‘Nothing gets her goat!’ The Farmer's Wife and the Duality of Rural Femininity in the Young Farmers’ Club Movement in 1950s Britain

ABSTRACT

This article examines the education provided by the Young Farmers' Club organisation for its female members across the 1950s. Numerous historians have highlighted the central role of domesticity in the philosophy behind girls' education and training in 1950s Britain. Few, however, have explored this from the rural perspective. Drawing upon a range of organisational material, alongside both the farming and popular press, this study argues that female members of the organisation were trained to negotiate a dual role both in the home and on the farm and were regularly taught agricultural skills alongside domestic crafts. This training was often framed through a language of opportunity and equality and was shaped by the expectation that, as a farmer's wife, they would undertake agricultural duties. As a result, rural notions of femininity embraced technical skill and physical work in a way that urban domesticity did not and conceptualisations of the rural domestic sphere were restructured to include numerous spaces on the family farm.

Acknowledgements

This article is based on extensive research undertaken at the Museum for English Rural Life, Reading. The Young Farmers' Club material is reproduced with the permission of the University of Reading, Special Collections. My sincerest thanks to the staff at the museum for being so exceptionally helpful and accommodating. I wish to thank Dr Penny Tinkler, Dr Stephanie Spencer, Professor Claire Langhamer, Dr Jill Kirby and Dr Rose Holmes for their invaluable comments on this work.

Notes on Contributor

Sian Edwards completed her thesis, entitled ‘Youth Movements, Citizenship and the English Countryside, 1930–1960’, in 2013 at the Department of History, University of Sussex, UK.

Notes

1 The Young Farmer, May–June 1955, p. 217.

2 The Young Farmer, March–April 1955, p. 130 and The Young Farmer, May–June 1955, p. 216.

3 Stephanie Spencer (2005) Gender, Work and Education in the 1950s (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan); Madeleine Arnot (1986) State Education Policy and Girls’ Educational Experiences, in Veronica Beechey & Elizabeth Whitelegg (Eds) Women in Britain Today (Milton Keynes: Open University Press); Penny Tinkler (1994) An All-Round Education: the Board of Education's policy for the leisure-time training of girls, 1939–50', History of Education, 23(4), pp. 385–403; Janet Finch & Penny Summerfield (1991) Social Reconstruction and the Emergence of Companionate Marriage, 1945–1959, in D. Clark (Ed.) (1991) Marriage, Domestic Life and Social Change: writings for Jacqueline Burgoyne (1944–88) (London: Routledge); Penny Tinkler (1995) Constructing Girlhood: popular magazines for girls growing up in England, 1920–1950 (London: Taylor & Francis); Emma Latham (2000) The Liverpool Boys' Association and the Liverpool Union of Youth Clubs: youth organizations and gender, 1940–70', Journal of Contemporary History, 35(3), pp. 423–437; Sian Edwards (2003) Youth Movements, Citizenship and the English Countryside 1930–1960' (PhD thesis, University of Sussex). For a longer history of femininity and girls' education see Carol Dyhouse's work on girls in early-twentieth-century England: Carol Dyhouse (1981) Girls Growing Up in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul).

4 The Young Farmer, May–June 1954, p. 177.

5 Membership figures compiled by the Young Farmers' Club organisation.

6 Farmer and Stockbreeder, 4 May 1948, p. 1019.

7 The Young Farmer, January–February 1952, p. 37.

8 This is also a tendency that Jeremy Burchardt has identified in past historical scholarship on the countryside: see Jeremy Burchardt (2007) Agricultural History, Rural History, or Countryside History?, The Historical Journal, 50(2), pp. 465–481. This article will use rural and agricultural synonymously as it is important to do so when discussing Young Farmers' training.

9 Nicola Verdon (2010) ‘The Modern Countrywoman’: farm women, domesticity and social change in interwar Britain, History Workshop Journal, 70(1), pp. 86–107, and Janet Galligani Casey (2004) ‘This is YOUR Magazine’: domesticity, agrarianism, and the farmer's wife, American Periodicals, 14(2), pp. 179–211.

10 Kristine Alexander (2012) Can the Girl Guide Speak?: the perils and pleasures of looking for children's voices in archival research, Jenuesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures, 4(1), pp. 132–145.

