"I Like to Hoe My Own Row": A Saskatchewan Farm Woman's Notions about Work and Womanhood during the Great Depression

"I Like to Hoe My Own Row"A Saskatchewan Farm Woman's Notions about Work and Womanhood during the Great Depression Cristine Georgina Bye (bio) I expect you are a busy mother. I know for I have passed through it and been doing my share for fifty years and am getting so I had rather idle a little now. I am told by some that I never seem to rest. Well, I must say I like to hoe my own row and keep going as long as the Lord gives me strength. Kate Graves to Georgina Edith Graves Griffiths, December 5, 19351 Kate Graves was my great-grandmother. She was sixty-three years old when economic depression and drought struck prairie Canada in 1929. Over the next twelve years she dispatched more than 150 letters to her fourth-eldest daughter, my grandmother Georgina Edith Graves Griffiths, from her rural community in the heart of the Saskatchewan Dust Bowl. The central theme of these letters was work. Despite her age, Kate spent seventeen-hour days churning butter, raising chickens, tending children, cooking, cleaning, canning, sewing, and gardening. Her letters reveal the vital contribution she made to her family and the family farm in the 1930s. But more importantly, they tell us how she saw her role and how her perceptions helped to shape her life and the lives of other female family members. My great-grandmother used her letters to impart her ideas about farm women's proper work roles and to affirm her identity as a "good" farm woman. She tried to empower herself by policing gender boundaries in her family and working hard in the domestic sphere. The irony was that, rather than enhancing women's power, Kate's idealized notions helped to disempower her and future generations of western Canadian farm women. Seventy-five years later most prairie farm families—including my immediate family—would continue to value "men's work" more than "women's work" and to grant men more resources and power than women. Although literature on American farm women in the Great Depression abounds, we know very little about rural women in prairie Canada in the [End Page 135] 1930s.2 Information on gender ideals—what they were and how they influenced women's everyday lives—is particularly sketchy.3 A number of studies focus on prairie women who voiced their opinions in the rural press or played prominent roles in agricultural and political organizations. These studies depict 1930s farm women as grassroots feminists who complained about male domination in society and the home, sought greater recognition for their work, and expressed solidarity with their overworked, undervalued peers.4 A case study of Kate Graves, based mainly on the letters she bequeathed to her female descendants, helps to qualify this impression of prairie farm women. Kate speaks for the vast majority of prairie Canada's 390,000 rural women—women who quietly acquiesced to the gender status quo and, in the process, helped to perpetuate gender inequalities in prairie society.5 Kate's letters shed light on the role prairie women have played in reinforcing assumptions that men are more entitled to own and operate farms than women, that they are "farmers" and women are subordinate "homemakers" or "helpers." Kate was proud of the work she and female relatives performed in the 1930s, but she continued to see men as the family's chief breadwinners and decision-makers. This is not to say Kate and other women did not experience tension around male hegemony. Rather, Kate's letters suggest that they found complicated ways of dealing with it that protected farm men's and women's sense of respectability. This study is useful for other reasons as well. It provides a starting point for comparisons of rural American and Canadian women's experiences during the Depression. Political and other differences between the two countries likely shaped women's work lives in different ways. Residents of the Canadian prairies and the northern Plains states experienced similar drought and depressed economic conditions, but women on the American side of the border had access to far more state resources than women on the Canadian side.6 American...