Cooking & Rock Picking

By Sydney Dvorak

1. Experiences
I come from a long line of farmers, specifically in the Midwestern United States. During my childhood I spent a lot of time helping my grandma in the kitchen or garden and helping my grandpa work in the fields or herd the cows. While I was doing these things around the family farm, I was learning to sort certain tasks as feminine and certain tasks as masculine. So, for this project I decided to go back to my roots and perform two tasks I learned to perceive as feminine or masculine in my childhood. I spent time performing the masculine task of picking up rocks from the field, and the feminine task of cooking an elaborate meal.

1.1 – Performing Masculinity: Clearing the Land
This task provided me with the added challenge
of accessibility. Since I do not live on a farm or have access to farmland, I had to be creative. What I did have access to was the university’s field used for recreational sports. So, one cold afternoon I set out to find rocks.
Normally, when clearing a field of rocks on a farm, one does not need to ‘find’ rocks; because they are so plentiful, the rocks seem to find you. This was not the case for me. But, I did manage to spend around half an hour or so in the field, bending over and picking up some rocks.
Constantly bending over in the field is back breaking work. As soon as I started my task, a memory surfaced of my cousins and I picking up rocks and sticks for what felt like hours when we were younger. Doing this as an adult, I realized that yes, it is extremely time-consuming and laborious to pick up rocks by hand. It also feels extremely overwhelming knowing that you have such a large surface area to cover. There is something to be said, however, of the feeling one gets when one successfully engages in clearing the land. It is a strange feeling of confidence, knowing that you are tangible altering the landscape in some way.

1.2 – Performing Femininity: Cooking
I am not someone who has ever enjoyed cooking. As a kid, I would have much preferred helping my grandma in the garden than in the kitchen. I have always found cooking to be too time-consuming, mess-creating, and boring. I am also, frankly, not very good at it. I spend the least amount of time in the kitchen as possible—just enough time to make one of the six or seven meals I do know how to make well, clean up, and eat. I did not learn this aspect of traditional femininity. But, for this project, I decided to spend time in the kitchen and cook a meal my grandma would traditionally make for big family dinners. I attempted to make a roast, mashed potatoes, and gravy like my grandma would.

However, because I am a vegan I put my own spin on it and used tofu instead of beef. The whole experience of prepping, cooking, eating, and cleaning up took me a whopping 3 hours. The meal I made is not something I would ever make for myself for dinner, primarily for the reasons I listed above, but also because I am cooking for myself, not a family. I cannot imagine making a meal so involved more than a couple times a year, let alone a few times a week. I didn’t even bake an elaborate dessert to cap off the evening like my grandma would.

2. Analysis
In rural Iowa, a typical day begins with my grandpa heading out to feed the cows and work outside in the morning while my grandma gets started on lunch (or “dinner,” as they refer to it). When my grandma has “dinner” ready, she phones my grandpa to call him in to eat. After they enjoy their midday meal, my grandpa heads back outside to work for the rest of the afternoon.

On a typical day, he might move the cows, fix a problem with his truck or tractor, or do more laborious tasks like clearing a field of some rocks to prepare it for planting. While he is out, my grandma cleans up around the house, maybe takes a nap or has friends from up the road over for coffee. She might work in the garden if the weather is nice. She bakes a dessert for later, and then starts preparing for the evening meal (known as “supper”). My grandparents’ dynamic is not a unique one. Within the culture of family farms, strict and differing gender roles are well defined: men are “the farmers who drive tractors and do most outside work,” while women are “responsible for the household, the family and social relationships.”1 Therefore, most of the tasks of the farming man take place outdoors, mastering the land, while the tasks of the farming wife remain largely domestic.

If gender is performative, then “masculinities and femininities are many and various.”2 Children and adolescents learn what aspects of masculinity and femininity to perform when.3 Then as adults we perform our roles as we have learned them, as full participants in our social communities. However, how we designate certain performances of gender as masculine or feminine was not created in a vacuum: they have been influenced by media, pop culture, law and government, and the interactions of our families and communities with all of these things.4 My engagement in the family farm environment contributed to my learning what it is to be masculine or feminine.

1 Sandra Contzen and Jérémie Forney, “Family Farming and Gendered Division of Labour on the Move: a Typology of Farming-Family Configurations,” Agriculture and Human Values 34, no. 1 (2017): 28-29.

2 Carrie Paechter, “Masculinities and Femininities as Communities of Practice,” Women’s Studies International Forum 26, no. 1 (2003): 69.