11 Lynne Thompson has briefly discussed the movement in her work on rural education: Lynne Thompson (2006) Agricultural Education in the Interwar Years, in Paul Brassley, Jeremy Burchardt & Lynne Thompson (Eds) The English Countryside between the Wars: regeneration or decline? (Woodbridge: Boydell Press) and Lynne Thompson (1999) The Promotion of Agricultural Education for Adults: the Lancashire federation of Women's Institutes, 1919–45', Rural History, 10(2), pp. 217–234. Gloria Leckie has written on the gender division of agricultural knowledge transfer in Canada: Gloria J. Leckie (1996) ‘They Never Trusted Me to Drive’: farm girls and the gender relations of agricultural information transfer, Gender, Place & Culture, 3(3), pp. 309–326.

12 Nicola Verdon (2002) Rural Women Workers in Nineteenth-Century England: gender, work and wages (Woodbridge: Boydell Press); Joanna Bourke (1991) Dairymaids and Housewives: the dairy industry in Ireland, 1890–1914', Agricultural History Review, 38(2), pp. 149–164 and Katie Barclay (2013) Farmwives, Domesticity and Work in Late-Nineteenth-Century Ireland, Rural History, 24(2), pp. 143–160; Selina Todd (2004) Young Women, Work and Family in Inter-War Rural England, Agricultural History Review, 52(1), pp. 83–98; Berit Brandth (2002) On the Relationship between Feminism and Farm Women, Agriculture and Human Values, 19(2), pp. 107–117; Sarah Whatmore (1991) Farming Women: gender, work and family enterprise (Basingstoke: Macmillan); Ruth Gasson (1980) Roles of Farm Women, Sociologia Ruralis, 20(3), pp. 165–180; Jo Little & Patricia Austin (1996) Women and the Rural Idyll, Journal of Rural Studies, 12(2), pp. 101–111.

13 A number of scholars have explored the relationship between the rural and modernity: see David Matless (1998) Landscape and Englishness (London: Reaktion Books); Frank Trentmann (1994) Civilisation and its Discontents: English neo-Romanticism and the transformation of anti-modernism in twentieth-century western culture, Journal of Contemporary History, 29(4), pp. 583–625; Alex Potts (1988) Constable Country between the Wars, in Raphael Samuel (Ed.) (1988) Patriotism: the making and unmaking of British national identity. Vol. 3, National Fictions (London: Routledge).

14 David Lowenthal (1991) British National Identity and the English Landscape, Rural History, 2(2), pp. 205–230.

15 Little & Austin, ‘Women and the Rural Idyll’, p. 103.

16 Verdon, ‘“The Modern Countrywoman”’; Rachel Ritchie (2010) The Housewife and the Modern: the home and appearance in women's magazines 1954–1969' (PhD thesis, University of Manchester).

17 Verdon, ‘“The Modern Countrywoman”’, p. 91; Ritchie, The Housewife and the Modern, p. 221.

18 Anne Hughes (1997) Rurality and ‘Cultures of Womanhood’: recovering the domestic experiences of rural women, in Paul Cloke & Jo Little (Eds) Contested Countryside Cultures: rurality and socio-cultural marginalisation (London: Routledge), pp. 125–126.

19 Verdon, ‘“The Modern Countrywoman”', p. 91; Stephen Brooke (2001) Gender and Working Class Identity in Britain during the 1950s’, Journal of Social History, 34(4), pp. 773–795.

20 The Young Farmer, January–February 1951, p. 51.

21 Farmer and Stockbreeder, 4 May 1948, p. 1019; Farmer and Stockbreeder, 29–30 May 1951, p. 96.

22 Warwickshire County Federation of Y.F.C. Members Handbook 1957–1958, Museum of English Rural Life (MERL), Reading, Collection of Young Farmers' Club Material, D71/51/37, p. 49.

23 Staffordshire Y.F.C Year Book 1956/57, MERL, Reading, D71/51/25, p. 78.

24 The Young Farmer, March–April 1946, p. 31.

25 Claire Langhamer (2005) The Meanings of Home in Post-War Britain, Journal of Contemporary History, 40(2), pp. 341–362; Finch & Summerfield, ‘Social Reconstruction and the Emergence of Companionate Marriage’; Wendy Webster (1998) Imagining Home: gender, ‘race’ and national identity, 1945–64 (Abingdon: Routledge).

