.5 Respondents' views about the women's movement Quebec member % (n = 100)

Quebec non-member % (n = 96)

France member % (n-102)

8.0

7.3

2.0

1.1

Fairly good opinion

58.0

52.1

45.1

49.5

Fairly bad opinion

22.0

20.8

23.5

19.8

Bad opinion

5.0

14.6

5.9

Missing

7.0

5.2

23.5

29.7

France member % (n= 102)

France non-member % (n = 91)

Good opinion

France non-member % (n = 91)

Table 5.6 Respondents' willingness to join the women's movement Quebec member % (n = 100) Is a member

Quebec non-member % (n = 96)

3.0

1.0

Would consider joining

16.0

18.8

7.8

7.7

Absolutely would not join

72.0

74.0

70.6

63.7

9.0

6.3

21.6

28.6

Missing

In general, the results were not all that different for likelihood of joining the movement at some time (see Table 5.6). Our overall figure of almost 14 per cent who would consider joining was approximately at the same level as that for women in the European Community five years earlier, while our French respondents were pretty much at the national level of that time. But the notable figure for the French, given all the missing responses - refusal and "don't know" - is those absolutely opposed to joining. In the Eurobarometer studies French women as a group appeared the most disinclined to participate in the women's movement, so much so that it was particularly noted by the commentator.38 This while, in the European Community, French women were also (along with Greek women) the ones most favourable to those feminists supporting role equity.39 Eurobarometer interpreted such responses as unwillingness to make "some kind of commitment" to action, though for our respondents we might perhaps see such answers as also a reflection of overload (these women worked hard on the farm as well as in the home and in clubs).40 Our French members, like their

iz/ Feminism countrywomen, were not very willing to join: only between 7 and 8 per cent indicated such a possibility.41 We tried a few tests to make more sense out of the likelihood of identifying oneself as a feminist or potential women's movement activist. Cross-tabulations suggested, though not strongly, that religious observance might be related to feminism, with the less observant more feminist, even though our respondents were so highly observant (virtually none being non-observant) that there was little room for variation. Cross-tabulations, however, also showed that work experience did not seem to have any significant or consistent impact. Our logistic regression equation confirmed that religious practice made a difference and work did not, and also showed that for France number of children and age mattered (older women, but also those with fewer children, were more likely to be feminists). We wonder what the explanation is of the role of age and relative childlessness in France? Something about age cohorts perhaps? More interesting was the relationship among three variables: opinion of the women's movement, willingness to join the movement, and selfidentification as feminist. The association between opinion of the movement and willingness to join was significant for all the categories, though with varying strength. And it was a relief to find that the four Quebec women who had surprised us by saying they were already members of the women's liberation movement also said that they had good or generally good opinions of the movement. What we found remarkable, however, was the number of women who would absolutely not join the women's liberation movement but thought well of it: 41 Quebec members, 35 Quebec non-members, and 32 and 2.6 respectively in France. In all, 134 women, 34 per cent of our sample, were non-joining supporters.41 We can in general assume that opinion of the movement and willingness to join it are associated. This is only reasonable, after all, as is the further fact that feminist identity in turn is related to both. For all but the cercle members there was a significant association between feminist identity and opinion of the women's liberation movement. Buried in those figures were those four Quebec respondents who said that they were members of the women's liberation movement - and who also said that they were not feminists. Three of them, it should be noted, were cercle members who may have thought of that organization as a part of the women's (liberation) movement; we had a few comments in various contexts that referred to the cercles as "the movement." Given the large number of missing answers to the relevant questions in France, we do not want to put much weight on the French figures or on the comparisons across countries with respect to these correlations,

12.8 Feminist Politics on the Farm or, more widely, to questions about feminism and opinions of the women's movement. The Quebec members, who all replied, included the highest percentage of self-identified feminists who had a bad or very bad opinion of the movement - 19.2. per cent. Was this why the correlation was not significant in this case? But we can only speculate, via our definitional questions, about what hostility to the movement was lurking among those who did not answer the relevant questions in France.43 Such non-response to surveys is generally considered endemic in France, and our respondents were not remarkable among their compatriots. Apart from the French non-responsiveness, we did find some national differences that were significant even in a technical sense. In our logistic regression, French women were substantially less likely to consider joining the movement themselves, and there was also a statistically significant variation on the basis of nationality with respect to opinions of the women's movement (see Appendix A). Looking at the subcategories, we could see that the Quebec leaders were the most likely of all to state willingness to join the women's movement as well as substantially more likely to approve of it: 78.9 per cent, compared to their followers' 63 per cent and French figures in the high fortieth percentiles. Eurobarometer supplied some comparable figures: in 1988, 58 per cent of French women approved of the women's movement, as did 47 per cent of women throughout the European Community in I983.44 This is a point on which our use of survey data and quantitative analysis enabled us to modify assessments that we might otherwise have made. If we had relied only on interviews without any systematic report of beliefs, we might well have given far too much weight to the criticisms of activists that we picked up as part of our respondents' discussions of feminism. Instead, on the basis of our survey, we concluded that in spite of frequent criticisms of feminist activism, as a group our respondents were on the whole more favourable to the women's movement than were comparable populations. Putting aside the question of association between different views about feminism and the women's movement, we can make a simple argument based on their aggregate levels. The percentages of those who were not feminists ought logically to be at about the same level as those of respondents who were negative about feminism, who had a bad opinion of the women's movement, and who did not want to join it. But it did not work out that way. Looking at all the cases, and disregarding differences between nations and between leaders and ranks, we can see that over all something over two-thirds refused to say they were feminists - but only about a third disapproved of feminists (or, more

12.9

Feminism

likely, of feminist militancy). Only two of all of the women who called themselves feminists - 108 in all - gave hostile definitions of feminism. About nine-tenths of the respondents were unwilling to join a movement with the goal of the liberation of women (here we are including moderate as well as absolute refusal) - but disapproval was never higher than 34 per cent (Quebec non-club members) and averaged only 2.9 per cent for the whole group (again, moderate as well as extreme disapproval). The responses to the open-ended question thus reminded us that approval could coexist, even for an individual, with disapproval that was often quite severe. And the aggregate analysis served to keep us honest in weighing the more dramatic elements of the individual responses. These responses about questions related to feminism and the women's movement were, we thought, interesting ones. As a group our subjects approved role equity - the milder version of feminism.45 They would want women's work valued as much as men's, or, the more common interpretation, they would want access to men's work. They were also relatively favourable to the one clearly identifiable sort of feminism asked about by Eurobarometer. It seemed more and more clear that the women's movement is no longer thought of as what is now pejoratively labelled "feminist," even if its goal is the liberation of women. So, our supposedly conservative women were substantially more favourable to the organized women's movement than their comparable populations, even if they were not more likely to see themselves as feminists or to contemplate joining the movement themselves. Such a pattern is drastically at odds with the largest part of the current empirically based research on feminism and the women's movement but it fits interestingly with a small sector of it. We now turn to this research, for it helps to make sense out of the views of our respondents. RESEARCH ON FEMINISM

Because our topic was feminism in the real world, not the ideal types to which feminist analysts have paid such attention, we will not discuss here, as we have elsewhere, the analytical distinctions among liberal, Marxist, socialist, and radical feminists or those more relevant ones between "individualist" and "relational" feminism, or "equity" and "social" feminism.46 By contrast, our interest is in empirical studies based on actual women's activities and beliefs, particularly such studies as can be generalized to larger populations.47 It seems to us important to link feminism with the actual practice and beliefs of real, identifiable women; in this context, quantitative analyses are, for us, a device for

130 Feminist Politics on the Farm precision and accountability. We found most relevant a small group of relatively recent studies that attempted some sort of quantitative analysis of feminism in the context of theories about minority mobilization. But we found these studies inadequate, although clearly feminist in intent. In this study we are looking at feminism as one or more belief systems observable in the real world. In the context of such an approach the preference has been to treat women as a social group in the process of mobilization.48 The expected process would see women increasingly identifying with their "minority" - women. They would next become aware that the group was disadvantaged, and finally move on to support of group action to remedy the situation. The implicit end-point, in both policy and theoretical terms, would be a single, united social movement whose leaders could organize concerted political action, like any group that represented a population with a shared objective situation. The slogan would logically be "women unite!"49 But in spite of that Marxist echo, empirical research on feminism has tended to rely on a concept of feminism that is American and, even more narrowly, an equal-opportunity, assimilationist version of feminism.50 The implicit goal is, as many theorists have pointed out, women carrying out public-sector activities in the same way that men (and groups of men) have always done, alongside them, and with a similar frequency. Such an analysis is preferable to non-feminist assumptions about women's distinctive beliefs and activities, for it means that women are potentially political if and when they develop the consciousness and unity appropriate to a mobilized minority. Unfortunately, however, there are a number of problems related to the underlying model and to the available data sources. Methodologically speaking, the process leading to the possible mobilization of women through feminism has been studied in two different ways. The first is roughly historical, even if a good deal of it has to be contemporary, oral history. Contemporary or recent groups defined as feminist by their contemporaries are examined in an anthropological, participant-observer mode relying on case studies; older groups from the days before such naming are identified by analogy (they share goals or beliefs characteristic of today's feminism) and studied from their records. We have done this sort of research ourselves. The mode is inductive; the mood is hopeful, and the risk of essentialism (or at least of accusations of it) is considerable.51 By contrast, more self-consciously social-scientific work has looked to larger populations of women, using representative samples to delineate patterns of attitudes and beliefs. Attention to mass feminism seems to be in part a response to the discouraging image of feminism that comes from basing analysis on the observation of specific feminist groups.

131

Feminism

The more recent studies of "feminist" or "gender" consciousness represent, among other things, an attempt to go behind existing feminist organizations or movements, to see them as evidence of a larger social and political change that might be in the process of creating an allinclusive women's movement. Such analyses draw on sociological and psychological studies of other historical examples of marginalized groups attaining consciousness and becoming effective political forces.52 Class models are not encouraging, for the workers of the world have hardly managed to unite. But race and ethnicity supply examples of the effective development of shared consciousness and action.53 Accordingly, research attention has focused on identifying among women some sort of feminist gender consciousness expected to intensify over time for individuals and also to become more widespread. The term "sexism" was developed as a variant of "racism," and particularly in the United States race-centred awareness has been, implicitly more often than explicitly, the model for the women's liberation movement. Typically, some sort of group identification and awareness of group disadvantage were seen as necessary for this consciousness to become activist - for women, feminist.54 The key question was whether women would be able to mobilize and organize like other, previous, arguably similar groups. Public-opinion surveys then became a major tool for probing the degree to which women were moving through the stages of consciousness of group identity, indignation about group disadvantage, and willingness to support organized group action to provide remedies. Survey data is expensive and difficult to obtain, so the studies of the role of gender in politics have tended to rely on secondary analyses of material gathered for other purposes.55 In particular, political science research on "feminist consciousness" (or, sometimes, "gender consciousness") has reanalysed a number of the well-known, reliable series of American National Election Studies (ANEs). 56 These studies did not include indicators of women's disadvantage or awareness of it, but in recompense they did include a "feeling thermometer" that asked whether respondents felt "warm" about or close to a series of groups, including women (or, sometimes, feminists, the women's movement, or "women's liberation").57 This measure looked like a fairly good surrogate for awareness of belonging to a politically relevant group identified as women (particularly when adjusted to allow for the respondent's propensity for feeling "close" to groups in general). These election studies also sampled views on what were seen as key feminist issues, including the value of the organized women's movement; positive responses on these could be seen as indicating willingness to support group action.58

132. Feminist Politics on the Farm

We did not, finally, find very useful the actual details of most of these American studies of the development of gender or feminist consciousness and feminist activity. Even in terms of the situation in the United States, we were not certain that feminism was effectively represented. Interested in Canadian and French feminism, we suspected that the difference of national cultures - both from the United States and from each other - would have a substantial impact. This was just a guess because for neither Canada nor France are there any studies that we could compare to the ANES.59 The only hard evidence, and that not very hard, was that some of the comparative work on Europe, such as Nancy Davis and Robert Robinson's study of "consciousness of gender inequality" in Austria, West Germany, and Great Britain as well as the United States, cast doubt on the broader relevance of the United States studies.60 However, in general terms, the ANES'S emphasis on consciousness struck us as important; it was an approach that we felt could include our non-u.s. subjects. Certainly, the attention to individuals' views rather than group structure was valuable. But the postulated process towards some socially and politically coherent minority seemed unlikely if not impossible for women. It is perhaps worth repeating: women are related to their "majority" as no other minority is. This is a group whose members live with their potential opponents more closely than any other marginalized population does. Furthermore, women compose at least half of every other minority.61 We also thought that the issues selected from the ANES to represent feminist goals were limited, not to say inadequate.6l The most frequently used goals were access to abortion and juridical and workplace equality. In this respect, the ANES'S original shortlist of feminist questions responded to the values of the mainstream women's movement in the United States, values shared by most of the Americans doing empirical research on feminism.63 It was not obvious to us that the mass of women or of feminist women considered these issues central; Alice Rossi had shown in 1987 that a large sample of feminists were prepared to accept as feminists even those women who opposed abortion.64 Certainly many women had good reasons for not favouring abortion under conditions where it was accompanied by forced sterilization or conflicted with their religious convictions.65 In a series of recent papers, as yet unpublished, Pamela Johnston Conover and Virginia Sapiro have added some important empirical data about the public's perceptions of women's situation in the United States. Their analysis suggests that, although "the majority of respondents clearly believe that men currently have more power and influence in public life (e.g. government and economy)," there is considerable

133

Feminism

disagreement about the existence and nature of inequality in the home.66 Presumably perception of women as a disadvantaged minority entails seeing them as badly off in the home as well as in the workplace - which some people do but by no means all. In addition, women's "preferences for equality are not enough to make women identify themselves as feminists"; some degree of support for the women's movement is also required.67 This set of analyses reinforces the notion that feminism might have a number of dimensions and meanings and that it should not be identified with merely legal or work-related gender equality or with views about the fraught topic of abortion. Women apparently distinguish among the goals of feminism, and also distinguish between feminism and the movement that has worked to achieve feminist goals, not to mention the specific tactics employed by that movement. Others involved in the re-examinations of survey data have in fact come to question their initial assumptions. In 1992, Elizabeth Adell Cook and Clyde Wilcox published a careful longitudinal analysis of the indicators available in the ANES, suggesting that the meaning of terms such as "feminism" and "women's liberation" has changed over time.68 Sue Tolleson Rinehart, in the same year, documented effectively the way in which studies of gender or feminist consciousness have muddled the connections between gender and feminism as well as women's potential relationship to each. "Like other forms of group consciousness, [gender consciousness] embodies an identification with similar others, and a feeling of interdependence with the group's fortunes," she noted, adding that it "may also carry a cognitive evaluation of the group's sociopolitical disadvantage, in absolute or relative terms, vis-a-vis other groups."69 In other words, gender consciousness does not automatically produce feminism; it could also play a role in motivating conservative but politically active women such as anti-ERA campaigners. Rinehart thus moved feminism out of the minority model; minority studies did not allow for the case of individuals who mobilized around group consciousness in order to reduce the opportunities for group members.70 Other studies have been able, usefully, to show that different goals of feminism, such as a pro-choice position on abortion and a support of "gender equality," have complex and varying relationships to each other and to women's views about the women's movement and feminism.71 It was in part because of the earlier American studies that we asked our respondents directly whether they considered themselves feminists, and then what they thought feminism meant. Given the limits of the ANES-based work, we also ended up with considerable gratitude for the Eurobarometer surveys made regularly for the EC. Eurobarometer has

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Feminist Politics on the Farm

not asked women if they consider themselves feminists, nor does it employ the feeling thermometers and their measures of closeness or identification; however, it does regularly pose questions on important political and social attitudes that are related to feminism but not directly linked to electoral politics. Its first study of views about the situation of women was in fact completed in International Women's Year (1975) and reviewed by a conference of representatives of women's organizations who then recommended some additional lines of inquiry that influenced the 1978 and 1983 Eurobarometers.7i Segments of the Eurobarometer questions and analyses have since continued to be deliberately designed for the project of measuring and mapping changes in the status of women, including both feminism and the women's movement. There is probably some influence here of Ronald Inglehart's involvement with Eurobarometer; his interest in value-change over generations and the development of integrative attitudes is relevant to the situation of women and to feminism. A few American studies have also looked at the Eurobarometer data.73 Again, we found these studies substantively unhelpful, although they reconfirmed the complexity of the concept of feminism. Their findings cast even more doubt on the model of feminist mobilization with which they started. One of the most recent of these studies concludes that "there are several dimensions to gender equality and European citizens differ in their attitudes towards each dimension ... Support for organized feminism and support for feminist goals need not go hand in hand. Support for equality in politics and in the market place is different from support for equal family roles."74 The diversity of feminism also came through clearly in the secondary analyses prepared for Eurobarometer itself. These studies attempted to search out individual characteristics of more "pro-feminist" (or "egalitarian," or "anti-feminist") women and men and then moved on to look at contextual elements, including the relevant women's movements. The model was the same as that of the ANES studies: the progress of a minority group towards social and political consciousness. Perhaps because the data included more varied indicators of possible feminist goals, analysts found it impossible to identify any single group of respondents as feminists.75 Once more there seemed to be evidence of separate populations approving of different dimensions of that single imaginary united women's movement or social movement of women, with only some of them strongly favouring the group action that was the goal of minority-model feminism. Similar results were found by one of the few studies that attempted to look at feminism on a genuinely cross-national basis; in 1987 Sidney Verba and others reported a variety of patterns of support of feminist goals among the

135 Feminism

feminist elites they interviewed in the United States, Sweden, and Japan.76 We could, it seemed, pretty well discount the minority model. The studies of non-United States populations supported our dissatisfaction with the ANES measures and their implication that feminism was a recent, North American, and unitary, limited phenomenon. Those alternatives would, we became convinced, label as non-feminist not only most of our respondents but ourselves as well. The present study's population of rural, francophone, Catholic women served for us as a reminder of the wide range of variation in both ideology and policy goals associated with different women and therefore, it seemed likely, of feminism. Our own experience gave the same message. As activists and theorists we had experienced considerable difficulty in placing ourselves within the offered models of belief and policy preference. Yet we remained convinced that we - and some at least of our respondents - were feminists. Thus, the available empirical material on feminism provided us with a few possibly useful questions to pose, as well as the expectation that our data would produce a variety of definitions but would not show convergence towards a minority-like consciousness of the sort likely to promote group mobilization. . In this context our respondents' judgments about feminism and the women's movement are rather startling. It seems clear that many of them thought of feminism in the confrontational pattern of the minority model we had ourselves rejected. That is, they shared the view that "feminists" sought unification and mobilization of all women, much as African-Americans or native peoples have developed their own political identities and movements. Most of these respondents did not see themselves personally as part of either an oppressed minority group or a potential social or political movement, and certainly not as activists engaged in trying to produce social change. Consequently, they did not expect to see themselves or women as a whole mobilized as a political force. Such an understanding of feminism was precisely what distanced them and sometimes, though not always, made them hostile to feminists themselves. In addition, some of them disapproved quite strongly of the specific tactics adopted by social activists, especially the women who were feminists. At the same time, they approved of many feminist goals and even of the fact of change. This is a perspective much like what we found for politics, but one in which the subject-matter was far more salient to our respondents. As a result, they also tended to think of feminists as the spearheads of change in the situation of women. Thus, one Quebecker commented on the meaning of feminism: "People used to stay at home; today they are militant." "People" does not mean oneself here, but it is not as remote as those who manage the country.

136 Feminist Politics on the Farm

Their attitudes were not simple ones, and the complexities emerged with some clarity when we did a factor analysis of the relevant answers to questions we had posed. DIMENSIONS OF FEMINISM

In this exercise we were initially searching for overall patterns of correlation that might correspond to the standard meanings of feminism, with feminism seen as one or several coherent belief systems rather than a series of separate items of opinion. Given that factor analysis is simply a more complex and a theoretically more informative measure of the correlations among varying statements supplied by some identifiable population, we had reason to think that some plausible factors might be present in our masses of data about feminism and the women's movement. Such an expectation was supported by the existence of a tradition in the literature of assuming that some such entity as feminism exists; we have discussed the studies that attempt to delineate one or the other version and had led us to believe that a number of varieties existed. In addition, looking at the whole group of almost four hundred respondents, we could see commonalities that implied a series of shared perceptions of feminism. Their support of role equity and change in the status of women ought to mean, at the least, some dimension that was equivalent to liberal feminism. Their definitions of feminism also suggested that some of the respondents shared liberal or equity feminism's desire for equality with men, and that others would believe in a feminism based on valorizing women's difference. As well, there was room for an anti-feminist current that would be organized around criticism of feminist tactics. Data on sexuality, which we will be discussing in more detail in the next chapter, indicated that as a group our respondents were less hostile than might be expected to related goals - such as decriminalization of abortion - that many see as central to feminism. Finally, there were three small precedents, analyses that derived factors showing divergent patterns of feminist beliefs. In 1972 Susan Welch had combined data from a national and a community sample to examine support of "the women's movement." From our point of view, it was of interest that a number of dimensions of feminist belief emerged, incompletely correlated with each other. In particular, support of the women's movement was part of a factor that Welch labelled "Women's Rights," which did not include views about abortion or the family.77 Six years later Trudy Haffron Bers and Susan Gluck Mezey performed a similar exercise with the views of just over two hundred women active in community women's groups in the Chicago suburbs.

