Women’s Representation in Agriculture Greater Among Native Americans

Women have always played a key role in farming, but too often has that role been undermined or remained unseen. To understand the relationship between women and agricultural issues in the global economy, we need to look at the way that gendered economic activities maintain and reproduce a mode of production based on capital extraction. The influence that women have played and keep playing on working land and ensuring agricultural production worldwide is tremendous, yet has often been kept invisible by patriarchal institutions that have relegated women to domestic activities.

From the European feudal agricultural systems to modern western capitalism, women have been historically kept from owning and managing farmland outside the bounds of marriage. Women have been “permitted” in the farm space as farmers’ or landlords’ wives and as such traded just like any other capital within the economic system. Brides often used to be traded for land ownership or access to land, or for the economic capital they would bring to an exploitation from their family’s heirship, but had little control or management of land assets outside these terms. Occasionally, widows would be allowed to manage land, usually for the benefits of lawful children’ interests.

These patterns have continued on in the formation of America’s farmland. Although history school books are quick to suggest that the American dream was promoting access to land often refused to settlers on the old continent, they forget to tell how that land was “given” to some people to the complete exclusion of others. “Settlers” when it comes to property ownership almost exclusively refers to male settlers, whereas women are mentioned in official documents alongside children in terms of their mental capacity to manage assets. Women farmers are therefore usually absent from the narrative outside of their marital and domestic participation.

Additionally, Native people altogether are absent and/or misrepresented in the narrative. First and foremost, all of US land was extracted by conquest from Native People (see details on our Stolen Futures Storymap). But additionally, and in total contrast with the myth of manifest destiny, where settlers supposedly settled on idle or wild land, these White men were given lands that were managed and even often cultivated by Native nations. Some nations were mostly agriculturalists, while others still practiced sustainable and rotational land stewardship over the resources that they relied upon. In that context, women’ roles greatly differ from nations to nations, but it is widely documented that their place in the food-system was usually more egalitarian. 

In some nations, women would head societies that would be responsible for making decision over land use, and would be tasked to decide when to harvest and migrate accordingly. Women were also often found to be the head or even owner of the family’s house, even in nations organized around land stewardship instead of land property. Despite great inter-tribal differences, it is clear that women’ roles in agriculture was much differently lived in pre-contact North America than in Europe and early US settlements. It is important to realize women’ relationships with their environment and to land use and agriculture is affected by the mode of production and has been historically defined by the western understanding of land as commodified and owned capital.