Women's Work in Agriculture:
Divergent Trends in England
and America, 1800 to 1930
SALLY McMURRY
Pennsylvania State University
English cheeses—Cheddar, Gloucester single or double, Cheshire, Stilton,
and others—are familiar throughout the Anglo-American world, whether
consumed after dinner in English homes or as key ingredients of American
tex-mex or vegetarian cuisine. These famous cheeses originated long ago but
in most cases reached a zenith in quantity and in reputation during the last
century. Little is known about the history of English cheese dairying, despite
its fame and its importance to agriculture past and present. Its economic
background has received only slight attention, and its social history is almost
entirely unexplored; yet clearly the social structure of English cheese dairying
has historically exerted a major influence on the industry, because it traditionally depended upon a distinctive sexual division of labor. The history of
women's work in English cheese dairying has implications for a broader
historiographical question: When and why did women gradually disappear
from many kinds of agricultural work in Western societies?
Some historians have maintained that women's work in English cheesemaking was curtailed as early as the nineteenth century. In her influential Women
Workers and the Industrial Revolution (1930), Ivy Pinchbeck argued that the
agricultural revolution of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with
its attendant specialization and enlarged scale, curtailed women's participation in the business of cheese production. Earlier, she maintained, when
dairying was part of domestic work, women had concerned themselves with
feeding cows, rearing calves, and even selling the cheese in local markets and
fairs. Pinchbeck thought that the advent of specialized dairying and especially
renting cows meant that women's work in cheese dairying was reduced simply
to processing the milk. She cited large-scale cheese dairying in Dorset and
Somerset. "Dairymen" (a new social category) raised and fed cows and sold
the cheese through factors, also men. With this narrowing of the scope of
work, Pinchbeck believed, women lost business ability, independence, and
I would like to acknowledge those who helped me at various stages of this project: Penelope
Carew Hunt; Mary Gryspeerdt; Patrick O'Brien; Nancy Osterud; Lena Sommesstad; the anonymous reviewer for CSSH; and especially St. Hilda's College, Oxford, for its generous support.
0010-4175/92/2406-2365 $5.00 © 1992 Society for Comparative Study of Society and History
248
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W O M E N ' S WORK IN AGRICULTURE
249
initiative. More recently, Mary Bouquet has re-cast this argument in slightly
different terms, maintaining that capitalist dairy farming brought about the
decline of those women's tasks which were complementary to men's and the
parallel rise of separate, subordinate tasks for women. Both portray precapitalist conditions as superior to what followed, yet recent scholarship on
the premodern period by Judith Bennett, Barbara Hanawalt, and others has
seriously questioned the notion of a golden age for women in precapitalist
society.'
In current historiography, the picture of a consistent, unequivocal decline in
women's status with capitalism is giving way to an analysis that not only
emphasizes both change (whether improvement or decline) and continuity but
also accounts for geographical, class, and occupational variation. The history
of women's work in English farmhouse cheesemaking between 1800 and
1930 is a case in point. It shows that Pinchbeck, by focusing upon atypical
operations, missed a substantial element of continuity in women's participation: that women, in fact, were central to cheesemaking throughout the period. Their persistence in English cheese dairying contrasts with their early
disappearance from English arable agriculture (in the south and east) and from
American cheese dairying. A brief comparison of these three divergent developments yields some reasons for the differences among them. English cheesemaking women worked in a setting in which cultural values, agricultural
conditions, and the nature of their work combined to support their continued
participation. In the other cases, one or more of these elements was lacking.