137 Feminism

They also found that opinions about access to abortion were unrelated to preferences about either family structure or women's rights. As well, "perceptions of the movement and feminist self-identity" were only "minimally related to support for women's issues."78 Welch had used some mass-survey data, but most of her study focused on responses given by her relatively small community sample; Bers and Mezey were candid about the investigatory nature of their study. Much broader in its implication was a factor analysis of the 1975 Eurobarometer survey. On the basis of all twenty-two questions related to the status of women, Margaret and Ronald Inglehart had derived a factor they labelled "Perception of Discrimination"; it referred to workplace issues of promotion possibilities and wages and job opportunities. This looked a lot like an element of the ANES-based feminist-consciousness studies - but it was not correlated with a second factor related to Satisfaction/Dissatisfaction or with a third factor identified as "Pro- or Anti-change in Women's Situation."79 These results all seemed once again to undercut the notion of women or feminists as a single "minority" moving from group identification to awareness of discrimination and a shared commitment to joint action. But they seemed to confirm that a factor analysis might be fruitful. After several attempts we ended up analysing a bundle of opinions that included self-identification as feminist along with the three most frequent of our respondents' definitions of feminism (equal rights, women's self-assertion, hostility), views about the women's movement and about joining it, assessments of the speed of change in the situation of women, and judgments about the desirability of role equity. The hostile definitions of feminism we interpreted in this context as rejections of activist and confrontational procedures; approval of role equity we took to mean endorsement of equal-rights (liberal feminist) activists. We also initially included a measure of happiness (to see if feminists really were unhappy women) and questions about sexual morality; here we included all three sexuality questions (abortion, premarital sex, adultery) because they seemed logically connected, but we receded the adultery question to focus on our respondents' (modal) assessment of adultery as "unforgivable."80 We in fact found a convincing factor solution for the whole population (unlike the case for views about mainstream politics or the private situations discussed in the next chapter). The resultant three factors describing the beliefs of our whole population seemed to amount to a very tidy pattern of associations, even if not very powerful (44.7 per cent of variance was explained; see Table 5.7). Willingness to identify oneself as a feminist (in terms of a scale extending from flat denial through uncertainty and confusion to acceptance of the label) was as-

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Feminist Politics on the Farm

Table 5.7 Dimensions of feminism: factors derived from respondents' views ALL 44.7% of variance explained

Feminist Identification Feminist

- .62302

Hostile definition of feminism

.60052

Approve WLM

.58618

Change in status of women too slow

.46128

Would join WLM

.41279 Sexual Liberalism

Abortion acceptable

.

.60525

Pre-marital sex acceptable

.57628

Adultery unforgivable

.38189

Approve role equity

.36476 Women's Movement

Feminism means equal rights

.75151

Feminism means self-assertion

— .67041

QUEBEC

48% of variance explained Feminist Identification Feminism means self-assertion Hostile definition of feminism Feminist Adultery unforgivable

-.84408 .64158 -.62170 .50667 Sexual Liberalism

Pre-marital sex acceptable

.63349

Approve role equity

.61335

Change in status of women too slow

.54170

Abortion acceptable

.53546

139

Feminism

Table 5.7 (continued) Women's Movement -.74855

Feminism means equal rights Approve WLM

.67588

Would join WLM

.50030

FRANCE

46.3% of variance explained Feminist Identification Feminist Hostile definition of feminism '* Feminism means equal rights

.76066 — .70264 .62078 Sexual Liberalism

Abortion acceptable

.67619

Pre-marital sex acceptable

.66705

Adultery unforgivable

.54420 Women's Movement

Feminism means self-assertion

- .72256

Would join WLM

.57068

Change in status of women too slow

.51549

Approve role equity

.47510

Approve WLM

.39844

Factors have been given identifying labels only when three or more elements are associated at a meaningful level. With the exception of the hostile definition of feminism, positive figures correspond to more progressive views. A minus sign indicates that the usual direction of association has been reversed: not a feminist; feminism is not defined as self-assertion; feminism is not defined as equal rights; feminism is not defined in a hostile fashion.

sociated (negatively) with views about the rate of change in women's situation, plus approval of the women's movement and willingness to join it. A second factor associated views about sexuality (including abortion) with views about role equity.

140 Feminist Politics on the Farm

If these had been our only results, we would have had two factors we could have labelled Feminist Identification and Sexual Liberalism. Such findings would have cast serious doubt on almost all the analyses of feminism current in political science. Feminism, they would have implied, entailed no views about sexual morality or women's control of their bodies. Furthermore, defining feminism as either equal rights or self-assertion had no relationship to feminist self-identification or to support of role equity. These results were so surprising that we re-analysed the results by country. The pattern then fell apart, though without the result of much increasing the amount of variance explained: the outcome was 48 per cent for Quebec and 4446.3 per cent for France.81 When we looked at the countries separately, we found that in both cases we still had a Feminist Identification factor, which we allowed to retain this label because of the presence in it of the answer to the question about considering oneself a feminist. For both countries feminist self-identification kept its inverse relationship with hostility to feminism (or, as we interpret it, hostility to feminism's confrontational aspects). Fair enough: it was not feminists who were going to criticize feminism in their definition.82 For France, the definition of feminism as equal rights was added to the two elements of being a feminist and not being hostile to feminist activism. Here, for France, quite neatly, was feminism as defined in most studies already discussed - except that there was no association with views about the women's movement or about abortion. Furthermore, in Quebec, feminist self-identification plus lack of hostility to women's movement tactics were associated in the Feminist Identification factor not with equal rights but with feminism as meaning self-assertion and, of all things, the acceptability of adultery.83 In Quebec as in France there was no connection at all between views on the women's movement and self-identification as feminist. In France, we should add, the three straightforward questions on sexuality grouped convincingly at a good level with no contamination, forming a factor we allowed to keep the label of Sexual Liberalism even though it included disapproval of adultery. Quebec's slightly more complex Sexual Liberalism combined approval of role equity, abortion, and pre-marital sex with the wish for speedier changes in the status of women.84 Finally, each country showed a new factor that we labelled Women's Movement because it seemed to delineate potential members of the women's movement: for both countries it tapped favourable opinions of the women's movement along with willingness to join it. For Quebec the Women's Movement factor also included not defining feminism as equal rights. For France it included not defining it as self-assertion, as

141 Feminism

well as support of role equity and the wish to increase the rate of change in the status of women. It will be noted that, even in the solution for the whole population of respondents, Feminist Identification and Women's Movement divided up, between two non-correlated groups, the standard elements usually seen as part of feminism.85 In none of the solutions, therefore, was there any association between self-identification as feminist and the goals usually postulated for feminism: in particular, role equity, equal rights with men, and sexual liberalism (especially acceptance of abortion). Once we reluctantly put aside the combined mirage and looked at the countries separately, we were struck by the differences in the views held by two quite similar populations who differed mainly by national (historical, geographical, political) location. As we reflected upon the subject, we came to realize that we should not have been surprised. Feminism is a political ideology; how could it not reflect national differences? Shared gender, occupation, and religion are not enough to override differences in women's status and activism. More positively, both feminism and the women's movement are likely to be influenced by their own history in the context of any specific time and place. We perhaps expected resemblances here because we too fell into the trap of seeing the major influences on women as social rather than political, so that feminism would be shaped by women's shared experiences in the home rather than by the differences of the public world. The women's movement (and this is the assumption of previous studies) would, similarly and in a similar fashion across nations, be seen as part and parcel of the world-wide revolt of women against the constraints on their autonomy. We would now suggest, tentatively, that we should follow our respondents. They seem to make a clear distinction between feminism and the women's movement. The two are obviously connected - the women's movement is the political instrument of feminism, even though various aspects of feminist activism keep many women from calling themselves feminists - but they are not identical, and activism is not all there is to feminism. We should note the responses of those women who said that they were not feminists if feminism meant the women's movement. The feminism we can infer seems to differ between individuals rather than between nations, but the mix of beliefs seems to have some national basis, with the feminist Quebec women more likely to go for a self-assertion definition and the French women for one related to equal rights. The women's movement in turn is seen by our respondents differently depending on country. In both countries the movement is criticized for its tactics by those who do not consider

142. Feminist Politics on the Farm

themselves feminists, and we argue for some causality here. But we can say nevertheless that in Quebec the concept of feminism as self-assertion is dominant, and those who do not see feminism as equal rights are more likely to support the women's movement, while in France the concept of equal rights is dominant, and those who do not see feminism as entailing women's self-assertiveness are more likely to support the women's movement. Here we should pause to qualify our description, which we presented as relating in general terms to feminism in the two countries. It is of course merely a description of feminism among our two groups of respondents. It is impossible to tell how representative they are, for there is little comparable data. Certainly the 1993 poll conducted in Quebec by the Conseil du statut de la femme produced an overwhelming endorsement of the definition of "a 'feminist' person" as someone who "advocates the equality of men and women": 69.3 per cent chose this answer, while 10.3 per cent felt that the reference was to someone who "is a militant in a women's group." However, the other available alternatives did not include anything that would correspond to autonomy or self-assertion. It is interesting that 14 per cent selected among the hostile definitions provided - which did not provide any possibility for disapproving of methods while approving goals.86 In the 1993 Canadian National Election Study (CNES), Canadians seemed able to approve both equality and autonomy for women at the same time.87 And we have no external source of French definitions at all. It still seems safe to say, on the basis of our study, that any definition of feminism that reduces it to equal rights, insists on its including support of abortion or equivalence of roles, or postulates that only feminists are likely to approve of the women's movement will be seriously misleading. To begin with, it will exclude women who identify themselves as feminists. Even more important, it will overlook many of the women inclined to support or even join the women's movement. Quite apart from activism, it seems that some women who do not call themselves feminists - because they cannot see themselves as activists or because they dislike activists' tactics - define feminism in ways that both include more than equal rights and share some recognizable women's movement goals. As we have noted, there is a tendency on the part of academic analysts to view feminism as non-political unless, like some sectors of the women's movement, it adopts the competitive, even conflictual mode of "normal" politics or at least of "normal" protest movements. Politics, defined in such a way, undeniably differs from the family, especially that version of the family used by maternal and social feminists as their model; it differs also, we should note, from the way our re-

143 Feminism

spondents define politics. In their insistence upon non-confrontational forms of social pressure and change - in their feminism as well as in terms of more conventional politics - our respondents remind us that the model of familial behaviour can serve to shape views of proper human life. For them the family implicitly represents a situation from which all participants ought to benefit. Recent discussions of the family have pointed out that it is hardly the idyllic haven of some descriptions - and prescriptions. At the same time, the family continues to embody certain ideals. Its implicit rejection of competitiveness has not prevented it from generating an influential version of feminism and a potential role for women in public life. This is, we think, reflected in those views of our respondents that we have discussed in this chapter. Let us now see what emerges when we look directly at this feminism's origin and model, an area that is even more difficult to conceptualize as political: the private politics of everyday life.

CHAPTER SIX

Private Politics "Les homines, tant qu'on ne leur demande pas de faire la vaisselle, ils sont toujours d'accord." "As long as you don't ask them to wash the dishes, men will always agree."1

We now turn to our respondents as "housewives," which is what nearly all of them are in the eyes of the rest of the world. "Housewife" - a term designating the woman who is not in the paid labour force, and who is often considered the least political as well as the least feminist woman possible. But we would argue that private life is itself political, and that it can generate significant change in lives and situations. Kathleen Jones suggests that "women's traditional roles, as housewives and mothers," should not be thought of as "politically isolated and generally politically ignorant ones." Instead we should realize that they constitute "a significant political mechanism both for continuing the segregation of dominant political institutions along sexual lines, as well as, potentially, for undermining dominant hierarchies."2 For a farm wife there are even more possibilities for change, whether conscious or not, in terms of her political situation on the farm. This realm of private politics relates to the task allocation, the decision-making structure, and the sexual balance of the farm marriage. We can see these factors in the accounts given by our exemplars. The conventional, predictable situation - submissive wives in the house, dominant men in the fields - does not seem to be present any more. But the family structure of our respondents is not a result of being in the paid labour force, for at a time when many farm wives work for pay off the farm, most of our subjects do not. Rather, we are seeing the significant alterations that can occur without any drastic changes in employment patterns. Once again, our exemplars manage to demonstrate all the possible alternatives, in both their consistencies and their internal contradictions. Andree, the Quebec club activist and oldest of our exemplars,

145

Private Politics

was closest to the conventional, predictable experiences and attitudes of farm women. She had worked for pay but before her marriage, for only three years, and as a schoolteacher. I am a farmer's wife, she told us, and also a mother (this she had the interviewer add; she had no fewer than eight grown children). Her husband made all farm decisions - an old-fashioned, relatively infrequent pattern for our respondents. And she seems to have performed the conventional secondary role on the farm: one hundred hours of housework a week but under twenty of agricultural labour, frequently including reception, representation, and accounting and sometimes also field-work, animal care, building upkeep, milking, cleaning, and shopping for the farm. Yet she was one of the few to volunteer that "women can do anything on the farm." She picked out only gardening as a task particularly suitable for herself, and she listed her "preserves" (conserverie) as a major farm product, even though she also reported them as something from which she retained the income. Further, Andree specified that her mother, unlike herself, had been a "housewife" (menagere); she had the interviewer write it in under "other," at the end of a list of possible paid occupations. In addition, although she attended mass weekly, she used or had used artificial contraception and felt that decriminalizing abortion was progress. A feminist, as we have noted, she was convinced that things were not changing fast enough in terms of the status of women. Her younger compatriot, Brigitte, was on the face of it more explicitly modern. She called herself a farmer (agricultrice and exploitante) and was a 50 per cent participant in the farm company (syndicat de gestion) that ran the farm. She was one of the few respondents to sometimes regret not having work off the farm, this though she had been a "worker" (ouvriere) for only two years before she married. Yet she accepted a very conventional sexual division of farm labour, allocating building maintenance and mechanical work to men, milking and other dairy-related work to women and to herself. At the same time, it was her husband to whom she assigned accounting, now usually women's work on the farm. She also considered herself a feminist, used artificial contraception, supported access to abortion, and wanted speedier change in the status of women. In addition, she had a very good opinion of the women's movement and would consider joining it. Christiane was the only exemplar who had never worked for pay. She considered herself a farmer's wife (her mother, interestingly, she labelled agricultrice) but did rather more farm than household work, farm work that, with the exception of vineyard work, cleaning, and accounting, she would rather have seen done by men or her husband.

146 Feminist Politics on the Farm

Short of time and money, she said the farm could not afford to pay her - but should. At the age of forty-nine, mother of five children aged thirteen to twenty-three, all still living at home, she reported that she used artificial contraception. Not a feminist, she thought the status of women was changing too fast, though she approved, as did all the exemplars, of the efforts of women who wanted to make the roles of men and women more similar. She was thus a conventional enough woman, but with a few anomalies. In particular, as we shall discuss, her claim to vineyard work challenged the standard division of labour in wine production in Bordeaux. This attitude we can, we think, relate to membership in the groupement feminin, which Christiane said she joined to meet others and to keep informed, "to receive information about new techniques," and for "exchanges with other women farmers." Finally, Diane, mother of two pre-schoolers, described herself as a farmer's wife. Most of her work was in the household, however, and the farm work she did was responsive to time she had free from the children. So she often did vineyard work, sometimes did packaging and management in the expanding wine-producing enterprise that was her farm home, and saw the work she was doing as appropriate for herself. An infrequent church-goer, she used artificial contraception, and approved of access to abortion and also of sex before marriage. She would have liked speedier change in the status of women. A feminist, she approved of the women's movement, but she would not join it. We did not, of course, expect a complete and mechanical consistency in the actions and views of specific individual women like our exemplars. They do, however, illustrate the mixes of conventional and unconventional positions in relation to roles and sexual politics that we find writ much larger in the data we have about our whole group of 389 respondents. The subject of this chapter is the extent to which a process of covert, unrecognized change may be occurring in our respondents' everyday life, which is simultaneously agricultural and domestic. We look at the areas of both production and reproduction: first, the meaning of the absence of paid labour off the farm (as illuminated also by women's preferred self-identification and the patterns of agricultural task allocation and decision-making that they report); next, both the reality and the interpretation of agricultural work; then men's role in domestic work; and finally the area of sexual practices and beliefs. We present what we could infer about the impact of participation in women's groups, and we pay special attention to the group leaders, following our earlier observations about their distinctiveness, at least in Quebec. Gender boundaries and their persistence or fluidity - these are what interest us now.

147 Private Politics ATTITUDES ABOUT PAID LABOUR A N D DD E C I S I O N - M A K I N G

Working for pay, outside the household, is the only feminine activity always identified as "work."3 In industrialized societies like Canada and France, for women as for men, exchange value - pay - and externality to the household tend to go together.4 Furthermore, going out to provide the financial support of the household, specifically contrasted to doing unpaid work at home, is often seen as apt to have a major impact on gender relations. Most strongly, seeking such "work" can be interpreted as indicating a desire for changed relations between women and men. Thus the 1983 Eurobarometer argued that "the wish to work [for pay outside the family] appears to be strongly linked to a cry for an improvement in the women's situation demonstrated as much by the wish for a breakaway from women's traditional role in the family as by supporting movements for the liberation of women."5 At the least, working for pay may be expected to alter women's preferences and expectations. Since a meagre 12 per cent of our respondents worked for pay off the farm, we could put very little weight on why they worked or on the impact of their experience in the paid labour force. Nevertheless, we should note that those few women who were in the paid labour force were satisfied with that experience (only two of them were even "somewhat" dissatisfied; see Table 6.1). In relation to motives for working for pay, members of the cercles, already far more likely to be doing so, stood out as strikingly more likely to be working for reasons of personal development (a motive that might theoretically be associated with interest in a change of condition); the Quebec non-members and the French respondents were more likely to be driven by financial concerns (see Table 6.z).6 As it happens, most of our respondents had worked off the farm, most likely before marriage: almost three-quarters of those from Quebec and just over half of the French women. Their past and present occupational experience seemed pretty much equivalent. The largest group were employed in various white-collar jobs, mainly in the service industries that employ so many women. But with respect to the frequency of never-employed "housewives," the results were quite dramatically varied: among the cercle members 28 per cent had never worked for pay and among the Quebec non-members 18.9 per cent, while for France the figures were 47 per cent (gfs) and 40.7 per cent (see Table 3.12). These figures are of some interest: none of our respondent groups had currently the degree of involvement in the paid labour force that

148

Feminist Politics on the Farm

Table 6.1 Respondents' satisfaction with their current paid employment off the farm Quebec member % (n = 17)

Quebec non-member % (n = 13)

Very satisfied

70.6

Somewhat satisfied

29.4

France member % (n = 7)

France non-member % (n = ll)

61.5

28.6

27.3

30.8

42.9

54.5

7.7

Somewhat dissatisfied

9.1

Table 6.2, Respondents' reasons for currently having paid employment off the farm (several responses possible) Quebec member % (n=17)

Quebec non-member % (n = 13)

France member % (n = 7)

France non-member % (n = ll)

Financial

17.6

46.2

42.9

54.5

Personal

58.8

23.1

14.3

27.3

Help farm enterprise

11.8

7.7

14.3

23.1

14.3

15.4

14.3

Not needed on farm Other

29.4

45.5

farm women as a whole do nowadays. This made all the more interesting the reasons why the vast majority were not currently actives, as the French put it, and their assessments of that fact. Since we were considering paid labour, it was also of interest whether - and how - our respondents might be paid for their farm work. Since most were not paid, we also wanted to know whether they would have liked to be. Looking at our respondents' feelings about being out of the paid labour force, we did not have the impression that these women much wanted paid jobs off-farm (see Table 6.3). Almost none were unemployed in the sense that they had lost jobs, and few reported that they had been unable to find work when they sought it. Of the women who did not work off the farm, over half had no regrets whatsoever (three-quarters of the Quebec respondents, if "rarely" regretting unemployment was added in). The comparable European figure in 1983 was 45 per cent.7 Nor did traditional values in a conventional sense seem to have much influence on their absence from the paid labour force. Very few of our non-employed respondents cited their husbands as impediments. Cercle members did so the most frequently,

149

Private Politics

Table 6.3 Respondents' reasons for not currently having paid employment off the farm (several responses possible) Quebec member % (n = 83)

Quebec non-member % (n = 82)

France member % (n = 93)

France non-member % (n = 80)

Couldn't find work

1.2

3.7

1.1

5.0

My husband wants me home

16.9

7.3

10.8

10.0

Family responsibilities

26.5

28.0

18.3

30.0

i:2

2.2

53.0

64.6

58.1

2.4

2.4

11.8

Lost job and couldn't find another I prefer to stay and work with my husband Other

61.3

but even for them the figure was only slightly above the comparable European figure (14 responses to this effect, 16.9 per cent compared to the EC'S 13 per cent).8 The question then becomes, why did they stay home? Was it for reasons linked to women's domestic role? When we asked a question allowing multiple responses, the results were interesting. We had first offered them the possible answers provided by Eurobarometer in 1983, which amounted to explaining women's absence from the paid labour force on the basis of labour-force conditions, conventional domestic roles, or spousal resistance. "Family duties prevented" off-farm employment was the answer most obviously linked to a traditional division of roles. It was cited by from a fifth to almost a third of respondents. Together, spousal objections and family duties were cited by two-fifths of the cercle members and just under 30 per cent of the gf members, with the other groups somewhere in between. But these were minority responses, and the remaining reason given for staying on the farm was clearly the favoured one: "I prefer to remain with my husband and work on the farm." This phrase suggested some motive more positive than the constraints represented by husbands' wishes or family obligations. Furthermore, this last response was virtually dictated by our subjects. In our pre-tests in Quebec a volunteered "other" response - farm work, co-operatively done with a spouse - was so persistent that we added it as one of the options. In our main survey this alternative was chosen by well over half of those currently not working for pay off the

150 Feminist Politics on the Farm

farm (53 per cent of the cercle members, and about 60 per cent for those in the remaining categories). It was thus well ahead of any traditionally defined "domesticity" as a reason for staying on the farm. But of course the division between home and workplace is not the same for farm wives as for most other married women in a modernized society. "Staying at home" for farm women means staying close to that other, agricultural workplace, where, as we have noted, they do a good deal of purely agricultural work. Accordingly, we decided to ask our respondents how they themselves would describe their relationship to the farm that was both a home and a workplace. We approached the issue of roles on the farm in two different ways. The first was aimed at a formal, legal definition, with reference to the farm enterprise as an economic structure rather than a human one: the farm dimension of the family farm. We embedded the question in a cluster of queries about the farm as an agricultural unit, and we framed it in terms that we expected to correspond to professional status (see Table 6.4). The result all the same was that by far the most common choice was "wife of a farm operator," selected by about half of the Quebec respondents and some three-quarters of the French ones. Given their higher rate of investment, one might have expected the French respondents to be more likely to describe themselves as joint operators of the agricultural enterprise they lived on. However, though the French respondents were very slightly more likely to call themselves farm operators, they were considerably less likely to select the title of joint operator. And even in France only a few more than a tenth of our respondents preferred the most directly proprietary title meaning farm operator (exploitante). It may perhaps be significant that the younger groups of respondents - the non-members - were most likely to choose this title, although fewer than one in five did so. So much for relatively official titles; but we wanted a better indicator of our respondents' relationship to the family farm as some combination of both work and home. We had encountered, both in conversation and in the press, and on the Quebec election lists, a very wide range of possible professional titles and also an amazing sheaf of versions of the simple "farmer's wife." Accordingly, we composed a second, less legal-sounding and less restrictive question about what our subjects might call themselves: "What is the title (denomination) that is the most appropriate for your role?"9 This time we came up with a list of fourteen possibilities, including all the versions of wife or homemaker that we could find, including the Quebec term la reine du foyer (queen of the home) that we had encountered on voting registration lists in the 19805 in the Valleyfield region.10 Our French interviewers found this term charmingly exotic, and five of the French respondents actually selected it.

