I’m More Than a Farmer’s Wife

Authors

Stevie Munz, Utah Valley UniversityFollow

Abstract

Women have always contributed to family farming operations; however, their labor was largely positioned as “women’s work” and ignored as contributing to the economics of the farming enterprise. Through examining the stories of farmers’ wives, this essay examined how the gender division of work and the ideology of domesticity silenced women’s contributions to family farming operations. Through oral history interviews and thematic analysis, this research project presents stories from two farmers’ wives (Annie and Belle) from western Illinois. The resultant analysis reveals that Annie and Belle labored on their family farming operations for most of their lives.

Keywords

farmer’s wife, women’s work, oral history, family farms

Author Bio(s)

Stevie M. Munz (Ph.D., Ohio University) is assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Utah Valley University. Her work appears in Departures, Communication Education, Basic Communication Course Annual, Women & Language, and the Western Journal of Communication. Please direct correspondence to smunz@uvu.edu.

Publication Date

7-1-2021

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.

DOI

10.46743/2160-3715/2021.4791

Recommended APA Citation

Munz, S. (2021). I’m More Than a Farmer’s Wife. The Qualitative Report, 26(7), 2152-2167. https://doi.org/10.46743/2160-3715/2021.4791

ORCID ID

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9089-9915