
          Unseen Partners in the Economy
          By Smith, Barbara EllenBarbara Ellen Smith
          Vol. 9, No. 3, 1987, pp. 4-6
          
          Women have long been "unseen partners" in
agricultural production. They have been partners in the sense that
their field labor in direct production and their household labor in
maintaining the farm labor force have been essential components of
U.S. agriculture for centuries. As slaves, black_women worked in the
fields and houses of the plantation system-picking cotton, stripping
tobacco, preparing food for others. Low-income white_women worked
beside their husbands and children in the fields of family farms, or
as tenants or sharecroppers on land owned by others. Wealthier white
women functioned as managers and supervisors of the domestic economy
of plantations. And yet, all of these women have been
"unseen," invisible, in the sense that their
labor, their productive role, has gone largely unrecognized in popular
images of the "American farmer" and in scholarly
studies of our agricultural system.
          For the last century, women have also contributed essential income
to the farm economy through their off-farm labor. Black women, for
example, long worked as domestic servants in the households of the
more well-to-do. As recently as 1960, forty-five percent of all
employed black_women in the South worked as domestics. Their wages
were meager (domestic service is the lowest paying occupation in the
U.S.) but essential to farm families chronically strapped for cash.
          Farm women, both black and white, have also worked for wages in
agricultural processing-whether in canneries, poultry or tobacco
plants. Women and, originally, children, predominated in the labor
force of the South's most important manufacturing industry,
textiles. In all of these activities, farm women have generated cash
income and in occasional cases, health insurance and retirement
benefits, which have been critical to their families' economic
survival.
          Beyond noting the broad trends of impoverishment and unemployment,
it is difficult to gauge the specific effects of the present
agricultural crisis on farm women per se. It is generally true in our
society that the survival skills with which families weather
impoverishment or periods of reduced income are vested primarily in
women. It is women who end up patching or making clothes instead of
buying them, stretching the food supply to make two meals instead of
one, or treating a sick child with home remedies instead of an
expensive trip to the doctor. In other words, women tend to intensify
their domestic labor during periods of economic hardship, substituting
their own hard work for the goods and services that their families can
no longer afford to buy. One may surmise that this is happening in
many farm families today.
          It is also clear that women are increasing their wage-earning labor
by seeking employment off the farm. Today, almost half of all farm
women in the U.S. are in the paid labor force, as compared to only
one-fourth in 1960. Like rural women throughout the South, however,
farm women who are looking for jobs these days find few that pay a
living wage. The economic crisis in agriculture has coincided with a
drastic employment decline in many other traditional Southern
industries.
          For rural women, who have long been the backbone of the labor force
in some of the South's key manufacturing industries, this loss of jobs
has been devastating. Women's unemployment rates in many Southern
states are well above those of men. For black_women, unemployment in
the fifteen to twenty-five percent range has become standard. The
unemployment rate for Southern farm women has been double that of
men.
          Women of course have found employment in newer non-

manufacturing
sectors of the economy. In the rural South, as in other areas of the
nation, the service sector is a key source of new jobs and a major
employer of women. In the service industries of the rural South, women
make up over forty percent of the labor force. For those with
professional training in the traditionally female fields of nursing
and teaching, the expansion of educational and health services (which
account for a large portion of this sector) has brought increased job
opportunities.
          Women without professional training, however, tend to end up in the
bottom ranks of the service sector, where wages are low, benefits few,
and opportunities for advancement scarce. Cooks, maids, cashiers,
secretaries, waitresses, nurses aides-these are the occupations of
most women in the rural South today. Women displaced even from those
industries traditionally considered low-wage are hard pressed to find
a service job that matches their former wages. The average wage for
workers in restaurants and bars, for example, is about two dollars per
hour below that in the textile industry.
          
            Crisis on the Farm
          
          This "double whammy"-the farm crisis coupled
with the loss of traditional off-farm jobs affects rural women in ways
beyond unemployment statistics and wage rates.
          Economic hardship also reaches into the heart of family life in the
form of suicide, domestic violence, alcohol abuse, and marital
breakup. It is difficult to document the extent of these problems
among Southern farm families not only because the compilation of data
lags behind the problem, but also because events like the breakdown of
a marriage may lead one or both partners off the farm altogether. For
example, the low percentage of female-headed families in the farm
population may be in part because such women don't remain on the
farm.
          A recent study of homeless people in Charleston, the West_Virginia
state capital, is suggestive. Contrary to popular impressions, the
research found that the single largest portion of homeless people were
not the deinstitutionalized mentally ill, petty criminals, or
alcoholics. They were rural people who had been left destitute by
economic decline, and who had migrated to the city on a well-worn path
called "in search of opportunity." As part of the
growing homeless population of Charleston, most had not found it.
          The overall point is that women's labor has been essential to the
rural Southern economy for centuries; as a result, women are deeply
affected by present trends in that economy. This occurs not only
indirectly through their husbands' changing economic fortunes, but
also directly through their own experiences in the labor market and
household. Rural women are intensifying their domestic, household
labor at the same time they are increasing their wage-earning labor
outside the home. Simultaneously, they are struggling to deal with the
destructive effects of economic crisis on their families.
          