151 Private Politics Table 6.4 Respondents' description of their role in the farm enterprise (several responses possible) Quebec member % (n = 100) Operator Joint operator

Quebec non-member % (n = 96)

France member % (n = 102)

France non-member % (n = 91)

17.6

6.0

9.4

12.7

25.0

34.4

10.8

8.8 2.2

6.0

6.3

Operator's wife

48.0

44.8

72.5

70.3

Retired

14.0

6.3

3.9

1.1

Other

1.0

Missing

4.0

Employee

2.0 1.0

2.9

1.1

Most importantly, we included the technical term for a female farm operator - agricultrice - that many researchers had argued was important for farm women as a rallying point for legal status.11 In 1984 the national network of gfs organized a large-scale project of survey and reflection on the theme "On nous dit sans profession, nous sommes agricultrices" - "They say we have no profession, but we are farmers." The cover of the resulting report asked, "Are we 'fill-ins,' 'aides,"assistants' or 'specialists,' 'joint operators,' 'managers of emergencies'?" The answer was: we are agricultrices. Their reported discussions made it clear that more than fiscal status was at issue and that professionalization, as symbolized by the term agricultrice, also meant something about equality and status on the farm as well as about access to training.12 Only about 10 per cent of the cercle members chose to call themselves agricultrice (18 per cent of non-members), and less than a quarter of the French over all. The national difference may well reflect the public discussion that has focused on that term in France, but the low level of the response was not what we expected.13 For their part, the Quebec women were somewhat more likely than the French to select the title indicating that they were joint operators of the farm. Looking only at first responses, we found that the professional terms indicating solo or joint agricultural status added up to only about 34 per cent in Quebec and about 44 per cent in France (see Table 6.5). In both cases the large majority selected household versions of self-description.14 Logistic regressions indicated that, in relation to this question, age had an impact, but only in Quebec, with the younger women there more likely to pick a professional title (see Appendix A).

152. Feminist Politics on the Farm Table 6.5 Respondents' self-identification by title (several responses possible) Quebec member % (n = 100)

Quebec non-member % (n = 96)

France member % (n = 102)

France non-member % (n = 91)

13.0

17.7

23.6

28.6

1.0

1.0

2.0

Joint operator

22.0

17.7

19.6

14.3

Operator's spouse

18.0

21.9

35.3

31.9

Operator's wife

10.0

15.6

12.8

6.6

Cultivator's wife

9.0

10.4

Farmer's wife

2.0

1.0

Countrywoman

1.0

2.0

4.4

Peasant

1.0

ALL RESPONSES

Operator Cultivator

2.2

Housewife

12.0

11.5

2.9

9.9

Queen of the home

10.0

7.3

2.9

2.2

Homemaker

5.0

5.2

Other

8.0

8.3

4.9

7.7

Professional

34.0

34.4

44.1

42.9

Domestic

66.0

65.6

53.9

54.9

1.1

FIRST RESPONSES ONLY

Although both nationalities preferred domestic to professional identifications, the French respondents were more likely to select professional titles. The wide margin of difference between the leaders of the cercles and of the gfs in their choice of title is remarkable: nearly 70 per cent of the gf leaders chose professional titles, in contrast to just over one-quarter of the cercle leaders. At the same time, the professional/domestic distribution for the Quebec and French rank-and-file members was almost identical. In general the differences seem to reflect the more specific professional orientation of the French respondents - particularly the gf leaders - and perhaps a greater degree of familiarity on their part with the political significance of the various titles.

153 Private Politics Looking at the details of the self-descriptions, we were struck by the extent to which, as a group, these women related their position to the agricultural enterprise. There were only thirty-eight second or third choices in all, and all but four of these were domestic additions to a professional first choice. The most frequent "professional" responses were farmer or joint farm operator, and even within the domestic choices the preference was overwhelmingly for the alternatives linked to the farm. This is not easy to demonstrate in English, since the nuances of difference among the possible titles is barely reflected in translation. For example, in English, where specifically female equivalents do not exist for most job titles, "farmer" still fairly unequivocally designates men and "farm operator" is ambiguous, while in French the gender loading of fermiere, exploitante, and agricultrice is unescapable.15 But for all the subgroups we have, "farm operator's spouse" was the preferred option among that majority of responses that referred to being companions of those who live on and from farms.16 In addition, most respondents preferred to call themselves not even wife but the more modern "spouse," and not of a fermier defined by occupation but of the man who was the operator of a certain sort of rural business (i.e., conjointe d'exploitant). We would argue that such choices reflect a perception of the role of women on the farm as, at least in part, agricultural. Self-identifications were thus related to the agricultural enterprises that their spouses operated rather than to the head of the family or to the households they themselves managed.17 We have the impression that, over all, our respondents preferred a bundle of titles that seemed to have some link with absence from the paid labour force in order to work co-operatively on the (shared) agricultural enterprise. We therefore turned our attention to the subject of wages for farm work. After all,-if we looked for the potential impact on farm wives of wages for non-domestic labour, for most of our respondents this had to mean not whether they worked off the farm but whether they were paid for doing agricultural labour on their own family farms. Pay for women's agricultural work on family farms would in fact be a significant change; at the least, the desire to be paid could mean something about attitude shifts. Admittedly women's agricultural work is not paid work in the ordinary sense. But then neither is the work of most of those involved in a family business. The physical distancing of the workplace has not taken place for such families; only the nature of the work or the fact of exchange value can identify any of their activities as "work." At the same time, who gets access to cash matters in many ways, not least in terms of authority and entitlement to make decisions. The male heads of farm families usually have entitlement to farm income; they are le-

154

Feminist Politics on the Farm

Table 6.6 Respondents' remuneration for work on the farm Quebec member % (n = 100)

Quebec non-member % (n = 96)

France member % (n = 102)

France non-member % (n = 91)

Yes

31.0

41.7

11.8

9.9

No

66.0

58.3

87.3

89.0

Paid for farm work

gaily responsible for taxes on earnings, and, even more important, they are entitled to work-related pensions and other social support not available to their wives.18 This last point is cited in the French literature as a particularly crucial one for farm wives, and it was underlined for us by a gf president.19 Almost none of our respondents had called themselves salariees (paid employees) when we asked a question about their official status in relation to the farm.20 We were told by conseilleres agricoles from the Mutualite that women were the worst paid and most exploited of the farm workers who worked on farms other than their own.21 It is understandable that our respondents, even if paid, would not identify themselves with such a group. If the term were less literal, it would be equally undesirable, since their spouses would be their bosses, under very unfavourable conditions: no specific labour contract and no possibility of leaving the job without leaving the family as well.22 These considerations might not apply equally, however, when the fact of pay rather than the status of (dependent) employee was at issue. Therefore, in our question about pay on the farm we used the French word remuneree (paid) and referred specifically to work on the agricultural enterprise (see Table 6.6). And a fair number of our respondents reported, answering this specific question, that they were indeed paid for their agricultural labour: about a third of the Quebec women and just about a tenth of the French. The figures for Quebec seemed high; in 1981 only 17 per cent of Canadian farm spouses were receiving pay for their farm work.23 The few among our respondents who were paid in France were approximately the same percentage as the few who were working off the farm, while in Quebec, by contrast, the 3 5 per cent who said that they were working for pay at home amounted to more than double the percentage more conventionally in the paid labour force. Getting paid was not as straightforward as it might seem, however, as we can tell by looking at what the pay amounted to, as well as at reasons for not being paid (see Table 6.7). In fact, "remuneration"

155

Private Politics

Table 6.7 How respondents' are remunerated for work on the farm France France Quebec Quebec member non-member member non-member % (n = 31) % (n = 40) % (n = 12) % (n = 9)

41.9

40.0

16.7

44.4

6.5

2.5

50.0

22.2

12.9

15.0

8.3

22.2

Increased formal share in enterprise

9.7

7.5

Gifts

6.5

Registered pension

6.5

5.0

I take what I want

22.6

27.5

25.0

11.1

Other

16.1

7.5

Weekly or monthly Hourly Percentage of profits

does not seem to have been restricted to wages in the usual sense: two Quebec clubwomen even selected "gifts" as a description of how they were paid. Yet remuneration clearly did include pay, since from 42 to 66 per cent of the women who answered this question reported receiving a weekly or monthly salary, or, less often, an hourly one. A few others received a percentage of profits, a legal share in the farm enterprise, or participation in a registered savings or pension plan. However, for about a fifth of "paid" club members in Quebec (and four women in France), being paid meant being able to draw at will on farm income ("I take what I need when I want to"). This is not a large group tweny-two women in all - but it amounts to about a quarter of those being paid. We were reminded that farm and household budgets are often merged and that any form of pay for wives would mean a claim on the farm's resources as a result of agricultural work. It seemed that being paid might be better understood as entitlement to access to the cash available on the farm enterprise. And this to us meant something about the role of women in that enterprise as part of the public or economic dimension of the farm as opposed to the private or domestic one.24 About half of the clubwomen who were not paid thought they should be, and so did about a third of the non-members. Yolande Cohen notes that in the late 19608 one of the demands of the cercles' agricultural committee was "a tax-deductible salary" that would be paid to farmers' wives who performed a specified number of hours a day of agricultural work/ 5 We would suggest that when farm women who were not being paid said that they should be, they were not necessarily

156 Feminist Politics on the Farm thinking just of some form of income and work-related benefits. Some at least may have had in mind their role on the farm. Being "paid" implied not just more money but also perhaps more impact; the desire to be paid would indicate either a wish for more influence or - more likely - wanting to have existing involvement recognized concretely. The reasons our respondents reported for not being paid supported such an interpretation (and this unremunerated group included 90 per cent of the entire population of French respondents, about two-thirds of those in Quebec). With one exception (non-members in Quebec), a substantial majority of each group of women told us that they were not "paid" because of the condition of the farm.2-6 Such responses, related to farm conditions, seemed to us to represent respondents' own direct assessment of the condition of the farm, as contrasted with some form of deference to the owner-spouse or to established conventions. In fact, only a tiny fraction, under 5 per cent of the whole group of respondents, said that they were not paid because their putative bosses, their spouses, did not think it "necessary." Similarly, hardly any listed tax consequences for their spouses - a choice that would have implied acceptance of the farmer as enterprise head in the same way as the tax machinery does. From a quarter to a half made the decision themselves: they hadn't asked for pay or didn't need it. Over all, although farm conditions continued to be central, the actual decisions about the likely impact of women's working seemed no longer to be relegated to the farmer-owner-boss. The resulting situation would certainly be congruent with the co-operative model of work with a spouse that was our respondents' main reason for keeping out of the offfarm labour force. It seemed to us, finally, that the wish to be paid might be not so much a wish for financial or other independence as a wish that farm conditions (including the system of taxation of farm income) might improve to the point where more access to cash would seem reasonable to the farm women themselves. They felt that pay would be appropriate, if only it were prudent, for women who were voluntarily and co-operatively working as part of an agricultural enterprise. Our interpretation was supported by what we could learn more directly about decision-making in our respondents' farm families. We wanted to see how much impact these farm women felt they had on farm choices, since it is conventionally held that the primacy of women's domestic role prevents them from having much say in the agricultural side of the farm enterprise, however much farm work they do.27 We looked first at a question about task allocation in the agricultural enterprise (see Table 6.8). The possible responses were mainly about criteria for sharing out the work, but two of them instead referred to possible methods of making the assignment: "spouse's decision" and

157 Private Politics Table 6.8 How tasks are allocated on the respondents' farms (several responses possible) France France Quebec Quebec member non-member member non-member % (n = 100) % (n = 96) % (n = 102) % (n = 91) My preferences

54.0

46.9

37.3

38.5

Spouse's preferences

13.0

9.4

13.7

14.3

3.0

3.1

2.9

Children's preferences Preferences of other members of the enterprise

1.0

My abilities

41.0

53.1

34.3

44.0

Spouse's abilities

12.0

8.3

19.6

19.8

Abilities of other members of the enterprise

2.0

1.0

Spouse's commitments off farm

14.0

7.3

5.9

11.0

My responsibilities to the children

21.0

22.9

18.6

25.3

The time I have free for the enterprise

36.0

44.8

20.6

18.7

The profitability of the activity

27.0

25.0

24.5

33.0

The tradition of assigning certain tasks to women

6.0

3.1

17.6

9.9

Spouse's decision

4.0

2.1

5.9

2.2

26.0

21.9

44.1

34.1

Shared decision after discussion

"shared decision after discussion." Although decision-making procedures were relatively infrequently listed as important elements in sharing out tasks, the co-operative version was much more common. Under the same question, responses about the criteria for task allocation were more instructive. "The tradition of attributing certain tasks to women" reportedly had practically no impact on actually assigning those tasks (except among the g/members, where eighteen women cited it). When we combined the responses that we identified as referring to the role of wife and mother, even for the gf members, who were the most influenced by such traditional role considerations, they were first responses from fewer than one in five/8 Far more important were elements related to the condition of the farm and, even more strongly, women's own characteristics, meaning their own preferences or their capabilities. When we totalled all the multiple responses given, we found

158 Feminist Politics on the Farm that no less than 97 per cent of the Quebeckers referred to their own abilities or preferences, as did 77 per cent of the French respondents. Considerations of farm profit, by contrast, were cited by fewer than a third in each country. Nor did the influence of the husband loom large in task assignment. Totalling mentions of spouses' preferences and capabilities, whether for first responses or all down the list, we still had relatively low figures, suggesting that men were felt to have little influence on assignment of tasks. Furthermore, organizational membership seemed to play a significant role in making it possible for women's own characteristics to affect task assignment (see Appendix A). The answers to this question seemed to us to indicate, rather surprisingly, that when it came to assigning tasks in the farm enterprise, the domestic and maternal role of the farm wife had relatively little weight. If deference to that role was lurking under references to the respondent's own preferences and capabilities, the wording nevertheless shifted the emphasis to what a woman decided she wanted to do and could do. We should recall here the choices of self-identification by titles, which were family oriented but still most often related to the farm enterprise. We may be catching rhetoric again. But discourse matters: the model was clearly not one of the self-effacing, even submissive farm wife devoted to her domestic role. Rather, it focused on women's own situation or their evaluation of the farm's situation. In addition, as we shall discuss below, these women also claimed to be satisfied with their agricultural work and to have relatively few problems apart from shortage of money. We had similar results from a question explicitly oriented to decision-making procedures, this time asking about the way in which "large decisions" took place. Here the direction of the question was also towards the farm enterprise: the examples given were "major expenditures" and "new [forms of] production." Such categories would include those key choices in terms of the farm enterprise that Corlann Bush has in mind when she writes of the "crucialness equity," what enables women to "become fully functioning, economically critical partners in the farm enterprise."19 It would also presumably include decisions to purchase major domestic appliances or to do major remodelling of the farmhouse, but these do not arise very often. Over all, support for co-operative decision-making was decisive. We allowed a wide range of alternatives, in which the possible models ranged from the two extremes of either the respondent or her spouse making the decision alone (including "I take no part at all in making such decisions") through a number of fairly complicated versions of interactions, including the relatively moderate, traditional "I influence the decision." Only among the French non-members and the Quebec

159 Private Politics

cercle leaders did husbands' monopoly of farm decision-making hit even 5 per cent, and the seven women (the total from the whole population) who said that they alone made the farm decisions go a certain way to balance out the twelve who said that their husbands did. About two-fifths of the respondents reported making the decisions with their husbands, and about half indicated that some weaker degree of consultation occurred. Interestingly, membership in the gfs was significantly related to co-operative decision-making (see Appendix A). Were we identifying here a move towards a more co-operative or egalitarian farm enterprise or, again, merely a more egalitarian/co-operative rhetoric? Certainly a number of sources report that farm women feel they do not in fact share in major farm decisions.30 Perhaps participation is more variable and related to specific issue areas than our question could tap: in her analysis of a large 1984 national survey, Marguerite Planchenault argued that involvement in financial management certainly gave women a say in "financial" dimensions of major decisions, such as the feasibility of investment and use of funds. However, they had a far smaller role in the "technical" aspects related to, for example, brands of purchased products, locations of buildings, and types of production. Nevertheless, 71 per cent in that study felt that they played some role in decisions related to equipment, and only a slightly smaller percentage in relation to buildings and production.31 By contrast, in the 1976 Gironde study 82 per cent of respondents indicated that they shared in decisions, and in a small but suggestive Quebec survey conducted in 1991, almost all the farm women who responded said that they were satisfied with their responsibility with respect to the farm enterprise (91 per cent) and the division of work on the farm (92.3 per cent).32 We would guess that our respondents felt that they had a substantial share in decision-making and that the concept of sharing was central for them. Alice Barthez cites a comment from an earlier study that sums up nicely what we would expect to be our respondents' feelings: "I'm happy to do the accounting, as long as I'm not given this work to do as if it's dishwashing. I want it to be recognized as part of a collaboration that entitles me to participate in general direction [of the farm] and overall decisions."33 Which leads us to the central question: the meaning of the farm work done by women. The areas we have examined so far in this chapter suggest considerable change in women's feelings about the farm enterprise. But the key is what we find when we look directly their actual agricultural work and their opinions about it. Is their role still in practice or in perception an extension of housework, or are we right to argue that their agricultural work is increasingly an analogue to paid

160 Feminist Politics on the Farm

labour elsewhere? Is it still seen as a temporary and exceptional thing, or as an essential part of the agricultural enterprise? To repeat, "fillins,""aides," and "assistants" or "specialists," "joint operators," and "managers of emergencies"? Or just farmers? We can seek answers to such questions to some extent by asking whether women and women's work are still effectively segregated on the family farm. AGRICULTURAL WORK

Certainly our respondents carried out work that was in an important sense non-domestic. This was the agricultural work they performed, even though all of them did it without leaving their households, and most of them did it without pay. For us it was not the presence or absence of cash income but the role in the operation of the farm that defined agricultural work as contrasted with domestic. Farm accounting, including computer work, was therefore agricultural; although it might not be highly regarded, it was not work for the household as distinguished from the farm. At the same time, it clearly remained women's work: this work was nearly always done by women; most farm women did such work, and they most likely did it in the house rather than in the male territory outside.34 This is a pattern we can recognize in other family businesses, including family stores, the most obvious case where non-domestic work is done by women in or next to the home. It has had little attention from feminists or indeed from any scholars. We think that, on the family farms we studied, women's relationships to work and to men have already changed somewhat and are continuing to change. The farm wife continues to be less powerful than her husband, but the gap is less, and the supportive rhetoric or discourse has shifted. We think that at least part of the reason for this shift is to be found in actual performance of agricultural work on the family farm and, even more, because of the relationship between allocation and performance, in the gap between what is expected in general terms and what happens in individual ones. This last relationship ought to show us something about power relations in the farm enterprise: private politics. And we are increasingly convinced that private politics - the politics of everyday life - is the sort that matters most. We already knew what women did on the farm. Now we wanted to get a picture of how our respondents visualized the male/female boundaries within the farm enterprise. Only then could we estimate the extent to which they were prepared to disregard gendered definitions either in principle or in practice. In our questionnaire we therefore attempted to discern the degree to which agricultural tasks were seen as associated with the different sexes, which would amount to sex-stereotyping of

161 Private Politics Table 6.9 Respondents' views on what agricultural work is appropriate for men Quebec member % (n = 100)

Quebec non-member % (n = 96)

France member % (n = 102)

France non-member % (n = 91)

Field-work

39.0

37.5

33.3

49.5

Animal care

23.0

22.9

10.8

6.6

Building upkeep

31.0

34.4

69.6

70.3

Milking

20.0

18.8

2.9

4.4

Cleaning

19.0

17.7

2.0

1.1

Mechanical

65.0

55.2

88.2

82.4

Transport

18.0

13.5

14.7

5.5

Greenhouse

3.0

2.1

Packaging

2.0

Grading

4.0

3.1

12.0

3.1

3.0

2.1

Accounting

13.0

9.4

3.9

3.3

Flock management

24.0

27.1

13.7

3.3

Crop management

33.0

25.0

25.5

15.4

8.0

4.2

3.9

1.1

25.0

18.8

26.5

19.8

14.7

7.7

12.7

6.6

34.3

23.1

Sales Reception

Administration Purchases Vineyard work

2.0

Grape harvest Wine-making

1.0

1.0

2.9

farm work.35 For this analysis we could not find any precedents in survey research; it is the sort of inquiry more typical of ethnographical or historical studies. So we had to invent our procedures as we went along. We did this by taking the list of farm tasks that we used to trace our respondents' actual farm work (derived from Suzanne Dion's study of Quebec farm wives), and asking which of these jobs was more appropriate for men and which for women. We then added two more questions, asking which tasks were more appropriate for the subjects' spouses and which for themselves (see Tables 6.9-6.12). With these last questions we

i6i Feminist Politics on the Farm Table 6.10 Respondents' views on what agricultural work is appropriate for their spouses Quebec member % (n = 100)

Quebec non-member % (n = 96)

France member % (n = 102)

France non-member % (n = 91)

