Centre for Rural Economy artist in residence Joanne Coates has been exploring reasons for gender bias as part of her residency. Although the Covid-19 lockdown has halted her artwork, here she highlights how feminism and women’s leadership are viewed in farming and further afield.

In the art historical world, gender bias is not a secret. Ever since stories have been told, they have been told through the voice, seen through the eyes, and felt through the experience of the masculine. As recently as 2012, only 4% of artists in The Metropolitan Museum of Art (MET) were women. In my own medium, photography, only 15% of photographers are women. In the industry, women earn on average 40% less than men^[1]. The situation is no different in agriculture. according to the UK Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs, with only 14.9 % of registered farm holders in the UK being women.

I have recently begun working with Professor Sally Shortall at the Centre for Rural Economy, and our conversations about gender bias get my mind racing marathons. One discussion brought me back to a time when I told a high-up middle-class (obviously) man in the arts that I was dating a farmer, and his exact words were, “you’ll just end up a farmer’s wife.” I can’t think of many jobs where you just end up somebody’s wife. I think of my partner’s Mum, the work she does for the farm, the behind-the-scenes running of farms women have done for centuries. Are these women ‘just farmers’ wives’?

Since December I’ve been immersed in research, preparing myself to move to rural Northumberland for the practical side of my residency. Lockdown was announced the day before I was due to move. I stayed put, in the lowest part of the North East, in the furthest-up part of North Yorkshire. A bleak rural landscape, my dog for company, (slow) internet, and my partner, a farmer. It is definitely a challenge to how I usually work. I’ve found solace in online conversations with people I’m yet to meet through email chains, talking about gender roles with women who are living the farming experience.

On one of my lunchtime escapes I was listening to the WNYC podcast ‘Dolly Parton’s America’ and two and two finally added to four. One moment in particular helped to explain much about the gender imbalance in farming and how portrayals of feminism link within this.

Dolly’s fans hail her as the original third wave feminist icon. However, Dolly doesn’t view herself that way. When the podcast presenter asks if she thinks of herself as feminist, her response is clear: “NO I DO NOT. I think of myself as a woman in business. I love men, I have a brother, a dad, a lot of cousins. I look like a woman but I think like a man, but I think like a woman too.”^[2]

The podcast goes on to hear from Sarah Smarsh, who wrote a book called Heartland, and writes a lot about Dolly and Class. Coincidentally, Sarah grew up in a rural area, on a farm in a poor area 40 miles outside of Wichita, Kansas. She highlights how femininity has changed within the portrayal of feminism, with Dolly Parton paving the way in breaking down these stereotypes. To quote:

“The feminism of the 1970s and 80s, it’s where you had a lot of women start with traditional roles in both the workplace and the home. That’s a moment. When women who had business ambitions were being encouraged to sort of downplay their own quote unquote femininity. You don’t need to wear makeup. You can cut your hair short and put on the pants. During the second wave Dolly is one of the first to represent the future third-wave. She went, like, in the opposite direction which was like you have a problem with my tits then here. They are hanging out. She played it up and was like, you can deal with it. I think I’m more kind of a millennial spirit of approach to feminism… There’s this idea of what feminists are supposed to look like. Feminism can be whatever that it is you wanted to be as a woman. You want to have big hair and big boobs and wear rhinestones then do it.”

What she said next also struck a chord with me. Sarah explained how women live feminism in different ways: “Let me put it through my own experience. I had a very complicated relationship to the term feminist when I was a teenager. In America they choose to sort of like feel this backlash (to feminism) that is full throated now. It was like burgeoning when I was a teenager and I could feel it. Certain words have a different life in those two worlds, but there are women who as we speak are living the tenets of feminism more strongly and in a more badass manner than women who wear the word on a T-shirt and March in the marches.”^[3] This struck a chord with me.

Sarah is from a farming community, and I’m part of a farming community. They can be closed communities, with outsiders not fully understanding their complexities. Rural villages and hamlets are not big cities, universities or towns. The language used is different, the way communities engage is different. Women have worked on farms for hundreds of years, they have supported and pioneered. The female shepherdess isn’t a new phenomenon. The language around being a woman in a traditional role, and the more recent trend of using ‘feminist icon’ as a term for a leader, makes many feel uncomfortable. This, however, doesn’t mean they are not. It is in their actions. We still have to look at and deal with the lack of female leaders within the farming industry. From conversations I’ve had to date, I have noticed a clear tendency to downplay their roles.

I’m a keen advocate of voices. For women to see themselves as farmers or leaders, they need to literally see themselves as farmers and leaders. To make space and create space for this. That’s not as simple as it sounds.

When it is safe to meet, I will take my interviews from screen to face-to-(covered) face. I will chat with women in different roles within agriculture. Together I am hoping we will look at and challenge attitudes currently held within the industry. For now, here’s to those women that have been leading the way in farming but not speaking about it. In the words of Sarah, those ‘Badass’ women of agriculture.

