Women in this region often did the same work that the men did.Worked in the fields and then in the house."A man works from dusk till dawn but a woman's' work is never done."
Women's Lives and Work In The Ozarks
The women who have lived in and around the OZAR region have crafted family and community through a great deal of hard work. Technologies changed, various industries came and went, and the Ozark National Scenic Riverway was established. But even though women have seen a great deal of change in the last few generations, there are threads of continuity that stretch from homestead farming of the past, to state-of-the-art computerized classrooms of today.
A diversified approach to family subsistence is a practice that has persisted for generations in these hills, with women and men pursuing multiple possibilities for food production and income. Most families lived in rural areas and, until recently, raised or traded for the majority of what they consumed. In the past as well as today, it was not uncommon for a person to have two or more paying jobs, and to perhaps sell garden produce, eggs or firewood, to offer child care, or to sell arts and crafts.
Researchers have noted the practice of multiple economic strategies as a hallmark of Ozarks culture (Stevens 1991; Gibson 2000). This is an environment that is not abundant in any one resource, but instead offers many small opportunities from which to piece together a living, and a diversified approach is a tried and true means of survival. When we consider the range of diversity in women's activities, we see that their gender, rather than limiting or confining them to certain kinds of work, meant that an even greater range work was delegated to them.
The division of labor between women and men was not always so neatly defined. Some women plowed, planted, and helped in the fields during the harvests of corn and other grains. They also chopped or sawed wood and split rails for fences. Of course, women would undertake such "man's work" for a variety of reasons…" (Stevens 1991: 128).
Most centrally, of course, women undertook "women's work." At the center of life was the family. Families have always been central to community building, and women were and are often at the core of family organization. Women typically have been primarily responsible for child care, socialization, and instilling moral values in children. They usually provide meals for the family, as well as clothing and other basic daily necessities.
In addition, simply running a farm meant many kinds of work. Most women remembered growing up on farms where quite a number of different tasks were necessary in a day or a season to pull together the family's subsistence, and this was often combined with paid work. Additionally, these multiple tasks often meant undertaking and supervising many different kinds of work simultaneously. One woman told of her mother setting up the children with a reading lesson for the morning while she went out to milk cows and do other chores. She would return to the house and redirect the children in additional activities as well. Women of the Ozarks may certainly have been some of the earliest and most successful "multi-taskers."
For most of us, it is probably difficult to imagine, just a few generations ago, how hard women worked and what such work entailed. Just to clothe one's family was often more complicated than simply making the clothes by hand. The fabric, if not purchased from a store, had to first be produced. Even after the cotton had been grown or sheep had been raised and shorn—and women were likely to have no small part in these endeavors—cotton or wool would then need to be picked clean, carded, and spun, woven and dyed. These were jobs that were almost exclusively women's. And such work would oftentimes take place at night when women's outdoor work was over for the day (McNeil, 1995: 37-42). Like making clothes, other kinds of work were also more involved than we might first imagine. Not so many decades ago, washing clothes or other items meant one had to first make soap, an extremely time consuming activity. Lighting for the home meant making candles. Quilts on the beds needed to be pieced together and stitched. Having food for the winter meant drying or later, when it was technologically feasible, canning the season's crops. Butter had to be churned and animals butchered, cleaned and prepared. A kitchen garden had to be tended, in addition to crops in the field. Cooking meant building a fire in the stove, and having enough wood on hand to do so. The list of work related activities for a life lived on a basis that was in most respects self-sufficient is a long one, and women were the sole participants in many of these activities and an important contributor in many others.
Women of this region are proud of what they consider to be a strong work ethic, and they remember with fondness the hard working days of the past. Of course, all of the work women did and do is supported and complemented by the work of men of the family, as well as others in the community. Women spoke about community cooperation on butchering day, barn-raising and corn husking, or big canning days. Men did focus on farm and field work that was primarily their responsibility. But women contributed to "men's" work in ways that was rarely true in the reverse.
Spatially, for example, we can see that women typically ran the household, with the kitchen at its center. Work also took them out into the yard for washing, butchering and care of chickens. The garden might be relatively near the house, and the sheds, barns and fields further out. Women went into forests to gather firewood, berries and greens, or to gather in grazing animals. And so they traversed spaces that expanded far beyond their kitchen door. Men, on the other hand, usually did not share a command of domestic activities that were typically understood as "women's." Women spoke about the range of domains within and across which they worked, demonstrating their ability to apply themselves as economic generalists in ways even more far-reaching than men, in many cases. One woman remembers some of the subsistence and income-generating activities her family would engage in as she was growing up…
We lived on a creek and they got a lot of creek bottom land…and [my father] raised watermelons and cantaloupes and peanuts and of course I had to help with the peepaw and I had to lay the vines…And they sold some garden products, eggs and chickens and stuff like that. Mom canned and she froze stuff…you know, put everything into…all kinds of jellies…[B]efore the kids started school she stayed home but…she…took care of a neighbor, an elderly woman, and they had milk cows…and she sold milk so she still worked all the time. Then after both kids were in school…she worked at restaurants in 1964 or 1965. I can't remember what year it was but it was in the 1960's she went to work in the nursing home here in Van Buren and that's where she worked until she retired.
Another woman remembers fondly,
I had a very special mother. She…married really young, but she was so intelligent and so widely read. And she was really clever. She could sew. And she was so industrious that we always had more to eat than any of our neighbors. In fact, on weekends, people would come in, and I can see now it was for my mother's cooking, you know.
Oh, she was the most marvelous cook and we always had good things to eat. And we all helped. By the time we were three or four we could wash fruit jars, you know. And my mother was always workin.' She canned all summer and then she would sew all winter and…we just had kerosene lighting. And my mother read to us every night…
In addition to their considerable contributions to the sustenance of family, and the running of homes and farms, women throughout the past century and a half or more have taken up paid work outside the home. Women spoke of their grandmothers running general stores for timber camps, or serving as the sole postal worker for tiny post offices throughout the hills. Some women worked in early hotels and boarding houses, cooking and cleaning; in later decades they worked in restaurants and theaters. Less common, perhaps, were women who had more professional jobs in town, such as working in the family bank. In the present, of course, women work in all sectors, and are in many cases the sole or primary income earner for the family. Add to this the fact that some of them also work on degrees of higher education, while raising children and working at their jobs, and we see that the hard work ethic of the past burns just as fiercely in women of today.
This was from a NPS Ethnography.
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I am the dust that dances in the light. - Rumi
09 Dec 2013, 8:19 am