Field-work

54.0

44.8

35.3

33.0

Animal care

19.0

29.2

17.6

17.6

Building upkeep

19.0

29.2

25.5

17.6

Milking

17.0

24.0

3.9

1.1

Cleaning

10.0

8.3

1.0

Mechanical

52.0

55.2

44.1

34.1

Transport

9.0

7.3

3.9

3.3

Greenhouse

2.0

1.0

Packaging

2.0

1.0

Grading

2.0

2.1

15.0

1.0

Sales

5.9

7.7

1.0

5.5

Reception

3.0

Accounting

3.0

4.2

7.8

14.3

Flock management

18.0

30.2

8.8

9.9

Crop management

30.0

33.3

16.7

22.0

Administration

10.0

7.3

12.7

8.8

Purchases

14.0

21.9

23.5

25.3

Vineyard work

26.5

20.9

Grape harvest

14.7

12.1

Wine-making

29.4

33.0

hoped to get at the distinction that people often make between their own and their close associates' situation and that of the larger population they might belong to. For example, a 1980 European Community study of women and work identified a substantial population of women "who have not personally experienced discrimination [but] think that women are at a disadvantage on most counts at work."36 The logic of minority mobilization, of course, calls for minority members increasingly to define their own situation as a variant of that of a group, and to become responsive to group disadvantage

163

Private Politics

Table 6.11 Respondents' views on what agricultural work is appropriate for women France non-member % (n = 91)

Quebec member % (n = 100)

Quebec non-member % (n = 96)

France member % (n = 102)

Field-work

9.0

13.5

2.9

Animal care

4.0

14.6

12.7

13.2

Building upkeep

8.0

9.4

Milking

18.0

18.8

21.6

18.7

Cleaning

13.0

19.8

19.6

11.0

1.0

1.1

4.0

1.0

2.2

Greenhouse

18.0

13.5

9.8

11.0

Packaging

17.0

12.5

13.7

7.7

Grading

10.0

7.3

4.9

2.2

Sales

13.0

11.5

39.2

34.1

Reception

28.0

22.9

51.0

49.5

Accounting

49.0

52.1

62.7

57.1

Flock management

3.0

4.2

Crop management

2.0

2.1

15.0

19.8

25.5

20.9

3.0

1.0

2.0

2.2

Vineyard work

17.6

17.6

Grape harvest

3.9

6.6

Mechanical Transport

Administration Purchases

Wine-making

2.2

2.2

even if they are not personally dissatisfied.37 But the process can work the other way, so that individuals reject for themselves or their spouses a system that they do not challenge in principle (and remember that our respondents were not comfortable with explicit challenges). Implicit rejection, whether of action (what they did) or of personal preference, could indicate a process of breakdown in the system of sex-stereotyping. In effect, any lack of correspondence among views about appropriate behaviour for women, personal activity, and views about appropriate behaviour for oneself (as well as for men and

164

Feminist Politics on the Farm

Table 6.iz Respondents' views on what agricultural work is appropriate for themselves Quebec member % (n = WO)

Quebec non-member % (n = 96)

France member % (n = 102;

France non-member % (n = 91)

Field-work

25.0

26.0

10.8

5.5

Animal care

20.0

30.2

12.7

16.5

Building upkeep

16.0

13.5

Milking

21.0

30.2

16.7

11.0

Cleaning

15.0

28.1

10.8

7.7

Mechanical

1.0

1.0

2.9

2.2

Transport

5.0

5.2

2.0

12.0

5.2

5.9

3.3

Packaging

8.0

8.3

7.8

2.2

Grading

9.0

5.2

2.9

Sales

15.0

8.3

30.4

34.1

Reception

29.0

22.9

36.3

30.8

Accounting

58.0

68.8

49.0

34.1

Flock management

4.0

5.2

Crop management

3.0

1.0

1.0

1.1

22.0

28.1

23.5

19.8

3.0

2.1

2.9

2.2

Vineyard work

29.4

30.8

Grape harvest

9.8

8.8

Wine-making

2.9

7.7

Greenhouse

Administration Purchases

3.3

4.4

for one's spouse) would then represent the fissures or fault-lines where change was possible. The stereotyping questions proved to be extraordinarily difficult to interpret. The rather infrequent case of gavage shows the problems clearly. Gavage means force-feeding ducks or geese to produce the luxury product foie gras. The process of cramming grain into fowl to produce enlarged livers can be done by hand or mechanically, but it is almost always done by women.38 Our Bordeaux research area borders on one of the parts of France where a great deal of foie gras is pro-

165 Private Politics

duced; the industry is almost non-existent in Canada. We could have speculated plausibly that those who identified gavage as women's work were actually those very few people who did it: who else in the Bordeaux region would have views about force-feeding geese? However, only six women actually performed this activity even occasionally; of these, only two thought it appropriate both for women and themselves; fifteen other women also assigned the task to their own sex. Furthermore, one of the few women with views about who should do forcefeeding was from Quebec. Not surprisingly, she did not list herself as doing it - but she did think that it was something that would suit her. We wondered: was she an ex-Dordognaise or ex-Strasbourgeoise who missed doing it? Or was it just that she fancied the idea? And those who said this task was appropriate for women but not for themselves: were they saying they knew women did it but that they themselves were too busy, or that they found it cruel or disgusting?39 All of which made us very glad indeed that we had asked about practice as well as beliefs, and about views about oneself and one's spouse as well as about more abstract notions of proper task assignment to women and men. And we found that, in general, figures for tasks appropriate for men tended to differ from those for tasks appropriate for your spouse, as did those for tasks appropriate for women from those for tasks appropriate for yourself, sometimes considerably. The first sets of figures may indicate what the respondent thought would happen most commonly - or ought to. The meaning of the second sets was equally open to interpretation: was each woman reporting what she and her husband actually did, what they ought to do, or what they would like to do? We did have some relevant marginal comments recorded by interviewers. Interestingly, our questions about appropriate work for women provoked a certain number of volunteered remarks explicitly claiming a large range of farm work for women. Thus, four women noted that everything except "mechanical work" suited women (mechanical work being the most frequently cited male job). Others noted animal care, building maintenance, or transport as the few things women were not good at, usually citing physical reasons. Such insistence on a broad range of female competence suggested that those respondents were resisting a more general sex-linking of tasks, and trying to supply some functional logic for specific cases. Some respondents even rejected the suggested sex-linked labelling explicitly and across the board, volunteering that anyone can do anything (if competent, some of them added). Such responses were most frequent in relation to the question about women's work, a category that no fewer than nineteen cercle members and twenty-one Quebec non-

166 Feminist Politics on the Farm

members refused to accept; in France there were only three such volunteered statements.40 Among these iconoclasts, a few of the Quebec women insisted that they and their husbands did everything together.41 These were answers volunteered well into a heavily directive questionnaire, by respondents who might have been a bit intimidated by a "scientific" inquiry and who were in any case inclined to polite agreement. We became convinced that the responses about appropriateness for women or men were most usually normative, since a far larger percentage of women reported doing agricultural work than were prepared to list it for either all women or themselves. That is, they did more than the rules would suggest. The less clear-cut pattern for self-assignment of tasks also implied that our respondents did not feel they ought to restrict themselves as much as they believed other women ought to be restricted. They did or would like to do more than the rules would suggest. We finally decided that for this particular analysis only the simplest sort of descriptions and analyses were justifiable, given the difficulty of interpretation. After inspection, we took 20 per cent as the cut-off point of interest. That is, we analysed all the tasks that were seen as appropriate for men, spouses, women, or themselves by at least one-fifth of the cercle or gf members or either group of non-members (one at least out of the sixteen sets of responses to four questions).42 For France, we also looked at the three wine-related tasks (vineyard work, harvesting the grapes, and wine-making), even though they did not all pass the stipulated threshold of frequency of mention. These last we included because of our interest in the work dynamics of wine-making enterprises, where the physical demands of the job do not indicate sex assignment as plausibly as with some other tasks. In addition, we knew that horticulture and brewing were areas of work that were cross-culturally likely to be women's, and historically have been performed by women in some areas in France. We also consulted, for comparison, the figures on how many women in each of the subgroups in fact often performed the tasks that we were discussing as relatively sex-defined for either men or women.43 On this basis we can make a few observations, and they are not without interest. Let us assume that stereotyping is indicated by a high level of agreement on sex-assignment. The first noteworthy fact is that the work does not look highly stereotyped, whether we take the accounts as simply reporting reality or as indicating general propriety. No task was unanimously assigned to one sex, in the sense that every respondent, even in a single category, agreed that it was either men's or women's work. To get an imaginary contrast here we can think of the roles of wet-nurse or male model, where unanimity would be predicted.

167 Private Politics

Nor was any type of farm work unequivocally men's or women's work. The highest assignment we got was for mechanical work, which 88.2. per cent of the gf members assigned to men. Even in this case, two intrepid women labelled it women's work and a handful of others saw it as something particularly appropriate for themselves. With respect to this same task Quebec non-members were as likely to assign it to their spouses as to the whole group of men, but the members of other groups showed a relative reluctance to assign such work to their own men. When fewer than half of the gf women saw their own spouses as particularly apt at this set of tasks - which almost 90 per cent of them had assigned to men in general - we wondered whether it meant that they thought of their men as mechanical incompetents. Such differences in any case seemed to weaken the possible normative meaning of assigning mechanical work to men as a group. A considerable number of tasks were virtually free of any sex assignment. Less than 10 per cent of the respondents in any category were prepared to say that any of the following were more appropriate for any particular group of human beings (men, spouses, women, selves): classification, maple sugaring, processing, research, fruit harvesting, force-feeding (though we know that gavage is in fact a women's task if anything is).44 This amounted to a little over a fifth of the twenty-eight tasks listed, and obviously a substantial number hovered between 10 per cent and the zo per cent cut-off point; nor did zo per cent feel like a very powerful level for establishing stereotyping. Second, the level of task assignment was higher for men, whatever measure of stereotyping we used. We had sixteen sets of answers, made up of eight sets of answers for each sex: what our four different groups of respondents considered jobs appropriate for men in general or for their spouses and what they considered jobs appropriate for women or for themselves. On these we tried two different tests. First we looked for cases where our minimum level of sex-assignment (zo per cent) was present in six of the eight possible sets of responses. We found that five tasks met these criteria for men's work: fieldwork, building upkeep, mechanical work, crop management, and purchases for the farm. Reception and accounting were seen as women's work by at least a fifth of the respondents in every category; only milking was anywhere near, and it was well below the cut-off point. When we tried a stronger test - sex-assignment by at least half of the respondents in at least one category - field-work, upkeep, and mechanical work remained assigned to men (and over half of those in six of the eight categories saw mechanical work as men's work). For women, accounting was identified as women's work by well over half of those in five of the eight groups of respondents, while reception

168 Feminist Politics on the Farm

was seen as work for women in general for about half of the two groups of French respondents. In general, the levels of assignment of tasks to men ran much higher and across strikingly more categories. Even when we used a really minimal test, looking only at questions about tasks assigned to men and women in general, and looking only for those mentioned by 2.0 per cent in at least two categories of respondents, we were able to identify only four more women's jobs - cleaning, sales, administration, and vineyard work - but five more for men - care of animals, management of the flock, management of crops, purchases for the farm, and winemaking. We felt that some areas of our results (using categories from Dion's survey of Quebec women) were by no means unambiguous. One example was accueil, which we translate as "reception" and which produced relatively high figures for assignment of tasks to women or performance by them. Dion defined it in her questionnaire as dealing on the phone or face to face with suppliers, purchasers, and so on, and 34 per cent of her respondents indicated carrying out such activities; as can be seen, for three out of four of our categories we got rather higher figures of reported frequent involvement, with the assignment to women highest in France.45 In France, at the vineyards that sell their products, women do a good deal of work with the public ("wine tours" and "wine roads" are increasingly popular), but what does "reception" or "welcome" mean on a dairy farm? We wondered to what extent we were getting responses related to general hospitality, offering the appropriate cups of coffee or glasses of aperitif to the more or less casual visitor. But perhaps we have here an illustration of the way in which household tasks shade into agricultural ones for farm women. However, we did use the same categories for all our inquiries about agricultural labour, so it seemed legitimate to compare task assignment with the reported reality of agricultural work done by our respondents. If we look at work that more than half of the women in any category reported doing often, we end up with no fewer than eight tasks. Almost 70 per cent of our respondents did accounting often, and two other tasks - reception and administration - were frequent ones for about 50 and 4 5 per cent respectively. On farms with relevant principal products we found more than half of the farm wives often carrying out animal care, milking, vineyard work, grape harvesting, and fruit picking. When we looked at the family wine industry, about which we had a learned a little from our experience in the St-Emilion area, we were able to work out, tentatively, some general patterns in the relationships between the assignment of tasks and performance of them. We had asked about three wine-related tasks. Of these, we knew from local ob-

169 Private Politics

servation that wine-making was understood to be men's work, while harvesting the grapes was not so labelled and in practice brought in women as a temporary, auxiliary part of a mixed work-force. Vineyard work (travail de la vigne] was done by both men and women, but the subcategories of vineyard work were clearly delimited and assigned, so that women took part in only the less skilled labour. After a particularly violent storm during our visit to Bordeaux in 1993, we ourselves participated as amateurs in the ungendered task of reattaching the vines to the wire supports from which the wind had torn them. At the same time, some women aspired to the more skilled work, such as pruning the vines. Our own unexpert observations of the wine industry were confirmed by a number of sources. A 1976 survey of almost a thousand non-g/ members in the department of the Gironde gave the most detail: 78 per cent of respondents reported doing minor vineyard work; 81 per cent prepared harvesters' meals, and 20 per cent were involved in winemaking as such.46 Nicole Millon, a gf member in the Medoc who was, exceptionally, the proprietor of the family vineyard, an inheritance from her father, confirmed this in 1984: "Traditionally, in the Medoc, women do vineyard work, but mainly for fastening [the vines to their supports]; practically none of them make the wine. They work in the wineries for labelling and processing, and they receive the clients."47 The assignment and reported performance of tasks in our questionnaire reflected these realities, if only in a rough way. The non-stereotyping of grape harvesting came through clearly: little assignment to anyone (never exceeding 15 per cent) and a good deal of female activity (40 per cent). For wine-making the pattern was markedly different: fairly high assignment to men (averaging about 37 per cent) and virtually no female assignment or activity. With vineyard work, the third task, however, the levels of assignment to self and spouse were higher than to women and men in general. And the reported level of activity was higher still (about 40 per cent). We thought that in this last case we might be catching something about the team nature of vineyard work and also that women now thought it appropriate for themselves to perform some of the more male-identified portions of what needed to be done (indicated by highest assignment to self). The relation to "working with my husband on the farm" seemed obvious; the possibility of reshuffling of actual tasks and entitlements was at least implicit. The wine industry results therefore suggested to us that several patterns of task assignment and performance existed. There were some tasks that were not strongly stereotyped and that women might do a lot (harvesting), and there were also the expected stereotyped tasks, both assigned to and performed by either men or women but not both (me-

170 Feminist Politics on the Farm

chanical work and accounting respectively). Over all, however, malesterotyping seemed to be undercut by the generally lower assignment to spouses. Furthermore, there was also work that took the form of cooperative/team activities: here assignment was less to men or women than to self and spouse (vineyard work, perhaps milking). This last category would not be caught by our questions except via the few incidental comments. The allocation of tasks within such co-operative labour might well be in the process of changing to allow room for a more skilled and influential role for women. There seem also to be some transitional tasks still assigned to men that women did a good deal of (field-work, especially in Quebec). The data on animal care did not fit any of these patterns, since it was attributed to men by our respondents in spite of the fact that it still required work from a good many women; were we seeing here another possible transitional pattern, something about the shift from a task traditionally assigned to women to men's production of cattle as agribusiness? Looking at the higher French level of stereotyping of mechanical work and upkeep, we wondered if the relative condition of farm machinery and buildings might not be partly responsible for national differences, as might something attitudinal about machinery in a less modern farm culture (the Quebec cercle president who visited the Gironde for our conference in 1989 was taken aback by the persistence of non-mechanized dairy production there, even though some of the farms were fully modernized). But perhaps some key elements are also symbolic. It is in a French context that Evelyne Le Garrec writes as follows about the symbolic meaning of using the tractor, which we would assume would extend in France to all of what is called "mechanical work": "the role played by the tractor, centre of the farm activity, of all production, [makes it a] specific attribute of men. A man's prestige pours out on the tractor, noble tool, and the prestige of the machine reinforces in return that of the man who possesses it, who drives it. This must surely be why you rarely see a woman at the wheel of a tractor. "48 It is difficult to evaluate the symbolic perception of a task or tool as "noble" and as symbolic of control, dominance, all that the hierarchy of the sexes implies. To return again to vineyard work, we heard the same term, "noble," applied to pruning. Can we speculate that "noble" is a code for men's work in France? Perhaps it only means important. In 1986 a report in the journal for the MSA councillors, Travaux et Innovations, discussed the valorisation of accounting as follows: "We should note how certain functions become ennobled: little by little, each day, there develops awareness of the importance of certain tasks (like accounting] and of the new status that consequently accrues for the person who is responsible for [the task]." Men did not want to do the accounting, which fell to women by default, but now it is so important that eventually the associates in the farm enterprise will compete to do it: controlling the accounting, one has power because one

171 Private Politics

has information.49 And, as we have noted, accounting is both agricultural work and women's work. In any case, our data can be taken to indicate that the farm universe is no longer separate from the involvement and influence of women, not just as supporters and helping hands but as continuing participants in agricultural labour. The counterpart question would obviously be one about the presence of men in the private domains of the farm woman as wife and mother. Here we turn to our data on housework performed by spouses. HOUSEHOLD LABOUR

Most of the farm women spent a very large amount of time on housework, though varying somewhat by season in a way strongly linked to geographical location. But their husbands, who spent most of their time on agricultural work, spent almost none of it on domestic labour (see Table 6.13). The situations of our four exemplars served as warning that we would not find much involvement by men in housework. Active club member that she was, currently president of the local branch of the Societe St-Jean-Baptiste, attending ten cercle meetings a year, Andree got no household help at all from her equally elderly husband; we would guess that she left him a casserole ready in the oven for dinner if she was going to be late. Her younger, non-member compatriot, Brigitte, with her three small children, did rather better, in fact very well by comparison to our respondents in general: her husband often helped with the children or took care of them so that she could carry out personal activities, and sometimes he helped with the cooking. But he never shopped, cleaned, or went to parent-teacher meetings for their eight-year-old daughter. By contrast, Christiane, member of her GVAF since its founding, active in other groups including parents' clubs, only occasionally got help with household tasks except housecleaning (or used to - her five children, all still living at home, ranged from thirteen to twenty-three years old). Diane pointed out that her children were both pre-schoolers, so that a number of the categories listed were not relevant. But she never received any help from her husband with any other sort of housework either. She reported, we should note, that she was very happy, and able to do an average of twenty hours a week of farm work on top of what she reported as seventy of housework. Partly because men do so little housework, the literature usually provides no more than very unspecific time budgets. Still, INSEE found that by the end of the 19805 Frenchmen who were self-employed, which seems the category most like farmers, spent a grand total of one

172. Feminist Politics on the Farm Table 6.13 Domestic tasks ever done by respondents' spouses Yes %

No %

Meal preparation

38.0

62.0

Housecleaning

27.0

73.0

Care of young children

52.0

48.0

Shopping for household

61.0

39.0

Help with homework

40.0

60.0

Parent-teacher meetings

21.0

79.0

Babysitting

71.0

29.0

Meal preparation

53.1

46.9

Housecleaning

38.5

61.5

Care of young children

64.6

35.4

Shopping for household

60.4

39.6

Help with homework

40.6

59.4

Parent-teacher meetings

22.9

77.1

Babysitting

71.9

28.1

Meal preparation

44.1

55.9

Housecleaning

20.6

79.4

Care of young children

49.0

51.0

Shopping for household

57.8

42.2

Help with homework

62.7

37.3

Parent-teacher meetings

49.0

51.0

Babysitting

55.9

44.1

Q U E B E C MEMBER (n =

100)

Q U E B E C N O N - M E M B E R (n = 96)

FRANCE M E M B E R (n =

102)

173

Private Politics

Table 6.13 (continued) Yes %

No %

Meal preparation

41.8

58.2

Housecleaning

20.9

79.1

Care of young children

50.5

49.5

Shopping for household

56.0

44.0

Help with homework

48.4

51.6

Parent-teacher meetings

33.0

67.0

Babysitting

58.2

41.8

FRANCE N O N - M E M B E R .(n = 91)

hour and fifty-three minutes a week on housework, the least of any category studied.50 Eurobarometer tried a somewhat different approach, asking both men and women a question about the tasks for which it would be acceptable for a man to "replace" his wife often. The wording is worth noticing: these were women's tasks in which men might on occasion be helpful. In Europe over all, looking only at the rhetoric of acceptable substitution, shopping got 71 per cent approval and preparing a meal 40 per cent, while dishwashing and house-cleaning got respectively 53 per cent and 44 per cent approval from husbands, presumably indicating some willingness to help out.51 It would seem to amount to what might be done in ad hoc fashion. And husbands and wives disagreed about how much was actually done. The same Eurobarometer study showed that 3 8 per cent of married French men claimed that they helped their wives with unspecified forms of housework " often"; only z8 per cent of wives agreed.52 In 1981, when Canadians were asked "Do you think men ever help with housework?" 49 per cent of men answered yes, but only 37 per cent of women.53 Instead of these approaches, we once again used Dion's questions in order to make comparisons with her self-selected sample of Quebec farm women; she asked women to report how often their spouses carried out a list of household tasks, including some related to child care. Dion's respondents reported that their husbands did very little around the house; at the most they "sometimes" took care of meals, housekeeping, or dishes.54 The same pattern is clear in the anecdotal material that is all we could find for France. In Rose-Marie Lagrave's study of French women who were officers in farm unions, who might be ex-