Footnotes

^[1] Figures  from Women Photograph https://www.womenphotograph.com https://theconversation.com/women-were-photography-pioneers-yet-gender-inequality-persists-in-the-industry-today-119056

^[2] https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/dolly-partons-america/episodes/sad-ass-songs

^[3] https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/dolly-partons-america/episodes/sad-ass-songs

References

https://theconversation.com/women-were-photography-pioneers-yet-gender-inequality-persists-in-the-industry-today-119056

https://www.gov.scot/publications/women-farming-agriculture-sector/

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/dolly-partons-america

Our ‘post-truth’ world and unconscious gender bias: Sally Shortall

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How do trees and tree planting fit into a sense of place and stewardship? Shane Finan discusses how art can play a role in this in the second of his CRE guest posts.

Henry David Thoreau saw trees as essential for healthy places: “A village that has them not will not be found to work well. It has a screw loose, an essential part is missing” (Higgins, 2017 quoting; Thoreau, 1906). Thoreau felt the deep loss of the natural environment, and, from extensive observation, saw how the natural environment forms mutual partnerships.

There has been a recent surge in popularity in the idea of tree-planting to ‘re-green our planet’. Botanist and chemist Diana Beresford Kroeger, one of the early advocates of mass tree planting, has recently changed her argument slightly to emphasise the more urgent need to preserve the ancient forests that we have. This follows similar arguments, such as the backlash against a project to plant one trillion trees. Forty-six scientists put their name to a paper arguing that planting alone will not solve the current climate crisis (Veldman et al., 2019), and that unplanned planting, such as introduction of non-native species, lack of fire controls, etc., could be more detrimental than not planting at all.

A detailed study on rainforest preservation has found that indigenous communities are ideally suited to replanting efforts, and simultaneously finds that deforestation has more negative impact than reforestation has positive (Walker et al., 2020). It concludes that “the outlook for Amazon forests and their continued stewardship by [Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities] is tied to the political and economic future of Brazil” (p. 3023). Indigenous knowledge is shown to hold a value that is beyond quantification or economics: The ecologically conscious practices of the indigenous groups helps the forest to thrive.

Since the beginning of 2020, I have been working with the Kielderhead Wildwood Project in Kielder, Northumberland, in anticipation of an art residency there. The project is a rewilding effort run by Northumberland Wildlife Trust, where members of the community are planting native trees in a large area of north England.

Kielder was described to me by one of the regular volunteer planters as “the remotest place in England”. The village was built to service the local forestry in the 1920s, but over time the forest was mostly cut for its economic value. As a result, the place has lost a large part of its identity. This is something the wildwood project has the potential to restore, and even improve.

Asking local communities to be involved in the creation and maintenance of a forest has benefits. Aside from physically replanting a forest, it creates a sense of responsibility, identity and memory of place that connects the community and that place. Place-attachment is the concept of forming a close cultural, historical or social memory of a place, whereby people value a location and give it an identity that creates a relationship between them and the place. In a recent example from China, the role of place-attachment is seen to be crucial for grass-roots forestry management: “At the policy level, given that place attachment is an important predictor of pro-environmental behaviour towards heritage forests, efforts should be devoted towards the promotion and articulation of the cultural and historical values of heritage forests” (Cheung & Hui, 2018, p. 44).

By providing value to place, local residents gain a connection through social, historical and cultural memory. Folk music, stories, sculpture, events, artistic interventions, and the process of engaging people in place are all enablers of cultural association, creating a relationship between people and places. Art groups like Transition and Grizedale Arts promote this sense of place and stewardship by encouraging communities to grow, care for and maintain their places.

Art is valuable in its ability to create connections, and even more so in its creation of a different type of value. Returning to Thoreau, he argued that trees should not be cut unless necessary: “Every tree is better alive than dead…and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it”. This type of value in the life of a tree is a value for the whole forest. Artists create this value by showing the individual as the universal.

Stewardship is about what we value, and why. A steward needs to value each organism, not just the number behind it. The value is not in one trillion trees, or in the 39,000 that the wildwood project hopes to plant, but on the single one that connects the forest together. If one person takes stewardship for that one tree, the forest will survive.

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Cheung, L. T., & Hui, D. L. (2018). Influence of residents’ place attachment on heritage forest conservation awareness in a peri-urban area of Guangzhou, China. Urban Forestry & Urban Greening, 33, 37-45.

Higgins, R. (2017). Thoreau and the Language of Trees: Univ of California Press.

Thoreau, H. D. (1906). Excursions and poems (Vol. 5): Houghton, Mifflin.

Veldman, J. W., Aleman, J. C., Alvarado, S. T., Anderson, T. M., Archibald, S., Bond, W. J., . . . Zaloumis, N. P. (2019). Comment on “The global tree restoration potential”. Science, 366(6463), eaay7976. doi:10.1126/science.aay7976

Walker, W. S., Gorelik, S. R., Baccini, A., Aragon-Osejo, J. L., Josse, C., Meyer, C., . . . Schwartzman, S. (2020). The role of forest conversion, degradation, and disturbance in the carbon dynamics of Amazon indigenous territories and protected areas. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(6), 3015-3025. doi:10.1073/pnas.1913321117

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