26 Hampshire Young Farmers' Year Book 1958–59, MERL, Reading, D71/51/16, p. 54.

27 Ibid.

28 Alun Howkins (2003) The Death of Rural England: a social history of the countryside since 1900 (London: Routledge), p. 164.

29 Farmer and Stockbreeder, 12–13 February 1952, p. 41.

30 Verdon, ‘“The Modern Countrywoman”’, p. 96; Gasson, ‘Roles of Farm Women’, p. 166.

31 Farmer and Stockbreeder, 3–4 May 1955, p. 13.

32 The Young Farmer, September–October 1956, p. 382 and ‘The Farmer's Home’ supplement, Farmer and Stockbreeder, 3–4 May 1955, p. 13.

33 Hampshire Young Farmers' Year Book 1958–59, MERL, Reading, D71/51/16, p. 54.

34 East Sussex Young Farmers' Year Book, 1960, MERL, Reading, D71/51/18, pp. 10–11 and Oxfordshire Federation of Young Farmers' Clubs Year Book, 1957, MERL, Reading, D71/51/28, p. 37.

35 East Sussex Young Farmers' Year Book, 1957, Museum of English Rural Life, MERL, Reading, Collection of Young Farmers' Club Material, D71/51/17, p. 17.

36 Daily Mirror (7 October 1952), p. 8.

37 Ibid.

38 Ibid.

39 The Young Farmer, May–June 1954, p. 177.

40 Farmer and Stockbreeder, March 11–12 1952, p. 97.

41 Ibid.

42 Ibid.

43 Ibid.

44 Nicola Verdon, ‘The Modern Countrywoman’ & Selina Todd, ‘Young Women, Work and Family’, pp. 86–87.

45 Farmer and Stockbreeder, 30 January 1933, p. 249.

46 Gasson, ‘Roles of Farm Women’, p. 166

47 Finch & Summerfield, ‘Social Reconstruction and the Emergence of Companionate Marriage’, p. 7.

48 Farmer and Stockbreeder, 11–12 March 1952, p. 97.

49 Ibid.

50 The Young Farmer, October 1959, p. 20.

51 See: Nicola Tyrer (1996) They Fought in the Fields: the Women's Land Army (Stroud: Tempus) and Gill Clarke (2006) The Women's Land Army and its Recruits, 1938–50, in Brian Short, Charles Watkins & John Martin (Eds) The Front Line of Freedom: British farming in the Second World War (Exeter: The British Agricultural Society). The impact of women's war work has been critically examined by numerous historians. See, for example, Penny Summerfield (1984) Women Workers in the Second World War: production and patriarchy in conflict (London: Croom Helm).

52 The Young Farmer, February 1960, p. 14.

53 Mark Abrams, ‘The Home-Centred Society', The Listener (26 November 1959), pp. 914–915.

54 Daily Mail (1 December 1950), p. 3; Daily Mail (1 January 1960), p. 6.

55 Daily Mail (1 December 1950), p. 3.

56 Daily Mail (25 July 1952), p. 5.

57 Whatmore, Farming Women, p. 3.

58 Hampshire Young Farmers' Year Book 1958–59, MERL, Reading, D71/51/16, p. 55.

59 Farmer and Stockbreeder, 11–12 March 1952, p. 97.

60 Alva Myrdal & Viola Klein (1956) Women's Two Roles: home and work (London: Routledge).

61 Of course, there is a class distinction here. The involvement of working-class women in domestic service means that a significant number of women performed housework for pay. Wendy Webster has argued that migrant women are also an exception to this rule, being understood primarily as workers rather than mothers. See Judy Giles (2001) Help for Housewives: domestic service and the reconstruction of domesticity in Britain 1940–1950', Women's History Review, 10(2), pp. 299–324 and Webster, Imagining Home, p. xii.

62 Daily Mirror (7 October 1952), p. 8.

63 Farmer and Stockbreeder, 1 October 1957, p. 111.

64 Ibid.

65 Warwickshire Federation of Young Farmers' Clubs, Warwickshire Lads and Lasses September 1959, MERL, Reading, D71/51/1, p. 7.