174 Feminist Politics on the Farm pected to need more rather than less help in the household, only four out of sixty-four husbands gave recurrent, though not regular assistance.55 These women also volunteered that they left prepared meals when they expected to be late or absent. Lagrave described the wives' response as being "like the husbands' in respect to the agricultural work of the wives: 'He helps me, he gives me a hand, he just has to manage when I'm not there.'" 56 Similarly, farm union activists interviewed by Evelyne Le Garrec spontaneously cited their husbands' attitudes about housework as an indicator of men's limited willingness to support women's union militancy: "as long as you don't ask them to wash the dishes, men will always agree."57 It was at this point that the dishwasher - which could de-gender dealing with china and cutlery became for us a symbol to put beside the "noble" tractor that represented male dominance on the family farm. It is instructive to compare the (small amount of) domestic work that men did often with the agricultural work that their wives did often. In looking at spouses' domestic labour, we paid special attention to the situation of the leaders, as needing help most, so that we usually had eight different categories of respondents to compare (cercle members and non-members, groupement members and non-members, and leaders and ranks for both cercles and g/s). Babysitting - taking care of children in order that the wife could carry out some other activity was the only domestic task that more than 20 per cent of the men did often, and only in Quebec (and it was the followers' husbands who did the most). By contrast, at least 2.0 per cent of the women in the same eight categories performed at least seven agricultural tasks often; in each category there were at least four tasks done often by more than half of the women. Even when we reclassified responses from men to see if they did anything at all in each category of domestic work, we could find only a very few categories where more than half of the men in any category were involved even rarely: babysitting again, care of young children, and shopping, as well as child care for Quebec nonmembers and help with children's homework for the gf members. In the meantime, about a third of the women were doing more than forty hours per week of agricultural work in all but the low season (where such a period existed). Let us repeat: few of the husbands did much around the house. Nevertheless, we were able to find grounds for optimism in relation to the likely future activism of our younger respondents. In our regression analyses, organizational membership made one of its rare appearances at a significant level: in relation to the likelihood of French spouses' helping with children's homework, one of the few tasks husbands were at all likely to perform. Number of children (which has some relation to children's ages) was also significantly related in both countries to the

1/5 Private Politics

likelihood of husbands' assisting children with homework. In addition, the age of the women themselves, which reflects that of their husbands, was related to all dimensions of men's housework except shopping and parent-teacher meetings; younger women were more likely to get help from younger husbands (see Appendix A). But if the relationship between ages and family size and the likelihood of getting help was encouraging, it still seems clear that husbands neither had nor were expected to have a share in domestic labour equivalent to what the wives were acquiring in respect to agricultural work. SEXUAL

POLITICS

Finally, we have "the sexual domain," so called by an analyst of the Eurobarometer data, who singles it out as an "area in which women traditionally have been more conservative than men."58 Marita Rosch Inglehart cites the World Values Study to show that women are less likely to support "complete sexual freedom without being restricted" and also more likely to say that there is "never" justification for a list of actions including adultery and abortion.59 Women like our subjects are, of course, seen as the most conventional of all in relation to sexuality. Sexuality is, after all, the pre-eminent area of patriarchal control. It is possible to dispute interpretations of the data about sexuality such as those offered by Rosch Inglehart and others who base on them an accusation of puritanism, even prudery. In fact we are dealing here with what has been called the "gender gap" - the persistent tendency for women to have different, often significantly different opinions from those of men on political matters (among which we include questions related to sexuality). Central to the gender gap is a cluster of attitudes usually labelled "traditional."60 Looking at a long history of mass surveys, one of the most comprehensive studies of gender-linked opinions identified a "social conservatism" characteristic of women rather than men: "the support for traditional values, broadly defined," opinions that "preserve and protect traditional values, the home, the family, children, religion, the neighbourhood or immediate community, and the order and stability of everyday life." Relevant questions related to pornography, the use of drugs beginning with marijuana, prohibition (of the manufacture, sale, and consumption of alcohol), prayer in schools, sex education, birth control for teens, homosexuality, and, sometimes, abortion.61 Such topics can be seen to have some commonality centring on a retrospective ideal of the traditional nuclear family, a commonality of a sort we might expect to find among our respondents. The relevant questions in our own survey are three that we took from the study of French women's politics carried out in 1978 by

ij6

Feminist Politics on the Farm

Table 6.14 Respondents' views on acceptability of adultery for wives Quebec member % (n = 100) Normal Forgivable Unforgivable Missing

Quebec non-member % (n = 96)

France member % (n = 102)

1.0

'

France non-member % (n = 91) 2.2

24.0

21.9

45.1

30.8

71.0

74.0

48.0

61.5

4.0

4.2

6.9

5.5

Table 6.15 Respondents' views on acceptability of pre-marital sexual activity for girls Quebec member % (n= 100)

Quebec non-member % (n = 96)

France member % (n = 102)

France non-member % (n = 91)

Before marriage

36.0

45.8

52.9

74.7

Not before marriage

33.0

36.5

30.4

14.3

Missing

31.0

17.7

16.7

11.0

Table 6.16 Respondents' views on decriminalization of abortion as progress

Decriminalization is progress

Quebec member % (n= 100)

France Quebec member non-member % (n = 96) . . . - % (n = 102)

France non-member % (n = 91)

Yes

45.0

60.4

56.9

73.6

No

46.0

34.4

33.3

16.5

9.0

5.2

9.8

9.9

Missing

Janine Mossuz-Lavau and Mariette Sineau, who asked about extramarital and pre-marital sex and about abortion. To these we added a fourth about contraceptive use (see Tables 6.14, 6.15, 6.16, 6.17). Mossuz-Lavau and Sineau placed their analysis very explicitly in the context of the greater degree of Catholic involvement among traditional women, who are also characterized as more right wing in politics - and, because of all this, are supposedly in general more conservative.62-

177 Private Politics Table 6.17 Respondents' report of their use of contraception Quebec member % (n = WO)

Quebec non-member % (n = 96)

France member % (n = W2)

France non-member % (n = 91)

Natural

34.0

28.1

19.6

15.4

Artificial

41.0

50.0

36.3

48.4

None

25.0

21.9

44.1

36.3

Mossuz-Lavau and Sineau in fact focused less on the level of sexrelated attitudes as such than on differential expectations for males and females, for even the most sexually liberal women in their study tended to be far less indulgent for daughters than for sons, for women than for men. This is no more and no less than the double standard, and the argument is that the double standard is enforced by women. Thus, women's opinions condoned adultery for men somewhat more than for women and insisted on pre-marital virginity considerably more strongly for daughters than for sons. The differences were particularly large in relation to pre-marital sexuality in the case of "housewives" who, like many of our respondents, had never worked for pay/3 Our results were quite amazingly different. We did find some crossnational difference with respect to the questions about sexual morality, but otherwise very little variation among our groups, with members much like non-members and leaders not markedly more or less tolerant than followers.64 What is important, and surprising given MossuzLavau and Sineau's findings, is that no sex-linked differences appeared in the responses we received. That is, within each country as many of our respondents were unforgiving of husbands as of wives who strayed (about three-quarters in Canada and about half in France). And with regard to pre-marital sex they were not more indulgent towards boys than girls (again, more so for both in France). As a result, early in our study we dropped half of these questions, retaining for analysis only the views about adulterous wives and non-virginal daughters; our conclusions about them, however, apply equally to adulterous husbands and libertine sons, though possibly with a different logic of explanation. It should be noted that we adopted from Mossuz-Lavau and Sineau the wording, for adultery, of "normal, forgivable, unforgivable." Some respondents who posited a possible forgiveness made their reluctance clear in accompanying comments, adding that they had the survival of the marriage at the front of their minds: "better than breaking everything." Even in France only two individuals found adultery "normal"

178 Feminist Politics on the Farm

(we had expected more), and only one in Quebec. In interpreting these results, we noted that disapproval of adultery is not necessarily a conservative attitude in the context of a society in which an increasing number of people avoid precisely the implications of monogamy that would follow from committing to a legal marriage. One result of such a pattern of sexual liaison is that adultery becomes a serious disregard of commitment. In 1990, even among Canadians of the age group 18-35, approval of extra-marital sex had dropped from 1975's Z8 per cent to a remarkable low of 18 per cent (this while approval of pre-marital sex was up to 80 per cent). 65 We added a question of our own about contraceptive use because it represented, potentially, some degree of resistance to the dictates of both tradition and the Church. We also thought that it had some implications for views about extra-marital and pre-marital sex. In fact, Catholics in both Canada and France now seem on the whole to be close to their fellow citizens with respect to attitudes about birth control, whatever the Church would prefer.66 Among our respondents the expected national differences did not appear in any consistent way, even though contraception was somewhat less common in France. Canadians have over all an exceptionally high level of use of contraception, although these figures seem to be lower in Quebec, where, in 1984, 2,5 per cent of women in the relevant age range reported no use of contraception whatever; this was the case for about the same percentage of our Quebec respondents.67 In France the figure for women of fertile age not using any form of contraception has been stable at 32 per cent since 1978.68 It is relevant to these figures that, in her 1985 study, Lagrave found fewer than a third of female farm union leaders using contraception, while most of those who did specified that it was the canonically more acceptable but unreliable "natural" version (probably Ogino - rhythm). She noted also, apparently using 1979 figures, that 23 per cent of French farm women over all used either the coil or the pill, but that they were the population group least likely to use any contraception at all.69 By contrast - or as a result of the passage of time? - about 60 per cent of our French respondents used some form of contraception, and if we may be dubious about the effectiveness of "natural" methods, we should note that their users were among a population with relatively few children. Over all, the levels of contraceptive use that we report are remarkable, even if we were to sum the non-responses in with those who declare that they do not use contraception at all. The two sets of club leaders used artificial means somewhat more than their ranks. Even the rather older, more religious presidents of the cercles, who were strongly opposed to legalization of abortion, used contraception at about the same level as their followers (see Tables 6.17, 6.i8).7°

1/9 Private Politics Table 6.18 Respondents' views on decriminalization of abortion as progress, cross-tabulated with frequency of attendance at mass Attendance at mass Once/twice a month Occasionally % %

On holidays %

Never %

n

Once a week %

Yes

45

62.2

13.3

11.1 11.1

11.1 11.1

2.2

No

46

84.8

6.5

4.3

2.2

2.2

9

77.8

11.1

11.1 11.1

Yes

58

32.8

29.3

25.9

12.1

No

33

63.6

9.1

24.2

3.0

5

20.0

20.0

60.0

Yes

58

6.9

20.7

44.8

22.4

No

34

64.7

11.8

14.7

8.8

Missing

10

50.0

10.0

10.0

20.0

10.0

Yes

67

6.0

14.9

34.3

38.8

6.0

No

15

40.0

20.0

26.7

13.3

9

66.7

11.1

22.2

Decriminalization is progress QUEBEC MEMBER

Missing QUEBEC NON-MEMBER

Missing FRANCE MEMBER

5.2

FRANCE N O N - M E M B E R

Missing MEASURES OF SIGNIFICANCE Pearson Chi-square Quebec member Quebec non-member France member France non-member

Value

Degrees of freedom

Significance

6.74818 10.45109 36.13561 15.2.8024

4 4 4 4

.14981 .01510 .00000 .00415

We were reluctant to construct any index of sexual conservatism, given what the factor analyses showed about the relationships among the indicators we used. Instead, we calculated the rank orders, which showed very clearly the greater sexual conservatism of the Quebec respondents and, among them, of the leaders: they were the least likely of all our subgroups to condone adultery, pre-marital sex, or legalization

180 Feminist Politics on the Farm

of abortion. It appears that contraceptive practice operates somewhat differently from the three other measures. We find these last few findings of substantial interest. Together they imply a relationship to sexuality that seems worth trying to interpret. Looking at the underlying logic of traditional attitudes, we can speculate that such women were both chaste and unforgiving because they expected dire consequences for themselves from women's sexual freedom.71 When contraception became a possibility, in both technological and psychological senses, attitudes shifted for women, even quite traditional ones. Part of the renovated package of beliefs was the conviction that true love and constancy were possible and indeed preferable. In 1993, weU mto tne new era> a P°ll reported that "for 96.4 per cent of Quebeckers, faithfulness between a couple is essential."71 That is, free choice did not eliminate love and commitment but could facilitate it. Such current beliefs about sexual relationships have two implications for couples: the obligation entailed in a bond once it is committed to, and the equality of freedom and obligation for both partners, with, for heterosexuals, contraception a hidden requirement from women's point of view. Mossuz-Lavau and Sineau do indeed note that even their "modern" working women were not as tolerant of marital infidelity as they would have expected. Attributing this reaction to changes in notions about love, they commented: "from the moment when marriage is the result of only a reciprocal inclination - like maternity ... essentially "voluntary," it is accompanied by affective requirements that are not very compatible with a fickle conception of marriage."73 And this is what wre got from our women. Marriage was very much part of the equation. Some of those who were relatively permissive about pre-marital sex added the volunteered statement that it was all right before marriage - if the couple was in love. And then the very phrasing of the question, which we got from Mossuz-Lavau and Sineau, focused on marriage as something that is reasonable as a marker in relation to sex. Our respondents were all married and presumably expected their children to be also. Their condemnation of adultery was real, but went both ways; neither partner was expected to find it easy to forgive. With use of contraceptives, abortion should not be necessary. Pre-marital exploration at a modest but equivalent level for both boys and girls, permanent commitment that would not easily be disregarded, use of contraception and avoidance of abortion - it is a recognizable combination. It is not radical, but it does not seem to resemble male preferences, and it is certainly not the same as that of an older generation. Still, we had so far only a partial and fragmented view of what was going on inside farm households. We next turned to a variety of factor

181 Private Politics

analyses, looking for any larger patterns in the material we had on private politics. DIMENSIONS OF PRIVATE POLITICS

We first sought factors shared by the whole population, using responses to questions related to all the features of private politics as we had examined them: feelings about not working off the farm, desire to be paid for farm work, stereotyping of agricultural work (in the form of assigning mechanical work to men and accounting to women), shared decision-making, preference for a professional title, task assignment, and three measures of sexual liberalism (abortion, pre-marital sex, adultery). Since we had already included these responses related to sexuality in our analysis of feminism, we were not sure it made sense to use them again; their tendency to group was also troublesome. Accordingly, we also tested possible solutions for the whole population without the attitudes about sexuality. With sexuality included, the associations were slightly weaker, but in all cases the patterns were acceptable from a technical point of view. Even without the three sexrelated factors, the overall solution explained 51.4 per cent of the variance. We then tried individual-country solutions both with and without the sexuality questions, and those without were the most powerful of all (60 per cent and 56.7 per cent of variance explained for Quebec and France respectively). However, although the second, smaller solution for the whole population (absent sexuality) gave us two factors that made sense, the corresponding country solutions left us with a grand total of three factors composed of more than two components each, and they were factors that were not easily definable or comparable. Factor analyses can find correlations only among the responses supplied, which therefore serve as the resultant factors' contexts. We had already looked to see if opinions about sexuality were associated with beliefs about public policy, the status of women, feminism, and the women's movement. We now wanted to know, in a different context, if there were associations between those same views about sexuality and views about agricultural and domestic arrangements on the farm. The earlier factors seemed to us to correspond to dimensions of feminism; the new factors seemed to indicate the existence of structures of beliefs about gender relationships. We are inclined to feel that issues related to sexuality have a place in this analysis, though we may need a different way of measuring them. In the context of private politics, for the whole population the three responses related to sexuality were strongly associated, far more strongly

i8z

Feminist Politics on the Farm

than in the earlier feminism factor analysis: respondents who approved of abortion and pre-marital sex tended to disapprove of adultery. However, when we then looked at the factor analyses for each of the two countries separately, as all our analyses up to now had suggested we ought, the sexuality factors split up, going in different directions for each of the two countries. This struck us as more plausible than the overall solution and encouraged us to look at the countries separately, as we had done in our earlier factor analyses. Since, for private politics, the versions with sexuality included can be given rather more interesting interpretations, we present here what we can infer from a comparison of both sets of country solutions, first including the sexuality factors and then omitting them (see Table 6.19). As before, we have given names to factors when they have three or more components. We should stress that there are no precedents in the literature for these analyses, so our explanations are bound to be tentative. The most interesting suggestions related to the factors we labelled Farming and Autonomy. Farming showed an association of lack of regret for not working off the farm with a positive justification of absence from the paid labour force (I prefer to stay on the farm and work beside my husband) and preference for the title agricultrice. These components were related in all versions, with the one exception of the shorter Quebec version, where lack of regret for not working moved off to a two-way association with co-operative decision-making on the farm. The egalitarian farm enterprise seemed to lie behind such clusters. But it is important to note that it was also a co-operative farm enterprise, and one that women valued rather than merely tolerated. The second noteworthy factor, Autonomy, existed as such only in the two more inclusive country versions (one of the reasons we preferred those versions). Its defining elements were the two related variables of allocation of farm work by women's preferences and by their capabilities, with Quebec respondents stressing preferences and those in France stressing capabilities. For France the Autonomy factor combined this self-related assignment of tasks with two sexuality elements (tolerance for both pre-marital sex and abortion); for Quebec the third, weaker component was the desirability of pay for women's work on the farm. For both countries, dropping the sexuality variables from the analysis meant that the self-directed reasons for task assignment remained associated and solitary. This factor that we labelled Autonomy may be the closest we can come to feminism in the context of private politics. It tapped women's impact on task allocation as well as views about the desirability of waged work on the farm and, in France, about sexual behaviour. Let us recall the components of Feminist Identification as we described it in

183

Private Politics

Table 6.19 Dimensions of private politics: factors derived from respondents' views QUEBEC (INCLUDING SEXUALITY) 45.7% of variance explained Farming Prefer to work on farm with spouse

.76578

Call self agricultrice

.58735

Do not regret not having paid employment of f farm

.57581 Autonomy

Tasks allotted because of abilities

—.78987

Tasks allotted because of preferences

.77570

Should be paid for farm work

.35332 Task

Abortion acceptable

.62535

Accounting appropriate for women

.62343

Pre-marital sex acceptable

.59012

Adultery unforgivable

.51700

Mechanical work appropriate for men

.36571 .69506

Decisions made co-operatively

-.68073

Tasks allocated because of children QUEBEC (WITHOUT SEXUALITY) 60% of variance explained Task Accounting appropriate for women

.66645

Tasks allocated because of children

— .55749

Mechanical work appropriate for men Tasks allocated because of abilities Tasks allocated because of preferences

.51746 — .86201 .78483

Decisions made co-operatively

.73293

Do not regret not having paid employment off farm

.55789

Call self agricultrice

.81245

Prefer to work on farm with spouse

.68377

184

Feminist Politics on the Farm

Table 6.19 (continued) FRANCE (INCLUDING SEXUALITY) 45% of variance explained Farming Prefer to work on farm with spouse

.72519

Do not regret not having paid employment off farm

.67646

Call self agricultrice

.39157 Autonomy

Pre-marital sex acceptable

.74907

Tasks allocated because of preferences

— .57519

Tasks allocated because of abilities

.53929

Abortion acceptable

.51148 Task A

Decisions made co-operatively

— .58756

Adultery unforgivable

.55834

Accounting appropriate for women

.51952 Task B .66438

Should be paid for farm work

-.51746

Tasks allocated because of children

.49633

Mechanical work appropriate for men FRANCE (WITHOUT SEXUALITY) 56.7% of variance explained Farming Prefer to work on farm with spouse

.78396

Do not regret not having paid employment off farm

.72070

Call self agricultrice

.45707 Task

Mechanical work appropriate for men Decisions made co-operatively Accounting appropriate for women

.72741 — .68665 .50055

185

Private Politics

Table 6.19 (continued) Tasks allocated because of abilities Tasks allocated because of preferences Tasks allocated because of children

.80171 -.71984 .84134

Factors have been given identifying labels only when three or more elements are associated at a meaningful level. With the possible exception of allocation of tasks because of children, positive figures correspond to more progressive views. A minus sign indicates that the usual direction of association has been reversed: tasks are not allocated because of abilities; tasks are not allocated because of children; tasks are not allocated because of preferences; decisions are not made co-operatively.

the previous chapter. For both countries it included, along with calling oneself a feminist, the refusal to condemn excessive movement tactics. For Quebec only, this factor also added definitions of feminism as female self-assertion and also the acceptability of adultery. France's Feminist Identification, by contrast, which had only three elements, included equality definitions of feminism as the third. The new Autonomy factor in its two different country versions thus resembled those elements of feminism that differed between Quebec and France. That is, if we subtracted from each of the earlier Feminist Identification factors the components explicitly related to feminism as a label or a movement (feminist self-identification and refusal to condemn movement tactics), we would be left with self-assertion and tolerance of adultery as defining feminism for Quebec, and equality as defining feminism for France. Turning back to the private-politics analyses, we can see that what we have labelled Autonomy amounts to the claim for a full role in both activities and decisions on the farm, which would be a form of selfassertion. If a farm wife's wish to be paid for farm work - part of Quebec's Autonomy factor - is understood as a claim to access to the farm's resources, that belief can be seen as a nicely feminist enhancer of the assignment of tasks on criteria related to women's preferences (another part of Autonomy). By contrast, in the French version of Autonomy, tolerance of pre-marital sex and of abortion could correspond to the French Feminist Identification factor's claim for the equality of women to men. That is, the implication of the Autonomy factor would be that women and men are equal in relation to both reproductive and productive options, women able to function sexually like men and assigned tasks in (non-gendered) ways related to women's characteristics or capabilities. We find it interesting that none of the sexual factors is part of Autonomy in Quebec; this supports our view that sexual attitudes are often not integral to feminism, and also our suspicion that the meaning of questions about sexuality are strongly dependent on context.