The evidence on women's work in dairying is ample but, as in most histor1
Ivy Pinchbeck, Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution (1930; reprint, London:
Virago Books, 1981), 7-42; Alice Clark, Working Life of Women in Seventeenth Century (London; George Routledge, 1919); Mary Bouquet, Family, Servants, and Visitors: The Farm Household in 19th and 20th Century Devon (Norwich: Geo Books, 1985); Bridget Hill, Women, Work,
and Sexual Politics in 18th Century England (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 24, 46; Judith
Bennett, Women in the Medieval English Countryside (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987),
5-17; Barbara Hanawalt, ed., Women and Work in Preindustrial Europe (Bloomington, Indiana:
Indiana University Press, 1986); Joan Thirsk, ed., Agrarian History, 1640-1750, 406, 486-9,
501; W. Thwaites, "Women in the Market Place: Oxfordshire, c. 1690-1800," Midland History,
9 (1984), 23-43; Davidoff, "The Role of Gender," 205. Women's control seldom extended to the
disposal of the proceeds of their work, not to mention the legal right to them. In the case of
cheese, allegedly the rise of (male) factors compromised women's ability to market cheese at
fairs. These factors no doubt gradually eclipsed fairs as markets developed. But merely to sell the
cheese had not necessarily implied a woman's access to the money; Davidoff cites a case in which
an Essex man appropriated all but a fraction of the money from his wife's cheese sales. Until
further historical research establishes the formal and informal influences women could bring to
bear over daily finances, this question will remain unresolved. For a review of recent historiography, see Olwen Hufton's review essay in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 14
(August 1988), 223-8. See also Maxine Berg, "Women's Work, Mechanization, and the Early
Phases of Industrialization in England," in Patrick Joyce, ed., The Historical Meanings of Work
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 64-97; Janet Thomas, "Women and Capitalism: Oppression or Emancipation?," Comparative Studies in Society and History, 30:3 (1988),
534-48; and Lindsey Charles and Lorna Duffin, eds., Women and Work in Pre-Industrial England (Croom Helm, 1985).
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25O
SALLY MCMURRY
ical research, occurs in patches. Statistical data on production and labor are
fragmentary and often inconsistent, yielding little more than rough approximations. According to census reports, for example, not a single person
practiced the occupation of dairymaid, even in the years of the mid-nineteenth
century when thousands of women were making tons of butter and cheese!
Printed materials, such as dairying manuals, travel accounts, Board of Agriculture reports, agricultural journals, and the reports of the various parliamentary commissions are much more valuable in building a multifaceted account
of nineteenth-century dairying. Archival records, particularly the farm records
collections of the Institute of Agricultural History (Reading) and the Somerset
Rural Life Museum (Glastonbury) contain memoirs, farm accounts, interviews, and educational records. Artifacts can also be helpful, as they often
convey a vivid idea of what the work was actually like. These sources permit a
general survey of trends in England during the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries.
Most of the distinctive cheeses of the various English regions had emerged
by the seventeenth century, when major cheese-producing districts existed in
North Wiltshire, Cheshire, the Vale of Berkeley, Somerset, Dorset, and Suffolk. During the nineteenth century, cheese dairying expanded its output and
shifted to concentrate in the north and west, especially Cheshire, Derbyshire,
Shropshire, Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, Somerset, and Lancashire. At its peak
in the mid-nineteenth century, the national annual production probably
reached about 1.8 million hundredweight; the historian, David Taylor, has
estimated that about 40 percent of milk produced went into cheese. Opportunities for women in cheesemaking in the north and west abounded, though
women in eastern England probably lost opportunities. Keith Snell and Ann
Kussmaul have noted that conditions for women agricultural workers were
more favorable in the pastoral areas than in the south and east: Seasonal
unemployment was less marked, and traditions of indoor farm service persisted longer.2
2
Joan Thirsk, ed., Regional Farming Systems, Vol. I of The Agrarian History of England and
Wales, 1640-1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), chs. 4, 5, 6, 10, 11; Eric
Kerridge, The Agricultural Revolution (B. Batsford, 1967), 86, 123-8; P. R. Edwards, "The
Development of Dairying on the North Shropshire Plain in the 17th Century," Midland History, 4
(Autumn 1978), 175-91; J. D. Chambers and G. Mingay, The Agricultural Revolution (B.
Batsford, 1966), 35-39, 110; G. Mingay, ed., The Agrarian History of England and Wales,
1750-1850, vol. VI (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), ch. 2; Joseph Harding,
"Recent Improvements in Dairy Practice," Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society of England
(JRASE), 21 (1860), 82-92; "Cheese-Making," Farmer's Magazine (Edinburgh) (FM) (1862),
522-4; "Cheese—Its Manufacture and Quality," FM (1859), 322-3; J. R. Bond, "Derbyshire
Farming—Past and Present," JRASE, 93 (1932), 169; David Taylor, "The Development of
English Dairy Farming, c. 1860-1930" (D.Phil, thesis, Oxford University, 1971); David Taylor,
"Growth and Structural Change in the English Dairy Industry, 1860-1930," Agricultural History
Review, 35 (1987), 47-65; G. E. Fussell, The English Dairy Farmer, 1500-1900 (Frank Cass
and Co., 1966); William Palin, "On the Farming of Cheshire," JRASE, 5 (1845), 87-88;
Leonore Davidoff, "The Role of Gender in the 'First Industrial Nation': Agriculture in England,
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W O M E N ' S WORK IN AGRICULTURE
251
Cheesemaking operations varied in size and in social composition. The
most characteristic cheese dairying farm was the small (under 100 acres),
mostly pastoral, farm operated mainly by family labor. In some regions,
notably Dorset, dairy farmers could rent cows from larger farms, making all
the cheese and splitting the costs and obligations of providing pasturage and
winter feed. Middling and large farms also produced cheese; on these, the
farmer employed dairymaids and other laborers. Output varied, but even on
small farms an annual make of several tons was common; the cheese was sold
at local fairs and markets, or (increasingly) to itinerant factors, that is, middlemen who specialized in the cheese trade.3
The success of a cheese dairy farm depended upon a social arrangement in
which certain tasks were consistently allocated to one sex or the other. Men
fed, herded, and sheltered the cows. They worked in the fields, growing and
harvesting feed; tended other livestock; and maintained pastures and meadows. Women, by universal testimony, made the cheese. They also usually
made rennets (the coagulating agent procured from calves' stomachs); reared
calves and often pigs; made butter; did housework; and cared for children.
