Gender and agriculture in England

Abstract

Rural geography has been slow to respond to the growing recognition of the importance of feminist perspective within geographical inquiry. Studies of rural areas have, for the most part, been gender blind. Researchers focusing on the rural society of the industrialised nations have largely confined their interest to the positions of women within agriculture. Both the experiences of women living in the countryside and the role of gender in the organisation of rural society have been neglected. It has been shown elsewhere that ignoring gender has particulaly led to bias and distorsion in studies of rural population movement, rural employment and accessibility problems of migrant and non-migrant rural women. Most studies have been carried out in Southern England but this paper focuses on the accessibility and employment problems of women living in Northern England on the marginal upland farms of Northumberland.

The paper shows that although in England rural communities have undergone considerable change in terms of their social and economic structure in recent years, the home, as a integral part of the community, still retains a significant importance as a part of the dominant rural ideology. The retention of the traditional sex role stereotyping and the dominance of the domestic role in women's lives has remained strongest in peripheral regions. The emphasis placed on the domestic role imposes constraints on women's use of space within the community and access to the public space of work, leisure and organisational power is limited by the demands of children and problems of access to transport. But until women become involved in the traditionally male, land-owner dominated local goverment of rural areas, these constraints will not be removed and rural women will continue to have few job options outside low paid repetitive tasks in agriculture.