186 Feminist Politics on the Farm

The remaining factors were difficult to interpret, and perhaps not replicable.74 We labelled them Task Allocation (A or B) to indicate the presence of components related to the possibly sex-linked nature of activities on the farm (as well as the other reasons why jobs were generally assigned). That is, these factors included regarding mechanical work as men's work or accounting as women's work. Quebec's longer version (including sexuality) gave us a sturdy but rather peculiar fivevariable factor that included both of the identifications of jobs as more appropriate for men or women - should we have called this a workstereotyping factor? - but also added in all three of the sexuality factors, perhaps implying that quite conventional views about farm work might be associated with relatively progressive ones about sexuality? In the longer French solution, by contrast, the two job-stereotyping measures split apart, and we identified two different versions of Task Allocation that might perhaps correspond to less and more modern versions of relationships in the farm family. Task Allocation A associated the absence of co-operative decision-making with intolerance of adultery and assignment of women to accounting, while Task Allocation B associated the desirability of pay for women's farm work, the absence of task assignment related to children, and the assignment of men to mechanical work. Then, in the shorter versions, when sexuality variables were no longer feeding into the patterns, the factor we called Task Allocation fractured; the two job-stereotyping variables came together for both countries, and the solution for Quebec added in the absence of childrelated considerations for task assignment, while for France the third variable was the absence of co-operative decision-making. But we found, finally, that the logic of the different versions of Task Allocation remained obscure, if suggestive. Even with the possibly extraneous sexuality components removed, the reasons for allocating tasks were multiple and less than obvious. In the country with the larger families (Quebec), they did not include attention to children. The implication was, perhaps, that more functional - or, alternatively, traditional? considerations dominated. The absence of co-operative decisionmaking in France suggested also that the most common task assignments were imposed (or accepted) without discussion. Perhaps this was merely a way of saying that jobs were not all that severely sex-linked, and that children mattered more for Quebec, co-operative decisionmaking more for France? Certainly the differences between the two countries were once again conspicuous. Let us repeat: interpretations of factor analyses have to be speculative. Our own speculations are supported by the high levels of association that we report. All the same, it has to be disturbing that we have

187 Private Politics

managed to interpret two different sets of factor analyses in ways that both plausibly fit in with our general argument. The solutions omitting sexuality seem preferable for the technical reason that they explain more of what the respondents have in common, but at the cost of dropping some components that strike us as important in understanding what is going on. We would particularly regret the loss of the Autonomy factor as a possible surrogate for Feminist Identity. Still, even if we limit ourselves to the relatively impoverished versions without sexuality, the resulting contrast between the Canadian and French women leaves us with one interesting national difference: the different patterns of associations with the gender-assignment of tasks in the two countries. More important, the shorter versions resemble the longer ones in the persisting associations among beliefs that take seriously women's preferences and abilities on the farm, as well as some connection between professional self-description and satisfaction with being an informal partner on the family farm. This is particularly interesting for France, where interest in the title agricultrice has been interpreted as a relatively radical and politicized response. It might be expected to be linked to work experience and to a workplace model that is very remote from contentedly staying home on the farm to work co-operatively with a spouse. HAPPINESS

We say "contentedly" for, over all, our respondents seemed to be quite satisfied with their lives, including the agricultural work they did, and indeed with their situations as farm wives (see Tables 6.20-6.22). If we combine those who were somewhat or very contented and contrast them to those who were somewhat or entirely discontented, we can say that those who were working off the farm were satisfied with their work; those who were paid for their farm work were satisfied with their pay; nearly all were satisfied with their agricultural work - and just about everyone was generally happy. Furthermore, virtually no one was deeply distressed, reporting in whatever context that they were not very contented, very dissatisfied, or really not happy at all. The figures for general contentment were very close to those for satisfaction with agricultural work alone, though all the women were more prone to say that they were very (as contrasted to somewhat) contented with their whole, varied lives on the farm. Within this pattern of contentment there were, however, some striking national differences, with the French women less satisfied than the Quebec women over all, and also much more likely to report only a moderate level of contentment. The reasons for these differences can

188 Feminist Politics on the Farm Table 6.zo Respondents' satisfaction with their agricultural work Quebec Quebec France France member non-member member nnon-member % (n = 100) % (n = 96) % (n = 102) % (n = 9l) Very satisfied

50.0

52.1

11.8

19.8

Somewhat satisfied

42.0

44.8

72.5

68.1

Somewhat unsatisfied

1.0

3.1

8.8

7.7

Very unsatisfied

3.0

2.0

1.1

Table 6.2.1 Respondents' most important problems Quebec Quebec France France member non-member member non-member % (n = 100) % (n = 96) % (n = 102) % (n = 91) Isolation

9.0

14.6

12.7

15.4

Lack of free time/vacations

47.0

54.2

56.9

44.0

Work too heavy and hard

19.0

14.6

34.3

15.4

Insufficient income

23.0

16.7

45.1

47.3

Lack of local facilities/equipment

5.0

5.2

11.8

14.3

Other

3.0

4.2

7.8

5.5

39.0

35.4

11.8

17.6

No particular problem Table 6.2.2, Respondents' happiness

Quebec Quebec France France member non-member member non-member Yo (n = 100) % (n = 96) % (n = 102) % (n = 91) Really happy

62.0

70.8

19.6

26.4

Quite happy

34.0

27.1

73.5

62.6

3.0

2.1

4.9

9.9

Not very happy

perhaps be inferred from the account given of problems. Here about 37 per cent of the Quebec women reported that they had none in particular, as contrasted with about 1 5 per cent of the French. And while a

189 Private Politics

lack of free time was the most frequent problem for both members and non-members - for a fraction ranging from two-fifths to over half of respondents in each category - the French were twice as likely to report difficulties with shortage of money.75 Club membership may perhaps have had some small helpful impact: in France club members were slightly less likely to be among the small group citing isolation as a problem, and in Quebec the members of cercles were slightly more likely to report absence of problems than the Quebec non-members were. But among all the respondents the members of the gfs stood out as about twice as likely to find work too heavy or hard. In the end, answering the question in our survey, 91 per cent of the French respondents and 97 per cent of the Quebec women reported that they were very or somewhat happy. Almost 70 per cent of the Quebec respondents (though only Z3 per cent of the French) were prepared to say that they were very contented with their lives. The level of satisfaction was extraordinarily high, especially when we look at those who were "very happy": for the Quebec women, almost double the percentage for Canadian women in i^Si-Sz, and for the French women, half again as much above the figure for all French women in 1980-86 (15 per cent). The French have been conspicuous in surveys as one of the populations least satisfied over all with their lives, and according to Eurobarometer there were never more than 17 per cent of that nationality reporting themselves "very happy" in the whole period 1973-88.?6 There does not seem to be any association between happiness and feminism, we may note; that is, feminism does not seem to make our respondents either more or less happy, nor do either happiness or unhappiness seem to drive women towards feminism. But then, we know that most of our respondents are happy, and that only a fraction of them are feminists. What are we to make of all this? That these are contented conservatives (but our data show otherwise) or that the changes we can trace are, on the whole, welcomed? Certainly these women work too hard and have money troubles, but they seern to be pleased with their lives, including the specifically agricultural dimension. We do not have rebels here, but do we perhaps have some sort of model for acceptable change?

CHAPTER

SEVEN

Towards a New Analysis "He les gars!! Si on se cotisait pour leur acheter un lavevaisselle pour 1'annee prochaine?!" "Hey, guys, how about chipping in to buy them a dishwasher for next year?!"1

This study confirmed our belief that "politics" includes all forms of social power. Within that vast realm we identify three clusters of actions and beliefs as crucial for all individuals: those relating to their role as citizens, those relating to feminism, and those relating to the private sphere, including in the latter work-assignment and authority structures in the family or the family business as well as views about sexuality. We present in this book what we have been able to discover of these areas of life as they have been reported to us by a group of approximately four hundred women. This is their politics. We want to insist here on the importance of all three of the categories of politics. It seems to us that they delineate together, in three analytically separate but interactive sectors, the distinctive political makeup of any given group of people: what they think and do about the public world, what they think and do about the situation of women and about those who seek to change that situation, and, finally, what they think and do about the power relations of private life. The systemic structures of dominance and submission - gender, race, religion, nation, empire - are aggregates of the beliefs and acts of individuals, whether they know it or not. It is as politics, including the politics of feminism and the private, that people experience larger social structures. It is in politics that we can hope to trace change, and to cause it. Retrospectively, we can see that our study had three stages, in which we moved through different sorts of analyses with their implicit underlying theoretical models. Accordingly, this comcluding chapter starts with three sections presenting our successive approaches and our findings. We call the first part women and the pyramid, after the central metaphor of contemporary analysis of politics: the pyramid of citizen

191 Towards a New Analysis

activism. Here are to be found all the conventional electoral and partisan politics of mainstream political science. The second section, the political continuum, builds on an image suggested by Adrienne Rich. We use it to discuss feminist analyses and to assess our respondents' relationship to feminism and the women's movement. In a third section we consider another dimension, moving orthogonally, off at an angle on a route derived from the observed situation of farm women. We call it the politics of daily life. At that point we look at our subjects' everyday lives. Then, finally, we sketch some concluding thoughts, including our hopes and fears for our respondents, and for ourselves. WOMEN AND THE PYRAMID

Within the conventional understandings of the subject, it is not difficult to summarize our respondents' involvement with citizen politics, which was real if limited. By and large they accepted the traditional boundaries between public and private and saw themselves as on the private side. These women were not the decision-makers of the public sphere, nor, in most cases, did they personally aspire to be. They did not see themselves as particularly interested in politics. Indeed, they tended to define politics as something that did not require their participation (they did not include in it the voting they did so assiduously or the activities of the rural women's groups to which half of them belonged). Although many of them defined politics as mainly concerned with budgetary and management matters, they apparently did not consider relevant those skills acquired through their own involvement with farm accounting and management. At the same time, however, they did not feel that women either should not or could not move across the private/ public boundary. Politics should not be left to men, most of them said, and it would be appropriate for more women to participate even at the highest level of political life. A small but substantial minority insisted that they would prefer to be represented in Parliament by a woman, and we found others who combined a heightened sense of political efficacy with a desire for more women in municipal politics; among these latter groups we thought we could perhaps see future candidates and office-holders. Turning to our respondents' definitions of politics, we were able to show that their attitudes were in fact nuanced and not unperceptive in relation to conventional political participation and to women's role in it. And in demonstrating that fact, we were doing what the earliest feminist critics of political science and history had done: pointing out how scholars had misinterpreted, if not overlooked, women's relationship to politics.

192. Feminist Politics on the Farm

There have now been some twenty years of feminist analyses of politics, but these endeavours have left virtually untouched a stereotype of women that distances them from political considerations. In the 19905 the effects of feminist critiques seem little more than the inclusion of a few female notables in textbooks and occasional mention of the odd (picturesque) example of female pressure groups/ Women academics and a very few men now take seriously the new findings about women; the social science disciplines as a whole remain calmly uninterested. 3 In particular, attempts to reconceptualize women's political activity have been largely ineffectual. Most relevant to our present study are the persistent beliefs that women as such are politically inactive (apolitical, passive) and that women as such are conservative. The concept of the apolitical or passive woman is one we found inappropriate for our very energetic and independent-minded respondents. They were hardly people with a deep conviction of their "inferiority," as Maurice Duverger so early and influentially described women.4 If the evidence showed that they were not political agents, we thought, something must be wrong with the evidence, or at least with the theoretical underpinnings that validated that evidence. We came in fact to believe that the problem was less one of evidence than of conceptual framework - a conceptual framework accepted implicitly even by many of the feminist analysts who have attempted to reform political science. The image of women as politically inactive is squarely lodged within an understanding of politics that places leadership and office-holding at the centre - or the summit - of the analysis of politics, whether in government or in parties, pressure groups, and revolutionary activities. The implication: if more women are not leaders, it is because most women are not political in the way that men are. And if political change favourable to or supported by women has not occurred, well, it is precisely because of women's deficiencies. The approach is encapsulated in Lester Milbrath's famous "pyramid" of political activity, reaching from a wide base of apathetic uninvolvement through the easy minimal activity of voting to partisan participation and finally the "gladiatorial" acts of standing for and holding office.5 Underpinning the scale of activity is a related scale of attitudes deemed politically relevant: views about one's own competence and access to politics ("political efficacy"), interest in seeking office ("ambition"), and attention paid to politics. Whether the pyramid represents an adaptation to modern mass society of more ancient notions of participation and representation or is merely a theoretical justification of systems of domination in general and male domination in particular, it is how most political scientists understand the structure of

193 Towards a New Analysis

politics. We should note again that our respondents definitely did not share such a view of politics, which they saw as more widely inclusive because it was defined by the relatively non-competitive tasks of management. The original concept of the political pyramid had a certain simplicity that made it useful as a graphic image, a picture of observable behaviour in relation to political office. The model recorded the fact that, although in principle all could vote, few could be party officers and even fewer candidates. In this first formulation of the pyramid, no notion of movement was incorporated, although it came to be assumed. Rather, it looked as if, past the wide base of apathy, each layer of activity was cumulative on those before. Inclusion of the specific situation of women, once they had formal access to politics, did little to change the pyramid, since women were observably bunched at the lowest levels of the structure. Between the bottom and the higher levels of the pyramid passed, in effect, today's version of the line that separates public (= political, male) from private (= social, female). 6 The metaphor of the pyramid always encouraged the assumption that political inactivity was natural for the majority of the population; it now reinforced the assumption that absence from the higher and more competitive levels was particularly appropriate for women. This relatively simple model was soon altered from within mainstream political science, of course, to include a wider range of patterns of political activity such as voting, campaign activity, and "communal activity" among the "regular and legal channels through which citizens can express their preferences and put pressure on the government to comply with those preferences."7 These varying modes of behaviour are still defined, however, in relation to government and analysed, at least implicitly,, in terms of mobilization to what is thought of as more "political" action. Women once more appear to be less active in almost every mode of political participation that focuses on the government.8 The earliest feminist critics of political studies implicitly accepted the pyramid and its focus on office-holding, as they lamented the absence of women both from scholarly analysis and from leadership positions in politics and in political science. Without challenging the hierarchical nature of politics, a series of feminist empirical studies proceeded to fill in some of the gaps. They were on occasion able to show that women's actual participation at the citizen level was equal to or higher than men's, while in other cases the difference in participation was explicable by differences in women's resources such as education and income; men under similar circumstances would have been as inactive.9 Some of our own analysis followed this route, as we demonstrated that, given their education, age, and level of religious observance, our

194

Feminist Politics on the Farm

subjects were reasonably involved in the lower levels of conventional politics. We argued that they were in fact exceptionally active, since virtually all of them voted and followed political news on television. In addition, their affiliation with rural women's groups was accompanied by membership in an unusually large number of other organizations as well as willingness to contemplate action around issues such as the environment, child care, and contraception. Studies like ours that show the real, substantial dimensions of female political participation in conventional, electorally oriented political activities are heartening, for they make clear that women have no inherent lack of competence with regard to the entry-level activities of politics. Yet such studies implicitly accept the assumption that political actors can, if they wish, move through the hierarchy, advancing from mass to elite participation. Therefore, the non-advancement of women as a group is explained in terms of female motivation or socialization. Women are, alas, trained to be unambitious and unassertive, as well as liable to disabling role conflicts if they attempt to participate in a "male" activity such as politics.10 These are not political explanations. Their effect is to exclude the situation of women from the proper concerns of social science. As we look back at our own study, we can see ourselves following just such a pattern of analysis. For example, we explained our respondents' deficit of formal political discussion and persuasiveness by the argument that they thought it was impolite to attempt to change people's opinions. That is, we opted for an interpretation based in socialization or social-role requirements. Our own interpretation differed from that of the mainstream only in that we did not see reluctance to attempt conversion as a symptom of political incompetence or uninterest, nor as an indicator that women were unfitted to be leaders in social or political groups. However, we failed to look for the function of "politeness" in the power structures of families or of women's organizations or to examine the wider value of a less overtly conflictual version of politics and a style of leadership that would respect differences of opinion.11 If we had, we would have moved on to a sort of feminist analysis that challenges the conventional categories of political analysis. Changes in the nature of political science have not done much to change views of women-as-political. The movement to a conceptualization of politics as process rather than institutions ought to have facilitated the incorporation of women, as also should the expansion of the institutional contexts considered. This has not occurred, for even new areas of analysis continue to be assimilated into the familiar pyramid of political activism.12 The final result of the expansion of fields of study within political science has been, at best, the incorporation of women

195 Towards a New Analysis

and women's groups into minor and subsidiary areas themselves relatively unanalysed and seen as relatively uninfluential in relation to "real" politics and "real" political science.13 In line with the shift towards examination of processes and functions rather than just formal institutions, feminist analysts have attempted to demonstrate women's presence in the realms of activity newly recognized as political. Our own discussion of action ponctuelle fits here, as does our attention to activity within or growing from the cercles and the gfs; ; the analogy is pressure-group activity, looking at goals or issue areas expected to be particularly salient for women. And here we found our respondents to be joiners and potential activists, sometimes in ways we would not have predicted. In particular we were struck by the expressed willingness of observant Catholic rural women to participate in setting up a centre to provide information about contraception. But we are well aware that few scholars would consider this an interesting political involvement, if political at all. This is not to say that the study 'of politics has remained completely unchanged over time - just that the treatment of women and women's issues has. In the course of our study we encountered one striking example of the study of women in the political science of the present period, a good twenty years after the first rounds of feminist criticism. We have cited a study (by Mabileau and others) of municipal politics in Merignac, a suburb of Bordeaux, a study in which gender information was mentioned only briefly and dismissed as uninteresting. For the conference we organized in France in 1989, we asked the author of the relevant French section of the study, Professor Patrick Quantin, to prepare a secondary analysis focusing on the women. He reported that, as far as public activity was concerned, women were relatively underrepresented among those greatly involved in politics - but also, as is less often noted, among those completely uninvolved (although women were somewhat less active over all). More important, he also noted that he was using a study with variables that were not designed to test anything about women's participation. He concluded that the original study's conceptualization of politics - representational, bipolar, confrontational - excluded examination of a possible "political universe of women."14 Note that he would not even have carried out this second study or reached these interesting conclusions if we had not been in the exceptional situation of requesting the reanalysis. In general we felt that the categories and limiting assumptions of mainstream social science had defeated attempts to analyse women's distinctive relationship to politics. We were not satisfied with our own attempts to fit farm women into inhospitable categories that were bound to make them insignificant. So we turned to feminist approaches

196 Feminist Politics on the Farm that attempt to evade the traps embedded in the mainstream, however much the mainstream may have been renovated or extended. THE POLITICAL CONTINUUM

We did not draw on the very newest feminist approaches but on those that, in the seventies and eighties, attempted to move beyond the conventional definitions of politics: analyses of women's organizations, radical feminist arguments, and in particular Adrienne Rich's "lesbian continuum." 15 More recently, in the last decade, many feminist analysts have adopted a deconstructionist or postmodernist strategy that has helpfully directed attention to the variety within the broader category "women" and to the diversity of their experience. We sympathize with such an approach, given our dissatisfaction with the state of orthodox social sciences. In addition, we can see that our project is in a way justified by such analyses, for we deliberately selected for study a category of women - rural Catholic women - who have been ignored or denigrated even by feminist generalizations. But deconstruction also argues for abandoning the categories and patterns of conventional mainstream analysis, not in favour of a reformulation that would include women but for an indeterminacy that is virtually complete. Deconstruction obliterates everyone's political impact, but this is a form of equality that women should reject - a particularly unhelpful "equity" feminism that applies to the situation of women a series of theoretical approaches developed without concern for women.16 A potential postmodern valorization of women as the prototype "other" or more generally as outsiders, disrupters, has had little success in gaining the ear of non-feminist scholars, even those committed to the same analytical models.17 And such an approach seems to us unpromising as a way to understand the situation of women such as our respondents, conventional in attitudes and noncombative in style. Furthermore, we are convinced that gender is a real, a valuable category for analysis, so that postmodernism and deconstruction represent an alluring but risky side avenue in the attempt to analyse the role of women. To justify retaining gender as a central organizing principle, we rely on radical feminist arguments about the pervasiveness of gender. Humans first experience hierarchy in the home in the form of gender relations, when they learn in the family about male and female roles. Certainly the family farm, which combines home and workplace, can provide especially clear examples of male dominance. It can also, we believe, provide insight into more creative alternatives, and this is one of the main reasons we find the family farm important. Rural

197 Towards a New Analysis

women's organizations in turn are important because of the role - the political role - that they might play in farm women's politics. What we initially found most helpful in the newer feminist research on politics and history were the continuing attempts to redefine as political certain areas of life where women have been influential in producing social and political change. By the 19805 a few studies had argued that the women's movement itself was political.18 Certainly the more formal sectors of the movement could be seen, even by mainstream political analysts, as having developed deliberate goals like those of other political structures or social movements, while the production of state-level political change was among their aims. But feminist analysis attempted more. The goal was to expand politics past a focus on state structures in order to incorporate women's characteristic group and individual activity, even if such activity did not seem to resemble in goals or processes the usual components of politics. In the process it became important to redefine power from "control" to "empowerment, " from something used by a few to something possible for anyone.19 The intention was to show that women were in fact active "politically" in modes more promising for analysis and structural change than those recognized by even a renewed and expanded mainstream social science. Feminism could enter in as a liberatory ideology, and also, sometimes, one that could be derived from the practice of women's organized activism. Feminism might also become the essential element of a newly understood and reformulated, transformational politics. What we needed to do, suggested Kathleen Jones, was "to develop a new vocabulary of politics [to] express the specific and different ways in which women have wielded power, been in authority, practised citizenship, and understood freedom." We needed, she added, "a theory of political activity that could include women, 'female' virtues, and 'female' interests, without having to adhere to an ahistorical or essentialist reading of women's lives."20 The approach represented by Jones's comments drew on radical feminist insistence on the uniqueness and concrete reality of, in Teresa de Lauretis's words, "women's own experience of difference, of our difference from Woman and of the differences among women."11 Attempts at such an examination of women's politics include the many studies, prepared and used by a few historians and by even fewer political scientists, of women's organizations, including less obviously "political" groups such as the General Federation of Women's Clubs, the AFEAS, and the National and International Councils of Women.22 These studies gave women-only groups credit for developing and enhancing their members' sense of agency, as well as for producing or helping to produce significant social and polit-

198

Feminist Politics on the Farm

ical reforms. More precisely, such groups had helped women to develop political skills and an advanced, occasionally even radical gender or feminist consciousness. Such feminist analyses provided the logic of the main part of our account of the history of the Cercles de fermieres and the Groupements feminins, including our discussion of how the organizations and their programs had developed over time. Some dimensions of the experience of the cercles in particular could relatively easily be incorporated into political analysis: attention to education, to reproduction, to the environment, to working conditions on the farm and in the home. An expanded notion of politics was also the context of our discussion of our respondents' notions of feminism. We hoped to contribute to the project of reconceptualizing politics so as to include women's groups, not as part of an analysis of pressure groups or extra-parliamentary activity but as a distinctive, at least potentially feminist sector of political activity. Our expectation - our central hypothesis - was that those women who were members of traditional women's organizations would show a significantly higher level not just of conventional political behaviour but also of informal political activity, if still relatively mainstream, and of feminism. Our initial project was, after all, to demonstrate that rural women's organizations were effectively political and, furthermore, feminist (or, perhaps, the other way around: feminist and, furthermore, effectively political). It now seems clear to us that many academic discussions of autonomous women's groups, including our own very positive one, have retained quite conventional criteria for importance and for value in political activity. Even among feminists, "progressive" is likely to mean a rejection of any separate or different role for women, including any different criteria or goals.23 At the least, those groups organized on a basis of gender - even if gender combined with some other characteristic - tend to be evaluated in relation to conventional ideological distinctions. Even feminist analysts, less hostile to single-sex organizations, have sometimes been prepared to judge as conservative or dependent those women who gave priority to gender groupings of interests. For example, socialist feminists have historically been critical of "bourgeois" feminists on the basis of classifications of political action into left (good) and right (bad). 24 Historically, of course, such analyses would have labelled virtually all women conservative or reactionary, including a large number of self-identified feminists. In our own discussions of our respondents' left-right placement, definitions, and votes, we unwittingly shared such perspectives. We too felt the need to justify our respondents' reticence towards mainstream politics by showing that, to the extent that they participated, they did