3  Ibid, 70.

4  Ibid, 75.

2.1 – The Rural Patriarchy
The rural patriarchy is defined by masculine attitudes and behaviours that “produce and consume the rural.”5 Like in picking up rocks and clearing the land, there is a central aspect of controlling the land, changing its natural shape or content so that one can do what they want with it. Even the language of farming is highly gendered. Listen to almost any farmer from
small-town Iowa talk about farming, man or woman, and you will likely hear the same thing: the pronouns used to refer to the land are “she,” or “her.”6  And “she” is something you control.
Masculinity in rural communities contains many masculinities and performances of gender, just like in any social context. The masculinity I have seen presented most in my family and social contexts is monologic masculinity, in which a single-voiced, conventional masculinity with rigid expectations and strictly negotiated performances” clearly separate men’s work from women’s work.7 There is a distinct disdain in monologic masculinity for anything outside of relishing hardwork and ‘getting your hands dirty.’ Several oppositions define their performance of masculinity: “dirtiness versus cleanliness; outside versus inside; danger versus safety; farmer versus nonfarmer; and male versus female.”8 It is all constructed in a silently agreed upon homosocial arrangement, that this is what it means to be a man.

2.2 – Super House-Wives
Women in farming families have often been presented as “super house-wives,” due to their dual responsibilities of the home and involvement in agriculture.9  Farm women, like my grandma, are

5 Hugh Campbell, Michael Mayerfeld Bell, and Margaret Finney, eds., Country Boys: Masculinity and Rural Life (University Park: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 19.

6  Ibid, 33.

7  Ibid, 28.

8  Ibid, 36.

9  Contzen and Forney, “Family Farming,” 29.

in charge of the domestic work, and in addition often manage large gardens, poultry, and dairy. Within the last fifty years the time most women spent doing housework has gone down significantly, but in the era of my grandma and great-grandma domestic labour would have taken up a full work week: the average woman spent 44 hours a week cooking and cleaning alone.10

Before the widespread use of electric appliances, food preparation and housework was extremely time-consuming. In 1900, the use of coal and wood burning stoves were commonly used by most Americans. Something as small as making tea or coffee required one to go outside, cut wood or haul coal, start a fire, heat the stove, and wait for the kettle to boil. As I used my modern oven and electric stove to prepare my meal for this project, I thought about how much more work it would have been for me to be cooking like my great-grandmother would have.

When she was alive in the 1920s and 1930s, electric or gas appliances were gaining popularity, but only 10.4% of farm houses were connected to the electric grid in 1930.11 Especially since my great-grandma lived through the Great Depression, I cannot imagine her tiny four-room house was one of the 10.4% connected to the grid.

As new technologies for the home developed, gender relationships changed. Electric appliances cut down the amount of time necessitated to prepare meals and allowed women to seek jobs outside the home.12 In the 1960s and 1970s it became more common for farm wives to seek part time work off the farm. My own grandma worked off-farm for the postal service for many years. Perhaps in reaction to this, the baby-boom era saw women’s magazines attempting to reinforce the ideal of the “super house-wife,” one that was a homemaker and mother.
According to popular magazines, the ideal housewife was “intelligent and well-educated, could

10 Douglas Bowers, “Cooking Trends Echo Changing Roles of Women,” National Food Review 9 (2000): 23.

11  Ibid, 25.

12  Ibid, 23.

cook delicious meals, did housework efficiently, and spent lots of time nurturing her children.”13 From my grandma, I learned that these learned behaviours were all important aspects of performing femininity.

 3.Conclusions
We tend to learn gender performance from our communities as we are socialized into adulthood. What we learn and how we learn it is based largely on “dimensions of mutual engagement, joint enterprise and shared repertoire.”14 As a woman, growing up I was encouraged to do some activities, like cooking with my grandma, and discouraged from doing others. As an adult, I now enact many femininities and some masculinities. My sense of self is fluid, one that incorporates practices I learned as a young girl and others I adopted later in life. Some aspects of the feminine “shared repertoire” I have rejected, particularly cooking (as my roommate will tell you I only recently learned how to make rice properly.) However, if you asked me to jumpstart a car or clear a field, I would have no problems participating in these typically masculine tasks.
It is now socially acceptable for me to perform tasks that society would define as ‘masculine.’ While there are still hard barriers of gender in society as a whole, people have more freedom than ever to express themselves by performing masculinity or femininity, regardless of their gender. Modern families no longer feel the need, for the most part, to abide by the same traditional gender roles as their parents or grandparents. In heterosexual couples, often women and men both work outside the home. In the case of farming families, it is more and more common for women to inherit farmland, to study agriculture in university, and “get their hands dirty.” In the post-modern Western world, strict gender roles matter less and less.

13  Ibid, 26.

14 Paechter, “Masculinities and Femininities,” 74.

Bibliography

Bowers, Douglas. “Cooking Trends Echo Changing Roles of Women.” National Food Review 9 (2000): 23–29.

Campbell, Hugh, Michael Mayerfeld Bell, and Margaret Finney, eds. Country Boys: Masculinity and Rural Life. University Park: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.

Contzen, Sandra and Jérémie Forney. “Family Farming and Gendered Division of Labour on the Move: a Typology of Farming-Family Configurations.” Agriculture and Human Values 34, no. 1 (2017): 27–40. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-016-9687-2.

Fürst, Elizabeth L’orange. “Cooking and Femininity.” Women’s Studies International Forum 20, no. 3 (1997): 441–449.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277539597000277.

Paechter, Carrie. “Masculinities and Femininities as Communities of Practice.” Women's Studies International Forum 26, no. 1 (2003): 69–77. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277539502003564.