            Prospects for the Years Ahead
          
          So, what of the future? What forces are shaping the future for
rural women? Specifically, how is public policy shaping their future?
First, the obvious must be stated because it is so important: the
economic hardship facing rural people, especially women, is being
compounded by drastic cutbacks in programs that once cushioned the
impact of such hardship. This has occurred not only with transfer
payments and income support programs like AFDC and food stamps, but
also with programs that helped people participate more fully and
fruitfully in the wage economy-retraining programs for displaced
workers, job skills development for young_people, etc.
          Since 1980, funding for all federal employment and training
programs has declined by sixty-five percent. These cutbacks have
coincided with a policy of actively undercutting affirmative_action in
both employment and education. Increasingly, women and minorities are
neither trained for nor granted access to higher paying jobs. These
policies seem so obviously harmful and irrational, given present
unemployment and poverty rates in precisely these groups, that they
require no further comment.
          Other greatly needed programs have never seen the light of day. For
example, the need for high quality, locally controlled day care,
especially in rural areas, is so urgent it 

can scarcely be
overestimated. We are long past the time when rural women, including
farm women, stay home to tend house and children while rural men go
off to the fields or the paid labor force. Indeed, for many rural
families, particularly black families, a non-wage-earning wife and
mother is a luxury they could never afford. And yet, the fact that a
majority of mothers-those in whom primary responsibility for
child-rearing traditionally has been vested-now spend at least eight
hours each day working in the paid labor force simply has not been
absorbed on the social policy agenda. As a result, many lower-income
women face a heartbreaking choice between providing direct care for
their children, or leaving them inadequately tended while they work to
put food on the table.
          The irony in this neglect is that child care represents an
excellent target for local economic_development. Low-interest loans
and technical assistance for the development of locally controlled day
care centers, coupled with child care subsidies for low-income working
mothers, could promote long-term development by directly offering
employment to child care workers, providing a service that would
enable women to take advantage of education and training
programs. Development can also be enhanced by offering enrichment
programs to pre-schoolers and after-school programs to older
children.
          
            The Price of Economic Progress
          
          Having catalogued some of the activities that governments are not
undertaking, what are they doing? One of the most important economic
development strategies currently being pursued by state governments
across the South is the promotion of tourism. This is important not
only in the sense that tourism is growing rapidly in certain areas,
but also in the sense that this industry has a deep effect on rural
communities where it takes hold.
          The Southeast Women's Employment Coalition is presently working
with women in four Southern_states who face the growth of tourism in
their rural communities. Unfortunately, the stories they tell are not
full of promise and hope, but of anxiety and fear. Along the coast of
South_Carolina, for example, women from predominantly black,
low-income island communities are witnessing the destruction of their
traditional means of survival: agriculture and fishing. Their story is
typical.
          Escalating property taxes and land values are forcing indigenous
residents to give up their most important resource. Scarcely a week
goes by without news of another resident having sold his or her land,
often because of inability to pay the rising property taxes. As
"prime waterfront" property increasingly changes
hands, the indigenous residents find their access to traditional
fishing areas closed by new landowners who forbid trespassing. As a
result these trends, the indigenous community is rapidly being
destroyed.
          What is positive about this situation is the fact that people are
organizing to challenge these trends. The low-income rural women with
whom we've been working do not oppose tourism outright, but they
understandably do not want it to destroy their own resources-their
land, their culture, their community. They are attempting to pull
their communities together around a common vision of economic
development that preserves their integrity as a community and protects
their control over valuable resources, especially land.
          If there is hope for the future of the rural South, it lies with
women and men in community organizations like these. The South not
only has the highest poverty rate in the United_States, it also has
the most unequal distribution of income. The problem is not simply one
of disparity between the South and the rest of the United_States, or
between the rural and urban South, but within the South. It is between
those who have a great deal and those who have almost nothing. It is
unrealistic to expect government at any level to take on this
fundamental inequality in a consistent, long-term fashion. Poverty
will be reduced in the rural South in the same manner that denial of
voting_rights was reduced. It will come about when those who are rural
and poor organize and declare "No More." Those who wish to
serve the rural poor would do well to listen to the voices and support
the efforts of those who are attempting to organize their communities
to shape their own future-and particularly to the voices of rural
women, who have been unheard and unseen for too long. 
          
            Barbara Ellen Smith is a researcher with the Southeast
Women's Employment Coalition, Lexington, Kentucky.
            Barbara
Ellen Smith's essay is an edited version of a talk presented to the
1986 Professional Agricultural Workers Conference held at Tuskegee
University. A collection of the papers of the Conference is available
from Dr. Thomas T. Williams, Director, Human Resources Development
Center, P.O. Box 681, Tuskegee, Alabama 36088.
          
        