199 Towards a New Analysis

so in a "progressive" fashion. We were accordingly pleased to be able to report that our respondents were no more likely to vote for parties of the right than the general population or the relevant rural populations.25 Our French respondents were, in fact, less likely to support the right-wing National Front than were French men. We emphasized that their self-placement corresponded to their votes in terms of left and right, but, by contrast, we did not devote much attention to the ideological coherence demonstrated by the complete correlation between their degree of religious observance and their disapproval of legalizing abortion. Instead, preoccupied with defending our respondents from accusations of conservatism on the basis of their organizational affiliations, we focused on the fact that their views on reproduction included an unexpected interest in making information about contraception available. In general, what we discovered among our respondents was that, although members of the cercles or the groupements feminins were not significantly more activist in conventional or unconventional politics or more feminist or more leftist than the non-members, they were not less so, in spite of demographic characteristics that would seem to predict it. In addition, we did find a group of women "leaders" - officers of our Quebec clubs - who had a somewhat greater involvement in some areas of citizen-level politics and seemed, on the whole, more feminist. We recognized them: we had met women like them as we set up our surveys. We thought that the leaders of the groupements were moving in this direction and would do more in the future. It was not possible to sort out causality, to see if more activist and feminist women gravitated towards the more active of the roles available to them outside of conventional politics, or if their greater involvement in the clubs was likely to make them more politically active or feminist. Either way, we were able finally, along with other feminist analysts, to disagree with a good deal of the generally hostile interpretation of traditional women's organizations. But it now seems to us that the best response to the charge that women are apolitical or conservative would be to reject explicitly the assumption that gender is intrinsically outdated or abhorrent as a basis of social and political organizing. In addition, it is important not to judge conservative the application to public life of the domestic goals of conciliation and well-being. Women are not alone in rejecting the ideological opposition of left to right as an ordering principle for political beliefs, nor are they alone in doubting the adequacy of the goals usually set for political action. But women will continue to be considered conservative until analysts accept the appropriateness of organizing women as such and the relevance of their specific, private goals to

200 Feminist Politics on the Farm

public, political decision-making. Here, "private" need not mean parochial or limited literally to the home but rather those policy areas that are linked to domestic activities and criteria. In this connection, we drew on feminist attempts at reconceptualization of politics when we highlighted the fact that our respondents, who said that they did not discuss "politics" often, were as likely as men to discuss the "major problems of society." These problems, we noted, included such traditional women's topics as the Third World and "rights of man." They also included "the situation of women." The feminist reworking of the notion of politics should include the insistence that all these topics are political, and not intrinsically conservative. Moving from organizational structures to ideologies, we insisted that politics must include all the possible varieties of feminism, including the belief systems of all possible varieties of the women's movement (which we still believe). Here we turned to the evidence provided by our respondents. They were feminist as frequently as the general population. But in their definitions of feminism we found two strands, both of which we wanted to include as political: an equity feminism seeking equal rights with men, and an insistence on autonomy and women's collective action that looked more like a social feminism derived from women's specificity. Equity feminism or groups animated by it can easily enough be added to the conventional analyses of politics, though in the sector the furthest away from formal power and from what is usually seen as political. Social feminism looks like at most a source of input for a government. Nevertheless, at this point in our analysis we wanted to add social feminism also to politics, though even further away from the top of the pyramid than equity feminism was. Then all feminists would be seen as politically involved - somewhere along the political continuum that we were articulating. Political participation could, we thought, be visualized as a sort of trajectory that had at one end more individual and less consciously political actions and beliefs (including everyday, unverbalized, unrecognized feminism and whatever was going on in women-only, traditional groups); next would come the beliefs and actions of those in the self-aware women's movement as well as the grass-roots activities of non-feminist action groups. By this point we would be well into the activities identified in connection with the pyramid, those beliefs and actions that were more conventionally power- and institution-related and more consciously public. That same political spectrum could also be read, going in the opposite direction, as extending from the accepted subject-matter of political science (centred on leaders, elections, and high policy) to private activities and beliefs usually seen as, at the most, influences on politics.

2.01 Towards a New Analysis

Feminism of all sorts would be found towards this more private end. The spectrum would not move but individuals would, working their way in and up from activities that previously had not been considered political. For women, these would include group activities informed by feminism. And feminism itself would be expanded to include all group activities with the goal or even the effect of increasing women's autonomy. Our analysis would thereby demolish the private-public discontinuity, we thought modestly, so that activities and attitudes formerly considered private - non-political - could be understood as political. Included among these would be feminist beliefs, even in the case of many women who do not call themselves feminists. With the resulting enlarged and reconceptualized range of possible politics, we would have a more useful frame of reference for the politics of farm women, and indeed for women in general. We therefore devoted considerable attention to demonstrating that our respondents were something that we could label "feminist" and therefore political. That is, we had previously shown them to be adequately political by mainstream criteria, and now we wanted to show that they and their organizations were feminist by feminist criteria. Most of our farm women did not consider themselves feminists. But they accepted many of feminism's goals. Furthermore, as usual, our respondents refused to fit into the expected categories: when asked explicitly, they showed considerable approval of the contemporary women's movement, even though it was likely to be characterized by extreme and aggressive tactics that they disapproved of. In addition, they were reluctant to say they would "never" consider joining such groups themselves. Even with regard to sexuality they were surprising. They persisted in disapproval of abortion, the issue often used as a litmus test for feminism. As a group they were what is usually defined as restrictive in sexual terms. But they rejected any double standard of sexual behaviour, so that their condemnation of adultery was imposed equally on husbands and wives and their preference for pre-marital chastity on both sons and daughters. Our respondents' analytic acceptance of boundaries between themselves and "feminists" thus accompanied beliefs that ignored that separation. Their responses contributed to fracturing even the categories of equity and social feminism and also pretty well destroyed any clear image of the feminism of the groups to which they belonged. How could we then call these women or their groups feminist, or, indeed, fit them into any range of action seen as reaching towards an impact on state action? On the basis of such responses we suggested some rethinking of what constitutes feminism, and we still find these suggestions useful. Feminism is a complex and variable phenomenon, and no single set of

2,oz

Feminist Politics on the Farm

beliefs should be used to define it. Equality but also self-assertion and difference; approval of the women's movement but also criticism of it and reluctance to join it; use of contraception but rejection of abortion; hostility to adultery but rejection of double standards of sexuality these added up to a reasonably coherent bundle of beliefs that could encompass women who called themselves feminists as well as ones who did not. But we were increasingly uncertain that we could tack it on to the end of something we thought of as a political continuum. We also doubted more and more whether it made sense to fit the cercles and the gfs on to a political continuum. We had liked the concept of the political continuum; now we came to feel it was less useful than we had hoped. Once again, our dissatisfaction can, we think, be traced to the analytic framework that we had adopted. As we have noted, the concept of the political continuum was influenced by Adrienne Rich's "lesbian continuum"; we believe that it suffered from some of the same problems as its model. Rich attempted to incorporate all women, consciously lesbian or not, into a possible range of women-centred activities that would implicitly reject and thereby ultimately destabilize and modify heterosexism and, eventually, patriarchy and hierarchy themselves. Every woman, she thought, had some special relationship with another woman, whether a mother, another female relative, or a female friend; all had at some time in their lives interacted lovingly with other women in preference to men.26 The lesbian continuum would therefore usefully include women who for historical or social reasons did not have the identity of "lesbian" available to them. It would also include many women who would reject the term today, as well as women with very few connections with other women. Resistance to heterosexism would similarly, by implication, include many heterosexual women, even ones who were complacently so. Rich was criticized for diminishing the specificity of lesbianism as a stated, assumed social identity and sexual orientation that was sometimes asserted against great pressure and at considerable personal cost. In much the same way we came to doubt whether it was appropriate for us to treat as "feminist" the beliefs of those of our respondents who deliberately wished to dissociate themselves from the ideology. Were we not in the process devaluing the others who were ready to accept an unpopular name, one likely to provoke hostility or even domestic strife? Nor did we want to extend "political" so far as to diminish the significance of what little had been done by women as part of the commonly recognized political system.27 Even our expanded continuum seemed likely to discredit the great social welfare and suffrage campaigns of the nineteenth century. Or, more troubling still, conventional political participation might be reduced to co-optation.28

2.03

Towards a New Analysis

Most importantly, we came to feel that feminism could not simply be added on to the existing views of politics, even if those latter were redefined in a more fluid mode. Feminism, we became convinced, disrupts rather than extends politics because of its implications about the inseparability of public and private life, home and work. Even equity feminism implies a profound change in public and therefore in private life, while social feminism is explicit about the major transformations it requires. In fact, incorporation of women's groups into the analytic model of the pyramid now seems to us questionable; gender is different from other bases of political organizing. The pyramid cannot be rescued by transforming it into a horizontal spectrum - a continuum that would make possible the inclusion of feminism and of genderbased organizations. What we were calling the political continuum was, in effect, part of a widespread attempt, both feminist and non-feminist, to include in "politics" those formerly seen as generally powerless. The first feminist critics had demonstrated the presence of women along the various routes towards the political summit at the top of the pyramid and pointed out where and why those routes were, in general, less accessible to women than to men. What their more radical feminist successors did was to point out new routes that women had in fact found and that should have been allowed for in the delineation of varieties of political participation. To make this adjustment, they had to redefine power, what was at the top of the pyramid, the top of the greasy pole, the goal of the original formulation. In the meantime, in mainstream but innovative studies focusing on the more widely distributed sorts of citizen action, researchers such as those working with Sidney Verba and Samuel Barnes had reshaped their own inquiries in terms of the weaker concept of "influence," something found at the levels short of the very top of the pyramid. But any imaginable pyramid - or political continuum - still ended, at its top or its end, with participation in or influence on government. And such analyses also, like their predecessors, made assumptions about sequence and cumulation of involvement. Such was the logic of our original plans for this study. We expected group membership to produce individual and group empowerment in which feminism was a key element. The underlying assumption of both the political continuum and our study, as originally formulated, was thus the existence of a direct link, both theoretical and practical, between autonomous women's groups and "normal" as well as feminist versions of politics. We now think this connection, though often real and powerful, is by no means omnipresent. Nor, we think, is that link the crucial element in the processes of social change that are feminism's project and also ours.

2.04

Feminist Politics on the Farm

Our concept of the political continuum was based in part on the history of women's organizations as it has been revealed in recent research. Some women's organizations or their members had over time moved from shared activities derived from their situation to an awareness of gender inequality and of gender-based absence of political impact, then to a search for a political role and an increasing degree of involvement in whatever normal politics were available. In periods and places when women were legally and socially barred from electoral politics, access to that politics often became a goal itself. Our research project was, among other things, looking in the context of women's organizations for feminist consciousness as a route to political consciousness and political action. Such was the impact historically of the American League of Women Voters and of Canadian groups including the National Council of Women and the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). Such we expected to be the impact of the Cercles de fermieres and the Groupements feminins. It would have been shown by our group members being more feminist and more politically active than the comparable non-members. Which they were not. But it is not at all clear that such a trajectory from activism in women's groups to activism in mainstream politics was an appropriate model for the groups we were studying. Although early women's groups demonstrably generated a political role for women, politicizing many individual women in the process, these groups did not initially have such a goal. Nor did they, by and large, have the ambition to include all women as members. The WCTU was Christian; the Councils of Women were not just national but nationalist, and so on. In practice, most suffrage groups defined themselves by class, racial, ethnic, occupational, or geographical identity, and these subdivisions reflected the different purposes for which different sorts of women would use the vote. More recently, the goals of the numerous women's liberation movements have also reflected specific activists' needs, whether related to reproduction, to violence against women, or to the constraints of bourgeois socialization into sex roles. The rest of the historical women's movement had a variety of limited goals related to the identity of the many only intermittently co-operative groups that were its components.29 Specifically, both Quebec and France have historically had a disparate, fissiparous version of women's activism. The local, provincial, and national councils of women characteristic of the Canadian women's movements were and are loose coalitions of heterogeneous members; Quebec's Federation des femmes du Quebec and the Canadian National Action Committee on the Status of Women, the contemporary federations, are very similar to their predecessors.30 In every era a myriad

205

Towards a New Analysis

of both small and large Canadian women's groups, including the Cercles de fermieres, have stayed relatively aloof from all attempts to create a monolithic women's movement or one with an explicitly political purpose. As for France, as Andree Michel has noted, only briefly did a national council of women operate as an effective national coordinating structure.31 In 1989, at the time of our study, contact among French women's groups - let alone co-operation - was at so low a level that the Secretaire d'etat pour le statut de la femme, who attended our Bordeaux conference, was unaware of the existence of any rural women's organizations whatsoever. How, in fact, should we evaluate the goals of an organization initially defined in terms of a group of women characterized not just by gender by also by some other dimension such as race or economic position or possibly sexual orientation? It does not seem reasonable to expect poor women or lesbian women or women of a racial minority to do more than defend their own interests when they come to organize for group action. And perhaps we should be similarly tolerant of other women's organizations even when they have relatively more resources, given the disadvantages inherent in organizing around gender issues. The cercles and the gfs represent a sort of women's organization different from the coalitions of the suffragists or the women's liberation movements. They are also more typical as examples of those groups organized specifically for and usually by a self-defined subcategory of women. Although the initial impetus for creating farm women's clubs certainly came from the state, farm women in both Quebec and the Gironde were convinced of the reality and significance of their situation. They co-operated enthusiastically and then, in many cases, took the initiative away from their official sponsors. In our assumption that farm women's organizations were like other women's organizations, we tended to downplay any specific character they might have because of their history, their farm connection, or their members' conception of farm life. Nor did we pose questions that might have tapped such specific imagery or goals. Another consideration frequently overlooked, including by ourselves, is historical context as it relates to women's access to politics. Women's political involvement or uninvolvement has a specific meaning today in those modernized societies where women have formal political rights and a degree of economic autonomy. Passivity and conservatism mean something different about goals and organizational context now from what they meant in times when women's entitlement even to public speaking or the vote was contested. Our project was, to a large extent, historical. We chose our respondents because they were like women of the past, and we chose their organizations because they

206

Feminist Politics on the Farm

also seemed to represent a type of women's group that had existed in the past as well as in the present. We have demonstrated, we think, the energy and vitality of women who could be considered traditional in interests and characteristics. But they are traditional in the context of what are now decidedly untraditional societies, and ones in which the practice and rhetoric of feminism are widely accepted. In periods or places where women are socially and legally constrained from conventional political participation, gender consciousness plus awareness of shared needs may motivate the search for political tools, including legitimation of women's role in conventional politics. This is why, in a way that we are often critical of today, suffrage sometimes became both the symbol and a central goal of political efforts of women's groups initially organized for quite different purposes. However, even in the places where women activists were most obsessed by that goal (which did not include France or Quebec), many women's groups continued to pursue other goals. In the period and places of our study, women had legal access to all elements of politics, and public opinion no longer barred them from attempting to use these tools.32- Under such conditions, members of women's organizations may come to believe that government is the proper agency to achieve group goals, or that mainstream political participation is the appropriate mechanism. But they also may not. And they may or may not develop that wider gender consciousness that is seen as the basis of feminism. In either case, however, it may still make sense to think of their groups and their group involvement as "political." Only: political in what sense? The relationship to politics of women's groups is a difficult one both theoretically and practically. It is virtually impossible for the issue-oriented politics of women's groups to enter the mainstream, for their goals are likely to be ones that mainstream electoral politics cannot comfortably handle. Political parties often seem to make deliberate efforts not to be distinguishable in terms of gender-linked issues such as abortion and child-care programs. Women activists would not move away from those issues even if they became more involved in conventional political activities, and it seems likely they might be hesitant to do that - to join, for example, a political party that would disregard their ideology, their issue concerns, and their experience.33 They might even, becoming more feminist, become convinced that systemic change was necessary, extending even to the abolition of hierarchies such as mainstream politics most fully embodies. That is, to the extent that such groups have been successful at what ought to be the startingpoints of the feminist-inspired political continuum - successful in producing attitudinal change in themselves and in a broader public - more conventional political methods might seem less attractive.34

^OJ

Towards a New Analysis

It is worth looking at the vote at this point - the one form of citizen activity that women consistently carry on, at which they even outperform men, and to which our respondents are so committed. The vote is the main, if somewhat limited instrument of conventional citizen influence. But the continuity from this form of citizen influence to the others is not as obvious as the designers of the political pyramid assumed, or as our suggested political continuum implied. If a key value is lack of conflict, if a key goal is peace - as is so often the case for women's organizations - then voting is acceptable, and so is public example or education, but the incentive to get into the "arena" is slight. To what extent does it make sense to learn to "fight" for peace? The intended value-loading of "gladiatorial" seems obvious: action versus passivity, agency versus uninvolvement. Yet the metaphor carries more baggage. The gladiators were slaves or condemned criminals forced into a lifeand-death conflict that entertained the masses and served the political ends of the elite. It is the classic model of hegemony and displacement, the most hateful version of the circus. There are no mixed-motive games or consensus processes down there on the bloody sand. Nor is it there that new social or political procedures will be found. Perhaps, after all, there is some logic in not including voting in cumulative measures of political activity or potential leadership, the omission that we criticized earlier. The vote has symbolic loading as an indicator of entitlement to citizenship. A transformational feminist politics might value the vote accordingly, but be concerned mainly with attitude change.35 Similarly, feminism has a drastic discontinuity with mainstream politics. Furthermore, even if it was not feminist, a groupbased women's politics might also be sceptical about action through the channels of regular politics, given the absence - the illegitimacy? there of goals based on women's distinctive preferences. How then can we test for the existence of possible group goals or consequences that are not oriented towards active participation in mainstream politics and also not feminist? And should we call them "political"? The survey instruments on which we based our study were not looking for idiosyncratic patterns of women's organizations' politics, and neither, really, were we. The present discussion suggests that we should have been asking more directly about the goals and motivations of the organizations and of those participating, and should also have tried to evaluate in more detail the views that our respondents had about politics, both conventional and non-conventional. In this connection, the most useful thing we did was to gather definitions of politics and feminism. These conveyed our respondents' feeling of remoteness from what they identified as conventional politics and feminism, as well as their distaste for protest techniques that they saw

2.o8

Feminist Politics on the Farm

as extreme. But these inquiries left us without information about the possible impact of their own, alternative (political) involvement: the organizations to which they belonged. Having dropped the notion of the continuum (or the modified pyramid), we now had to examine these organizations for something other than general politicization or linkage into either feminist or mainstream politics. The covert impact of the farm women's organizations could not have been tracked by questions from the models we used, for such groups - and such impact - are remote from both conventional politics and feminism. Yet the groups might, in our view, still be political, even if not placeable in relation to any pyramid or continuum. After all, our regression analyses had shown that membership in either a cercle or a gf was significantly related to task assignment on the farm even though it was not related to conventional measures of political involvement or of feminism. For the French, though not the Quebec respondents, club membership was also significantly connected with views about partisanship, political efficacy, and adultery. Better questions might have told us more. As a result of this study we came to think of political change as something everyday, regular, unrevolutionary and cumulative. Implied was an idea we liked: a politics that creates change unwittingly. The politics of women's organizations - in the frequent cases when the organizations are particularistic and specific in goals - fitted into such a concept of change. Their small community goals, their insistence on their own search for them, the accompanying changes in the lives of members - these were political, but they were not political in a way that fitted into a continuum (where our respondents' lack of clear-cut feminism bounced them off the end), let alone a pyramid (where our respondents tended to be pushed down among the so-called apathetic). We needed a new model or at least a new metaphor for analysing political change. With the study we present here we have, we think, begun to feel our way to another approach. We now turn to that, looking first at the private and organizational politics of our respondents, then at the relevance of our findings - and interpretation - for the wider situation of women. THE POLITICS OF DAILY LIFE

For our last chapter our only sources of comparison were studies of farm women's lives that, on the whole, did not see the situation as political. They provided a guide to charting the realities of private politics for our respondents but were inadequate for a discussion of the changing structures of domestic power that we have called private politics. Nor were we able to find many political analyses of rural women's

zo9 Towards a New Analysis groups. For theoretical assistance we turned to recent studies of "micronegotiations" at the fringes of politics, the actions typical of marginalized groups who have only limited ranges of legitimate disagreement or opposition possible.36 But we found, finally, that we needed to move to an analysis that avoided assumptions about conscious political or feminist agency. The concept of micronegotiation grows from studies of peasant resistance, where non-co-operation and other relatively covert acts increase the political potential of materially disadvantaged protesters.37 Mansbridge has used it persuasively to describe the feminist initiatives of the women she interviewed, as they refused to serve their menfolk or to follow cultural imperatives for docility. Yet there is an important distinction to be made between intentional individual resistance, however masked and subdued, and non-targeted cumulative change in private activities. Two short stories can present the difference; one is a classic genre tale, the other a recent science fantasy story. In "The Revolt of 'Mother' " an elderly farm wife, disappointed by endless postponement of the construction of an adequate house, moves the household into what her husband intended as a second barn. With some astonishment, she and her family register that she has indeed committed an act of "revolt." By contrast, in "The Byrds" a grandmother and then many others unexpectedly begin to act like birds, stripping off their clothes, painting their skin in feather colours, and eventually departing in migration (this is possible because they live in a future society where each person has an individual jet-propulsion unit). Their flight provides an example of action done for its own sake that nevertheless adds up to a substantial change in lives and relationships: after it, granny and her companions are gone.38 Our respondents, of course, are not much more likely to move to the barn than to fly; the very unlikelihood explains some of the enduring appeal of the older story, which one of us remembers reading in school some fifty years ago. Our study was in any case unlikely to catch any deliberate resistance among our respondents. In the last section of our study we looked at actions and beliefs even less self-aware than the retreat to the cowshed, definitely less dramatic than the departure of the "byrds." Yet in its small way "private politics" was fraught with implications for women's lives. We do not want to exaggerate the importance of women's actions and beliefs, whether in the home or in groups. We have been chary of talking about "resistance" or "revolutionary" impact. The notion of resistance, developed to describe the unarticulated non-co-operation of groups such as peasants facing all-powerful landlords, has been expanded in illuminating ways, and it is tempting to apply it to the situa-

