Agricultural planning and development are crucial to human survival, but they usually proceed without any consideration of the importance of gender issues at the production level. Although women have long been prime movers in agriculture, their contribution to the world's food supply has been largely ignored, and consequently their stake in development has been undermined.

This book is both a resource guide and a review of major issues in gender and agriculture which demonstrates that recognizing the contribution of women to agricultural production is a necessary step in development planning. It presents relevant information and research literature regarding women's roles in agriculture in a consolidated and accessible format, offering insights into how the inclusion or exclusion of appropriate information at the planning stage can have an impact during implementation. It also provides guidelines for locating information on gender-related agricultural issues and incorporating it into development planning, research, and training. The literature reviewed not only calls attention to the work women do in order to improve their access to technology and training but also challenges existing development paradigms. The issues discussed present women's experiences and local knowledge and allude to gender and class inequities that farming women face. Each chapter is intended to help the reader address major gender issues in a specific subject in order to access relevant information and thereby better design and implement appropriate agricultural planning and policies.

By synthesizing twenty years of international research, Gender and Agricultural Development provides an effective tool for development practitioners to use in training programs or surveys in order to ensure the appropriate collection of gender disaggregated data and for educators to integrate gender issues into courses dealing with social aspects of agricultural systems. Its findings are presented in such a way as to allow them to be easily incorporated into innovative planning for more sustainable and equitable agricultural policies.

How women-only communities provide spaces for new forms of culture, sociality, gender, and sexuality

Women’s lands are intentional, collective communities composed entirely of women. Rooted in 1970s feminist politics, they continue to thrive in a range of ways, from urban households to isolated rural communes, providing spaces where ideas about gender, sexuality, and sociality are challenged in both deliberate and accidental ways. Herlands, a compelling ethnography of women’s land networks in the United States, highlights the ongoing relevance of these communities as vibrant cultural enclaves that also have an impact on broader ideas about gender, women’s bodies, lesbian identity, and right ways of living.

As a participant-observer, Keridwen N. Luis brings unique insights to the lives and stories of the women living in these communities. While documenting the experiences of specific spaces in Massachusetts, Tennessee, New Mexico, and Ohio, Herlands also explores the history of women’s lands and breaks new ground exploring culture theory, gender theory, and how lesbian identity is conceived and constructed in North America. Luis also discusses how issues of race and class are addressed, the ways in which nudity and public hygiene challenge dominant constructions of the healthy or aging body, and the pervasive influence of hegemonic thinking on debates about transgender women. Luis finds that although changing dominant thinking can be difficult and incremental, women’s lands provide exciting possibilities for revolutionary transformation in society.

Farm women have often been seen by their city sisters as victims of patriarchy, overwork, and poverty, aptly depicted by the “Migrant Mother” image from the Great Depression. Amy Mattson Lauters now goes directly to the women themselves to get the other side of the story of American farm life: that many women survived and even thrived on farms through the adversity of the Great Depression and beyond.

On Behalf of the Family Farm traces the development of women’s activism and agrarian feminisms in the Midwest after 1945, as farm women’s lives were being transformed by the realities of modern agriculture. Author Jenny Barker Devine demonstrates that in an era when technology, depopulation, and rapid economic change dramatically altered rural life, midwestern women met these challenges with their own feminine vision of farm life. Their “agrarian feminisms” offered an alternative to, but not necessarily a rejection of, second-wave feminism.

Focusing on women in four national farm organizations in Iowa—the Farm Bureau, the Farmers Union, the National Farm Organization, and the Porkettes—Devine highlights specific moments in time when farm women had to reassess their roles and strategies for preserving and improving their way of life. Rather than retreat from the male-dominated world of agribusiness and mechanized production, postwar women increasingly asserted their identities as agricultural producers and demanded access to public spaces typically reserved for men.