66 Farmer and Stockbreeder, 11–12 March 1952, p. 97.

67 The Young Farmer, October 1959, p. 20.

68 Ibid.

69 The Young Farmer, May–June 1954, p. 177.

70 Verdon, ‘“The Modern Countrywoman”’, p. 91.

71 Results of proficiency tests were printed in The Young Farmer magazine.

72 Farmer and Stockbreeder, 11–12 May 1954, p. 123.

73 Nicola Verdon (2009) Agricultural Labour and the Contested Nature of Women's Work in Interwar England and Wales’, The Historical Journal, 52(1), p. 118.

74 Young Farmer, March–April 1949, p. 72.

75 Berit Brandth (2002) Gender Identity in European Family Farming: a literature review, Sociologia Ruralis, 42(3), p. 195.

76 Ibid., p. 187.

77 Young Farmer, March–April 1946, p. 28.

78 As Nicola Verdon has found in her study of interwar farm women. Nicola Verdon, ‘“The Modern Countrywoman”’, p. 104.

79 The Young Farmer, May–June 1944, p. 47.

80 The Young Farmer, September–October 1950, p. 249.

81 The Young Farmer, May–June 1954, p. 179.

82 Daily Mail (25 July 1952), p. 5. This reflects a general trend in the post-war period, identified by Berit Brandth, in which farmwomen were continually viewed in conjunction with their male relatives and as such were often placed in the domestic sphere as wives and daughters. Brandth, ‘Gender Identity in European Family Farming’, p. 196.

83 Gerry Holloway (2005) Women and Work in Britain since 1840 (Abingdon: Routledge), p. 197.

84 Gasson, ‘Roles of Farm Women’, p. 168.

85 Ibid., p. 168. Class is a rather slippery concept when discussing mid-twentieth-century rural Britain, complicated by changing landownership and the influx of urban workers. For a discussion of this see Paul Cloke & Nigel Thrift (1990) Class and Change in Rural Britain, in Terry Marsden, Phillip Lowe & Sarah Whatmore (Eds) Rural Restructuring: global processes and their responses (London: David Fulton).

86 The Young Farmer, November–December 1953, p. 461.

87 Whatmore, Farming Women, p. 3.

88 G. P. Hirsch (1952) Young Farmers' Clubs: a report on a survey of their history, organisation and activities, with recommendations for their future development (London: National Federation of Young Farmers' Clubs), p. 106.

89 The Young Farmer, May–June 1958, pp. 167–168.

90 Hirsch, Young Farmers' Clubs, pp. 88–89.

91 Lancashire County Year Book 1953, MERL, Reading, D71/51/13, p. 47.

92 The Young Farmer, September–October 1951, p. 341.

93 Birmingham Feminist History Group (1979) Feminism as Femininity in the 1950s’, Feminist Review, 3, pp. 48–65.

94 Judy Giles (1993) A Home of One's Own: women and domesticity in England 1918–1950', Women's Studies International Forum, 16(3), p. 240.

95 Farmer and Stockbreeder, 3–4 May 1955, p. 13.

96 Nottinghamshire Federation Year Book 1956, MERL, Reading, D71/51/8, p. 63.

97 Howkins, The Death of Rural England, p. 172.

98 Mark Riley (2009) Bringing the ‘Invisible Farmer’ into Sharper Focus: gender relations and agricultural practices in the Peak District (UK), Gender, Place & Culture, 16(6), p. 673.

99 Whatmore, Farming Women, p. 97.

100 Hirsch, Young Farmers' Clubs, p. 27.

101 Little & Austin, ‘Women and the Rural Idyll’, p. 103. Angela Davis has also explored the ways in which experiences of motherhood varied by locality. Angela Davis (2012) Modern Motherhood: women and family in England, 1945–2000 (Manchester: Manchester University Press).

102 For a discussion of the contested nature of women's agricultural work before the Second World War see Verdon, ‘Agricultural Labour and the Contested Nature of Women's Work’, pp. 109–130.

103 Mark Riley has argued that life histories can help us challenge ideas of strict gendered spatial separation on the farm by revealing the agency of farm women and the ways in which they contested their role. See Riley, ‘Bringing the “Invisible Farmer” into Sharper Focus', pp. 670–672.