2.10

Feminist Politics on the Farm

tion of women. Yet "the infrapolitics of subordinate groups" is seen as the preliminary stage to an all-out revolt and step-level systems change. Such a cathartic, apocalyptic model does not fit the deep interdependence in gender terms of women's everyday life.39 For our study we needed something more domestic, more gradual, more cumulative: we did not want to adopt yet another approach that undercut our analysis. We found what we required, by inference, in the empirical research on women's activism outside of feminism and politics. Political implications have been attributed to an extraordinary range of women's organized and unorganized activities, from Japanese "office ladies" who refuse to pour tea, through popular dance and household restructuring to forms of explicit self-assertion including marriage rejection or public disclosure of lesbianism.40 It is obvious that many of these actions are related to matters of individual or personal choice. The "political" thus becomes something far less structured and less organizationally oriented than is usual. At issue is what a person does rather than how she identifies herself or her actions, what impact an organization has rather than what its goals or analyses are. Such a perspective helpfully opens up for discussion the whole range of domestic activities that constitute so much of women's characteristic lives. In our study of rural women's groups and, more broadly, rural women, a focus on actions and impact would mean that the troubled question of self-identification could be put aside. Political activists would be those who carried on political activities, and feminists would be people who acted or thought like feminists, whatever they called themselves. Such an emphasis on consequences could undercut the elitist emphasis on explicit theorizing that is so common in feminist analysis. And such an approach would justify the analyses we presented in our chapter about private politics. It is in the cumulation of small change that we see the most important dimension of the political impact - the politics - of our respondents and of their rural organizations. There is a process of political change in private decisions and actions that are even less self-aware than joining clubs or participating in their activities. That is, private life is political in that it often keeps women out of formal or mainstream politics, and it also, historically, has supported male domination. However, it is also in private life that we find the (political) possibility of changing the basic structures of both private and, therefore, public life. And these bundles of functions or aspects of private life should be considered political. We can, we think, also see the farm women's organizations playing a role. Radical feminists still sometimes follow a logic that calls heterosexuality "sleeping with the enemy" and implies a strategy of (lesbian) sep-

2ii Towards a New Analysis aratism. We would like to adopt and adapt that image, to stress instead that women like our subjects sleep with their husbands who are also their employers - let down their guard, in one meaning of the term; have sex and make children in another. They regularly do it with, along with, someone who cannot therefore be "the enemy."41 The home or the family farm are, to say the least, incongruous as a setting for a gladiatorial model of social change. Yet the potential impact of changes within the home or the family farm seems to us very substantial. And we thought also that rural women's organizations might serve a role in promoting these changes as a result of both formal policy goals and more informal processes. A number of specific goals have been suggested as appropriate politics for farm women, issues identified as relevant to the situation of women on family farms and therefore the proper task of rural women's organizations. Particularly in France, researchers have focused on the quest for a legal status of farm women as agricultrice, with its implications about farm ownership and legal benefits. Related are certain gender-specific sorts of social-service entitlement such as maternity leave or replacement, though in a form adapted to rural contexts. The new farm women's groups such as Canada's Concerned Farm Women tend to focus on the condition of the family farm as a key factor in the situation of farm women.42 French researchers who have studied the involvement of women in farm protests have also noted in passing that there are areas and modes of production that might offer more straightforward explanations for women's activism.43 We did not find any evidence that legal status was a central concern for our respondents. Nor, as we discuss below, does this issue seem to us a useful rallying point for farm women or, by analogy, other women. We did find some indirect evidence of such relatively conventional political goals related to women in a farm situation. Programs and resolutions in the cercles and gfs showed concern for legal status even if our individual respondents did not. In our survey rather more women than we expected would like to be paid for their labour on the farm, and some of these cited entitlement to pensions as a reason. It seems likely that farm women's organizations might, in some diffuse fashion, increase women's awareness of such problems, and to some extent politicize them as a result. Such concerns would also have some resonance for other women involved in family businesses. More importantly, we thought that there might be a group of farm women's problems with wider relevance for women as a whole - issues related to the structure of power in the farm enterprise. This is a structure of power that is specific because it represents a double potential for male dominance, with respect to both agricultural work and the farm family, but it is also a structure that is present in all families. At issue

2iz

Feminist Politics on the Farm

was the allocation of tasks and responsibilities in a married couple, including decision-making and actual work as well as sexual entitlements and obligations. At the least, we expected that the club members would talk together about these topics, and how could that be without impact? One question that we asked seemed likely to produce information about the potential significance of rural women's organizations: why our respondents joined the clubs we looked at. This open-ended question produced two clusters of answers. First were the ones we had looked for, about what led the women to come to the clubs in the first place; we had been curious about the extent to which these were family or friendship connections, or were more impersonal (the former was more common). Other explanations took the more instrumental form of goals, which turned out to be basically sociability and professional advancement or professionalization. Our historical research showed that the explanations proffered continue a long tradition of activities that involve spending social time with other farm women as well as learning new skills together. In the clubs the mix of professional and more domestic concerns has shifted over time. Judging by federation 12,, the cercles are increasingly interested in social topics related to domestic situations and professional ones directed at rural rather than agricultural life, while in France even the most professionally oriented gf, Lussac's, is directing its programming towards a more domestic agenda. Both sorts of activities could have an impact on the power relations of men and women on family farms. The mix matters; all parts of the mix matter; the difference of the parts of the mix matter. And the differences between men and women, and between different sorts of work matter. In our data we found an ideology of equality that extended from work to sexuality without denying differences between men and women and differences in activities carried on. Here we think there is some relationship to the nature of the family farm.44 As well, we can infer some linkage to the organizations we examined. The groups' hope of modernizing the situation and professionalizing the role of farm women, the individuals' desire for a functionally divided but effective equality: these private and personal goals seem related. Other women's groups may well have similar implicit projects, however little they articulate them: shared desire to improve their own particular conditions or situation, combined with the wish for a personal, non-separatist autonomy. Such purposes are, in our view, political and far from conservative. They have little congruence with the goals of conventionally understood feminist organizations, less still with those of political parties or pressure groups.45 The private sphere is intensely political because of its implications for the central political notions of hierarchy and authority, even when

zi3 Towards a New Analysis it is not linked in the least to public-sphere structures. There are forms of politics, including organizational politics, that cannot be incorporated into any of the extant models of politics, including feminist ones. They are processes that may, intermittently, focus towards state policy, but they will only occasionally produce individuals with "political" ambitions and commitments as such or feminist identification. They may, however, help to produce individuals whose actions and attitudes constitute major political change. We see the clearest example of our respondents' political views and practices in what we have been able to find out about their relation to work on the farm. As a group they presented a predictably though not extremely stereotyped view of how work ought to be allocated. Yet a surprisingly large number volunteered that such division was inappropriate. Furthermore, when we looked at what they would prefer for themselves and their partners and also at what they in fact did, we found the expected categories fractured. Reports of co-operative decision structure and task allocation on the basis of women's preferences and characteristics supported the high level of agreement that they were working on the farm with their husbands. Obviously, there was a certain amount of wishful thinking in our respondents' descriptions of conditions on the family farm, and we may well wonder that they were, as a group, so remarkably contented. Yet to the extent that male-female relationships were, over all, really organized on this co-operative model in relation to both work and family life, it would surely represent a significant shift in gender relations, in human relations as we know them. No one should, we think, deny that such a shift would be political - on the farm and elsewhere. The family farm does not look like a good example, for it may be on the way to extinction. In addition, there are serious problems related more specifically to the situation of the farm wife. Yet we think we can make some helpful comments about the more general situation of women on the basis of what we have found out about our respondents. We shall look first at what our study tells us in specific terms about working wives on family farms, women like our respondents. We can then, at last, look at wider implications, the concerns that justify attention to what is happening to that small and diminishing group of women, married Catholic francophone women who live on family farms. CONCLUDING

THOUGHTS

Let us begin at the most specific level possible. In effect, the cercles and the groupements represented attempts to deal with women's relationship to the productive work of the family farm. The issue was not what

2i4 Feminist Politics on the Farm they or their husbands did, but what it meant. We think of the cercles' early efforts to professionalize the role of fermiere. For them this meant professionalizing women's tasks. There does not seem to have been any desire for women to take over men's tasks. The gfs in their time do something similar yet different. Apparently unconcerned with professional titles, they concentrate instead on training that will give an edge of competence to such female tasks as accounting. However, they are also interested in acquisition of skills in the more specialized and demanding areas of farm management, such as pruning the vines. They are professionalizing not so much women's work as women themselves, seeking the skills that will increase their claim to participate as equals. This is not to say that, in most cases, farm women become or wish to become full-time farmers as they see their husbands being. They merely want to be full participants in the farm enterprise on the agricultural as well as the domestic side. Secondary, unskilled, contingent involvement in the more masculine areas of the farm is not enough of a basis to a claim not so much for equality as for a full share in decisions and benefits. As our own data indicate, most women on working farms do not in fact spend a full working week on farm work (that is, the minimum forty hours per week of the full-time worker). By contrast, most of their husbands do work full time for the farm. Certainly the women spend a great deal of time at farm work, and it is time made the more laborious by their other responsibilities. But even when it matches or exceeds that formal measure of full-time work, agricultural labour is not these women's central "job" with respect to either time or primacy. Instead, in their very long working week and year what most of these women work at full time is housework and child care. Even those few farm wives who, across seasons, work what ought to be a full working week on the farm, or in some other workplace, also perform substantially more housework, including child care, than their husbands do. In this respect they are like most women we know of. Even more important, most women have central responsibility for the household whether or not they share responsibility for the farm, another home business, or a major income source outside the family. Women on the family farm cannot therefore be agricultrices in the same sense as their husbands are agriculteurs. In fact, they are more, for their roles in domestic work and domestic decision-making are crucial to the agricultural enterprise. The recommendation, implicit in the French literature, to treat women's farm work as practically and juridically equivalent to men's seems to us inadequate.46 Those analyses of farm wives that define them primarily as workers, on the family farm and elsewhere, tend to

2.15 Towards a New Analysis end up with a focus on women's legal status. This is the option supported by many farm women's groups and also by many of those who have studied the situation of farm women.47 Such an analysis corresponds to a formula for incorporating farm women's private politics into "normal" agricultural or labour politics. We are reminded of how suffrage has become conceptualized as a recognition of women's equality. The arguments about farm women's legal status are sustained by a familiar equity-feminist ideology of justice, entitlement, and inclusion in the mainstream. The continuum, if not the pyramid, underlies such analyses and recommendations. We want something better, and so do our respondents.48 We wonder: is there some way of basing social entitlement on the combination of domestic and agricultural labours, on what is always called a family farm? Such a model would in principle also fit the situation of other women working in other family businesses - and also all those other women who are both wives and (paid) workers, as well as that diminishing group whose role as full-time homemakers is essential to the family as social and economic enterprise. Unfortunately, such a theoretically satisfying solution is probably fantasy as long as men remain as uncommitted to domestic responsibility as our data indicate. Pragmatically, we could better try to deal with the vexed issue of social benefits by means of pensions, insurance plans, and so on that are not linked to work. In any case, specific solutions to the problems of farm women are less to the point than the wider theoretical consequences of the imbrication of productive and reproductive work on the family farm. What can we find among our respondents to suggest any movement towards wider, more significant change? Here we turn back to look once again at the question posed about role equity. We have suggested that our respondents' apparent approval of similarity of roles masks a more complex understanding: approval of non-exclusivity of activities but also of continuing differentiation on condition that there be equivalent assessment or valuing of performance. The problem is to valorize the peculiar combination of tasks that women end up with. Farm life may be an example of what happens when women in practice perform virtually all tasks, though not all at the same time and all to an equal degree. Social, economic, and biological constraints (strength, child-bearing) direct them towards domestic activities and make it preferable for men to carry out the non-domestic ones. A non-trivial number of women nevertheless, frequently, and in some cases regularly and even authoritatively, take part in the male tasks, even those most clearly perceived as such, even those where considerations of strength and availability might be expected to have major impact. Under such circumstances -

zi6 Feminist Politics on the Farm

of predominant but unstable and incomplete segregation and assignment of responsibility - what our respondents seem to want is for task allocations to be made collegially, including consideration of women's own abilities and tastes. What they apparently find lacking is recognition, both social and economic, that both their agricultural and their domestic activities are essential to the family farm as an enterprise. This is, we think, the content of the specific goals of the women who are married to family farms. Such recognition - such a structure of making decisions and assigning tasks co-operatively - would disrupt the whole established, historical system of power in the farm family. Autonomy versus heteronomy once again: who is in control, and on what does this control depend? For our respondents, the family farm provides an ideology of men and women working together with differentiation of activities but a varying differentiation, and (in principle) one becoming more flexible over time. The goal is not separate but equal, but rather different and equal because not separate. In the more common situation where productive and reproductive workplaces are separate physically, with one spouse regularly receiving cash recompense and the other not, the interpenetration of spheres is less obvious. But even in such cases public and private are linked by the way in which women carry on both sorts of activities, and by the way in which the shared enterprise of the family depends on reproductive as well as productive labour. They do sleep together. All of which is a long way from the image of resistance and (implicitly) conflict that might seem to come from seeing the family farm as the possible location of major changes in gender relations. But we think it is a mistake to model male-female relations on anti-colonial or industrial (class) conflict. The agricultural enterprise as site of gender domination has been resisted most effectively by women's departure. It is neither participation in the paid labour force off the farm nor monetizing and labelling their agricultural tasks that would help those who remain. Rather it is recognition by husbands, professional associations, and the state of the essential and complex role they play, with domestic responsibilities essentially theirs along with the actual performance of the necessary related tasks - it being recognized at the same time that the enterprise depends on them for the performance of a substantial amount of farm work. Farm women, so enthusiastic about their way of life (remember how contented a group our respondents were over all), are not interested in revolution. They have and use already the rhetoric of a more egalitarian and less exploitative situation: complementarity of equally valued roles, flexibility of task assignment and more so of performance, decisions made co-operatively in terms of abilities and preferences of all workers, by implication no hierarchy based on gender.

2.17 Towards a New Analysis But how is this situation to move from partial reality and large potential to a wider existence? We take the data we have described as evidence that, through the practices of the family farm, change is gradually occurring there. This is aggregate change, unconscious and cumulative, resulting from the practical consequences of shared labour in an environment where domestic and public are inextricable. It has happened among women whose ideology is conventional and whose gender or feminist consciousness is not particularly high, but women who nevertheless cannot easily be dismissed as apolitical or conservative. We pin our wider hopes for all women on their combination of domestic and non-domestic labour in all family contexts, their wish to reconcile these, their increasing potential to, like farm women, rethink or in practice reject the older models of family. As Mansbridge has suggested - and our work confirms - the twinned feminist discourses of equality and self-assertion are now part of the environment of women's lives. If Sapiro and Conover's survey respondents were unlikely to feel that women were oppressed in the home, it may in part have been because such change is already occurring. Or, more realistically, because such change can occur, and the household and its dynamics are intrinsic parts of the process. Dorinne Kondo makes a subtle argument on the uses of domestic ideology as a complex and changing instrument of what she calls "crafting selves." In her anthropological study of small business in a working-class section of Tokyo, she focuses on the ironies of the use of the concept of uchi no kaisa, the company as family, a concept creating "multiplicity, contradictions, and tension."49 The small factories that Kondo describes were still family businesses, linked into household practices and, more important, a whole rhetoric of family-like obligations. The resemblance to the family farm is obvious, even though her subjects were employees who were not literally members of the family.50 As in agriculture, her women subjects were thought of as parttime but necessary workers who did not share the status or the belief systems of the men who were the principal, full-time workers in the enterprise that was both business and life-space. The parallel is not exact, of course, because our respondents, who were not employees, had a commitment to the family farm at least equal to that of their spouses. In addition, their potential impact on the structure of work and particularly of decision-making and task allocation was greater than that possible for Kondo's subjects, given the actual correspondence of family and workplace on the farm. Kondo, who thinks that her subjects had a profound effect on their workplace, warns against the romanticism of uncritical accounts of

z 18 Feminist Politics on the Farm

women's "resistance" to hegemony: "By performing their gendered identities on the shop floor [or in the home] the women marginalize themselves, on the one hand, and on the other hand strongly assert themselves, making themselves indispensable." Mansbridge, reflecting on interviews with welfare mothers in Chicago, makes some similarly perceptive remarks about how women "believe actively in some of the values that justify our subordination, but can incrementally change some of those beliefs and act on those changes."51 Kondo concludes: "Because my co-workers, like all of us, must use the culturally available tools at their disposal, perhaps they - and we - will never be able completely to 'dismantle the master's house.' But resistance need not be seen as radical rupture or apocalyptic change in order to be effective."52 Here, of course, context is likely to be crucially important, and we do not wish to overextend the comparison between women's lives in rural France and Quebec and urban Japan, let alone the situation of Mansbridge's welfare mothers in Chicago. Yet we can see similarities in the way in which world and national economic as well as political systems set the range of possibilities for change in the situation of women in the last years of this century. Mansbridge's subjects, like ours and Kondo's, exist in fragile and constraining contexts that resist only precariously the forces of world economic change. Japanese business is at the beginning of a truly major restructuring, which may well virtually eliminate the sort of small family firm that Kondo discusses (though we should note again the tenacity of just such small family enterprises, whether urban or rural). More directly relevant to our own study, the agricultural sectors in all of the developed world, including both France and Canada, are at the beginning also of a period of major trauma and transformation. Alice Barthez, the analyst and defender of the family farm in France, reminded us recently how post-war agriculture and the groupements agricoles were linked with "a definition of agriculture in terms of increasing the quantity of production," a definition now endangered by the development of a unified Europe and a reevaluation of the meaning of progress. Hence the difficulty of imagining and preparing even for "a future whose elements we can name." We recognize, she says, how immense a distance we will need to travel "for the necessary transformations to take shape on our farms, in our villages, in our departements, in respect to our responsibilities there."53 We like that last part: the necessary transformation, too large to imagine, that will therefore take place at home, in relation to real obligations. When we visited Bordeaux and the surrounding areas in the summer of 1993 we heard a good deal of anxiety, and we have encountered

219 Towards a New Analysis more of these concerns since then over the phone and in letters. Unemployment has been making its appearance as overextended vineyards cut down on hired help. We were in St-Emilion after a great storm that produced devastating mudslides as a result of earlier opportunistic clearing of new terrains. Quebec is encountering similar environmental and economic problems, including appalling ice storms in 1998 that hit hard in the area of our survey. But in both places concern focuses most of all on the likely impact of the impending end to agricultural protectionism. French wines are experiencing increasing competition from Spain and Italy, and in Quebec farm organizations have carried out public protests in the provincial and federal capitals against the proposed removal of subsidies for poultry and milk production. We wonder how, in such a context, our respondents will fare. And their organizations - will they adjust, retain, or increase influence, or will they fade away into a footnote to history? We look for signs that involuntary change can precipitate voluntary change or, at the least, positive adaptation. Could that change not also have some impact on the situation of women on the farm? Or will it work the other way around, as the situation of women crucially changes, and changes with it both women's organizations and the farm? We think we saw a few possible indications. We have mapped some of the changes taking place incrementally in the privacy of the family farm. The organizations also show some signs of evolution. The 1992, meeting of the gfs of the Gironde produced resolutions about relating the groupements to other community-level organizations and by implication to larger political ones; those involved will have to be the larger population of rural women. At a similar 1990 meeting in the departement of the Rhone-Alpes, men and women together had come to similar conclusions: the rural organizations would have to be able to incorporate a larger population that was not agricultural in origin and a larger range of activities, such as the rural tourism we have already mentioned. The Rhone-Alpes has eighty feminine groups; in the Gironde, as we have noted, only feminine groups have survived. In both there is considerable pressure to move to mixed groups, for financial reasons if for no other. No agreement yet seems possible about the professional role of women; at the Rhone-Alpes meeting there was no effective discussion of the differing life situations that in part explain women's different professional ones. Barthez was unable to perceive any consensus, commenting: "With relations between men and women, as with the movement of life, we cannot finish. We can only suspend the debate."54 The very existence of that debate among the farm population suggests to us some impact of the varied politics of farm women, including

Z2.o Feminist Politics on the Farm

mainstream politics, their feminism, and their participation in their own organizations as well as, most important of all, their major role as individuals in the home/workplace of the family farm. It is inaccurate to label most of these women feminists. But we think that feminists should take seriously what their experience says about the transformational impact of daily life. We recommend considering the interconnectedness of work and family, women and men, as a model rather than an anachronism or an exception. Let us take farm women and their lives as a metaphor for the needs that other women have for specific change and general empowerment, in private as well as in public politics. They should be entitled to operate the noble tractor - and its equivalent - rather than simply being expected or allowed to carry out the many other tasks, both productive and reproductive, that they already perform. They need, too, proper appreciation for all their labours. But they need even more to have their men buy dishwashers, and use them, while, perhaps, the women prune the vines. Let us remember that it was in their groupement feminin that the women of Lussac agreed that they wanted to prune vines, and where they arranged to learn how to do so.

APPENDIX A

The Impact of Major Demographic Characteristics on Responses to Questions: Results of logistic regressions Frequencies are listed only when significance is less than .05; significant frequencies are given for "all" only when no results are present for separate countries. Correlations indicate association of respondents' characteristics with more progressive positions, with the following exceptions: problems; parties should get together; elections do not make a difference; politics needs specialists. A minus sign after the indication of location of significance (all-, Quebec-, France-) indicates that the usual direction of association has been reversed so that the associated responses come from those in the following categories: less likely to attend mass, fewer children, less educated, younger. a = all q = Quebec f = France Demographic characteristics *

Age

Education Children Religion Work

Spouse prepares meals

a— .037

f .039

Spouse cleans house

q-

f .087

Questions

Org.

.010

Spouse takes care of young children

q-

.000

f-

.003

* Org.: Age: Education: Children: Religion: Work: Nation:

membership in cereie or groiipement feminin in years (grouped) stage of education