This arrangement reflected longstanding patterns common in most of the
West, in which labor was divided between outdoor (male) and indoor (female)
tasks, except for milking, which was shared.4
On most cheesemaking farms, the farmer's wife and daughters did the work
1780-1850," in Rosemary Crompton and Michael Mann, eds., Gender and Stratification (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1986), 190-214; K. D. M. Snell, "Agricultural Seasonal Unemployment,
the Standard of Living and Women's Work in the South and East, 1690-1860," Economic History
Review, 34 (1981), 421-3; Ann Kussmaul, Servants in Husbandry in Early Modern England
(Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1981).
3
C. S. Orwin and E. H. Whetham, History of British Agriculture 1846-1914 (Longman,
Green, and Co., 1964), 144; Frederick Law Olmsted, Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in
England (1859; reprint, Ann Arbor, Michigan, n.d.), 128; Taylor, "English Dairy Fanning,"
190-8; Elihu Burritt, A Walk from London to Land's End and Back (Sampson Low, Son and
Marston, 1865), 171-5; The Dairy (Charles Knight, 1843), 47; Thomas Acland and William
Sturge, The Farming of Somersetshire (John Murray, 1851), 52; William Livesay, "On CheeseMaking," FM (1842), 40-41; J. H. Burton, "The Letting of Dairies—A West Country Custom,"
Journal of the British Dairy Farmers Association {JBDFA), 26 (1912), 28-35; George Cooke,
Topographical and Statistical Description of the County of Somerset (Sherwood, Neely, and
Jones, 1820), 35; Thomas Rudge, General View of the Agriculture of the County of Gloucester
(Richard Phillips, 1807), 328-9; Joan Thirsk, ed., Agrarian Change, vol. II of The Agrarian
History of England and Wales, 1640-1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), ch.
17.
4
William Marshall, The Rural Economy of Gloucestershire (G. Nichol, 1796), I, 272; Acland
and Sturge, Somersetshire, 133; Rudge, Gloucester, 328-9; William Howitt, The Rural Life of
England (Longman, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longman, 1838), 152; Cuthbert W. Johnson, The
Modern Dairy and Cowkeeper (J. Ridgway, 1850), 8; G. E. Andrews, Modern Husbandry
(Nathaniel Cooke, 1853), 389-90; Parliamentary Commission on the Employment of Children,
Young Persons, and Women in Agriculture, First Report, 1867-68 (P.P. 1867-68, XVII), 10,
41, 115, 122, 123; "British and American Agriculture," Genesee Farmer, June 1853 (Rochester,
New York), 178-9; Thomas Wedge, General View of the Agriculture of the County Palatine of
Chester (C. Macrae, 1794), 60; Susan Amussen, An Ordered Society (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1988), 68-69.
