Chores First, Then a Commute : Many Rural Women Take Jobs Off the Farm to Help Maintain Homes

Montana farm wife Anne Smith lives 100 miles from home so that her teacher’s salary can help her husband stay on his ancestral land.

Iowa farm wife Denise O’Brien commutes 160 miles a day so that her family can keep its dairy herd and apple orchard.

The farm crisis of the 1980s has dramatically changed the traditional role of mothers, wives and daughters in rural America.

For some, it’s an awakening, a chance to carve out a niche. For others, especially older women without advanced education who must seek minimum-wage jobs far from home, it is a wrenching separation from a peaceful life style into a rigid routine that has doubled their workload.

Traditional Role

For generations, farm women were stay-at-home helpmates who tended gardens, canned food, bottle-fed sick lambs and calves, supervised 4-H Clubs, drove tractors at planting time and trucks at threshing time, kept the books, and generally provided a second pair of eyes, ears and hands when husbands needed assistance.

A study of 330 Nebraska farm women found they spent nearly 68 hours a week at unpaid domestic labor, worked an average of 22 hours a week on farm chores, and spent five hours every week in volunteer activities.

The study, completed recently by Wayne State College in Nebraska, found that 37% also worked off the farm, earning an average $160 a week for 30 hours’ work.

The survey concluded that farm women’s total work, excluding volunteer service, is worth an average of $27,446 annually, while farm men contribute a median of $23,672 in income for labor on and off the farm.

53% in Work Force

Census data indicate that in 1986, 53% of all farm women were in the work force, compared to just under 23% in 1960. Of those farm wives working away from home, 78% cited economic reasons for their outside employment, according to a University of Nebraska study.

“I wonder sometimes how long I can keep this up,” said Denise O’Brien, who heads the Rural Women’s Leadership Development Project for Prairiefire, a farm-advocacy group based in Des Moines.

“I get up with my husband at 5 a.m., do chores, leave home by 6, drive 80 miles to put in a full day here, drive home, do chores, spend time with the kids, and fall into bed by 10:30,” said the 39-year-old mother of three.

“All of us working off the land are just trying to keep everything together: bring in money, keep the house clean, keep the kids involved in activities, pay extra attention to our husbands because they’re having a rough time right now. We’re trying to be everything to everybody. But it’s incredibly stressful.”

13-Year Struggle

O’Brien and her husband, Larry Harris, have a dairy herd and grow strawberries and raspberries to sell. Their apple orchard is about to mature. They have struggled 13 years, sometimes depending on food stamps for groceries, to make a go of their farm.

“We had this dream of farming organically, and my assumption was that I’d always be farming right next to my husband,” said O’Brien. “Sometimes, when I have to stay home from work for a day, and I’m out in the orchard, I get this real longing and I think, ‘This is what I intended it to be like.’ And I realize that when I’m home, it depresses me, because that is where I really want to spend my life, in the orchard, not in Des Moines.”

O’Brien, who grew up in Atlantic, Iowa, but had no intention of staying there until she met her husband, said she believes farm women are willing to sacrifice their own goals for their mates’ happiness, “which I guess is very anti-feminist.”

‘Is It Worth It?’

“But the question that doesn’t seem to be surfacing is, ‘Is this worth it, or should we get out?’ People are avoiding that issue, especially women, who are by nature protective and nurturing,” she said. “We know it’s something our husbands want to do, so we don’t think a lot of our own internal goals, we just put up with the stress.

“I think the couples that confront that issue and talk about it are on the road to breaking up their marriage.”

Texas Agriculture Department economist Heather Ball, a farm girl who left rural Idaho to earn a living in Austin, says: “America has lost nearly 600,000 farmers and ranchers since 1981, and today farmers are going broke at a rate of about 2,500 a week. That creates heavy stress in rural families.”

It also creates identity crises in a segment of society where family roles have always been clearly, even rigidly, defined. Because the farmer has been the historic breadwinner, having a wife who brings in most of the money is like having a gorilla at Thanksgiving dinner: Everybody knows it’s there, but nobody will acknowledge it.

Can’t Share Stress

A recent seven-state survey of 1,067 farmers and their wives coordinated by the University of Nebraska found that few wives believe they can share their stress with their husbands. Less than one-third said their families are helpful or supportive.

Anne Smith says she and her husband, Doug, have wrestled with that crisis ever since she announced five years ago that she was going back to college to get her degree so she could earn extra money.

“I’d been commuting 50 miles each way to work (as a secretary) for $4.36 an hour. Then gas went up so I had to quit,” said Anne, 31, of Bainville, Mont. “I wanted to improve our situation, but Doug fought me tooth and nail. I think he thought he would lose me.

“So I did it on my own. My mom and mother-in-law told me the only jobs for an educated woman around here were teaching or nursing so I decided to become a teacher. I was tired of being a peon. I wanted more.

‘Not Socially Acceptable’

“I borrowed money from my mom and went to night school. I did well, and suddenly Doug became my biggest supporter. That was the first time I ever stood up to him--and probably the last. What I did was not socially acceptable. Everybody assumed I was leaving Doug. It was real hard on him.”

Embracing calculus and trigonometry at 26, she was soon getting 4.0 grades at Minot State College in North Dakota. But the separation was wrenching.

“There were some bad, bad years there,” said Doug Smith. In 1980 he bought from his grandmother the land his grandfather had homesteaded in 1908. “It was a terrible drought year. In fact, I’ve only had one good year, ‘87, in the last nine.”

With his wife at school during the week, Smith became a part-time trucker hauling hay throughout the West. When his wife graduated in 1987, the couple was optimistic about finally being reunited when Anne got a teaching job close to home.

“But the only job I could get was tending bar in Bainville. My depression was terrible. I’d spent all this money, Doug was counting on my extra income, which wasn’t there, and then there was no reward for all the effort.”

For a year she searched five counties for a job. Finally, she heard about an opening in Flaxville, Mont., a town of 150 people 93 miles north of her home, up near the Canadian border. Competing against dozens of other applicants, she landed the job of high school math teacher in 1988.

“I teach 10 classes, and I’m the pep club adviser, cheerleading adviser, National Honor Society adviser, computer coordinator and junior class adviser,” she said. “I spend at least three hours a day preparing for classes, have to be at school at 7:40 a.m., and usually get finished about 11 p.m., because of extra activities.”

Monday till Friday she lives in a house owned by the school district, which she shares with the football coach’s family.

“I enjoy my job, but I want to be closer to home. It’s just that there are no jobs, and when one does open up, there are literally hundreds of teachers trying to get it,” said the outgoing woman who grew up on a North Dakota farm. “After college I swore I’d never be separated from Doug again, but I’ve done it because I’ve had to.

“It’s been good for our marriage in that it’s made us be more self-reliant, but I get so terribly lonesome. Flaxville is 12 miles from a movie or a grocery store. Our phone bill is terrible.”

This year she bought her first new car, a sports model her husband describes as “one of them flashy single-women lookin’ things.” Come Friday afternoons during the school year, she is in it heading home to Bainville.

“I never pay attention to the weather. No matter what’s happening, I’m coming home to Doug.”

Always alert for job possibilities closer to home, Anne Smith isn’t optimistic that she will find something soon. She says she’ll keep commuting as long as she has to to keep them on the farm.

“I’ve learned to love this place. This is our dream. If I could have my wish I’d be home and have a maid to come in and clean my house and all that. . . . Then I’d just sit out there on that tractor all day long. ‘Course, I’d have a four-wheel-drive tractor. But if Doug died tomorrow, I’d leave.”