Illinois Institute for Rural Affairs

A Foundation for Sustainable Rural Community Development

Women’s Work on the Farm

• CLC home page
• Introduction
• Report

Summary

• Purpose
• Commissioners
• Survey & Hearings
• Prominent Deficiencies
• Underlying Problem
• Migration
• Agriculture Challenges
• Public Health
• Role of Farm Women
• Conservation & Land Use
• General Corrective Forces
• Commission Recommendations
• Legislative Recommendations
• Remedies
• The Call for Leadership

Legacy

• American Country Life Association
• Rural Sociology
• American Farm Bureau Federation
• Highways
• Agricultural Economics

Resources

• Bibliography
• Web Resources
• Timeline

From The Report of the Country Life Commission (text) (p. 47):

• Conveniences for outdoor work are likely to have precedence over those for household work (p. 47).
• The regularity of duty recurs regardless of season, weather, planting, harvesting, social demands, or any other factor. That whatever general hardships, such as poverty, isolation, or lack of labor-saving devices, may exist on any given farm, the burden of these hardships falls more heavily on the farmer’s wife than on the farmer himself (p. 47).
  • In general, the farmwife’s life is more monotonous and more isolated, no matter what the wealth or the poverty of the family may be.
• The relief to farm women must come through a general elevation of country living. The women must have more help (p. 47).
  • Development of a cooperative spirit in the home;
  • Simplification of the diet in many cases;
  • The building of convenient and sanitary houses;
  • Providing running water in the house and also more mechanical help;
  • Good and convenient gardens;
  • A less exclusive ideal of money getting on the part of the farmer;
  • Providing better means of communication as telephones, roads, and reading circles, and developing of women’s organizations.
• The farm woman should have sufficient free time and strength so that she may serve the community by participating in its vital affairs (p. 47).
• The most imperative need is that domestic, household, and health questions be taught in all schools. The home may well be made the center of rural school teaching.
  • The school is capable of hanging the whole attitude of the home life and the part that women should play in the development of the best country living (p. 47).