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252
SALLY MCMURRY
of making cheese, with the skill and knowledge passed down from mother to
daughter. Even when they were able to hire assistants, farm wives supervised
production scrupulously. William Marshall reported in 1796 that the farm
mistress in North Wiltshire often performed "the whole operation of cheesemaking, . . . except the last breaking, vatting, etc., in which she has an
assistant." Testimony given before the 1843 and 1867 Parliamentary Commissions on the Employment of Women and Children in Agriculture and in
agricultural reports and journals show little change in this pattern over the
century. Nevertheless, on some farms highly skilled dairymaids, usually indoor servants, performed the work for relatively good wages.5
Regardless of their status in the household, cheesemaking women pursued
an exacting and arduous trade. Cheesemaking was exacting because so many
variables influenced the process. Methods varied, of course, from region to
region; and each dairy woman had her own preferences. Certain features of the
work were common to cheesemaking everywhere: It required vigilant and
unceasing attention, scrupulous observation, finely tuned senses, and meticulous cleanliness. A Mrs. Hay ward of the Vale of Berkeley described her
method in the Farmer's Magazine in the early 1850s. She began by stressing
that
The management of a dairy should be conducted with the greatest regularity. Every
operation should be performed precisely at the proper time. Either hastening or delaying the execution of it will cause cheese of an inferior quality to be made of milk from
which the best may be obtained. A dairy-maid is selected for skill, cleanliness, and
strict attention to her business.5
She then described the process for making Gloucester cheese in three pages of
close detail, with strict specifications on straining and heating the milk,
adding rennet, cutting the curd, scalding it, vatting, pressing, salting, and
curing. While the cheeses were ripening, they had to be washed, trimmed,
turned, and sometimes greased. The cheesemaker had to make adjustments in
the daily process, depending upon the outside temperature, humidity, even
wind speed, and on what the cows had been eating.
Cheesemaking was also arduous. During the busiest season, which extended from May to September, the work continued day and night. Numerous
observers and workers agreed that the hours were long, from early morning
5
Marshall, Gloucestershire, II, 156-9; Parliamentary Commission on the Employment of
Women and Children in Agriculture, Report, 1843 (P.P. XII), 5, 60, 61, 65, 67, 125; Parliamentary Commission on the Employment of Children, Young Persons, and Women, 1867, Second
Report (1868-69, P.P. XIII), 4, 136, 250, 491-2, 494; James Caird, English Agriculture in 1850
and 1851 (Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1852), 252; Howitt, Rural Life, I, 151-2;
William Marshall, The Rural Economy of the West of England (G. Nichols, 1796), 1, 107;
William Youatt, The Complete Grazier (Cradock and Co., 1846), 144; Acland and Sturge,
Somersetshire, 52; W. Carrington, "On Dairy-Farming," JRASE, 2nd ser., 1 (1865), 363; George
Beesley, A Report on the Slate of Agriculture in Lancashire (Preston: Dobson and Son, 1849), 28.
6
"Cheese-Making," Genesee Farmer, August 1854 (Rochester, New York), 277-80.
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W O M E N ' S WORK IN AGRICULTURE
253
until after dark. The work, particularly the task of turning the cheeses, which
often weighed fifty pounds or more, was physically demanding. Thomas
Wedge observed (1794) that "the labour of turning and cleaning cheese is
performed almost universally by women; and that in large dairies where the
cheeses are upwards of 140 pounds each, upon an average; this they do
without much appearance of exertion, and with a degree of ease, which is a
matter of surprise even in this country [Cheshire]." The exclusive assignment
of the work to women meant confinement, even on Sundays, to tend to its
demands. Some contemporary observers thought the toil of cheesemaking
resulted in overwork and physical exhaustion. A Wiltshire physician testifying before the 1843 Commission claimed to have been "applied to for advice"
by dairy women suffering from the "symptoms of overwork."7
For many dairy women, cheesemaking frequently imposed conflict with
family obligations. This is reflected in the recollections of someone who grew
up in a Somerset cheesemaking household:
When we were all young, Mother couldn' leave the cheese tubs tuh see us. When the
cheese were fast she had tuh be there. . . . We used tuh go in an' say, "Mam, We'm
hungry. We Wan' summit tuh eat." An' if the curd was forward enough she'd hit a
piece off an' say, "ere, push this in thee mouth and geddon out. I ab'n got time to play
withee now."8
The often-cited references to the enormous amount of work involved in
cheesemaking are reminders that in a context of legal and cultural disability,
women could not always control the circumstances of their work nor even
choose which type of cheese dairying would be the farm's main pursuit.
Though men's and women's duties were clearly defined, cheese dairying
required close collaboration between men and women. Where cheese was the
main product, the choice of fodder crops, the makeup and maintenance of
pastures, and the timing and conditions of milking all had a direct bearing
upon the cheesemaking process (and its outcome), and women continued in
the nineteenth century to participate in decisions about these matters. Even
where dairymen rented cows, they occasionally turned the entire operation
over to their wives. George Cooke noted in his 1820 description of Somerset
that the smallest farms were dairies, in which "many instances have been
known of . . . little farmers bringing up a large family in a very respectable
way. In these cases the wife undertakes the whole management of the cows,
and the husband goes out to day labour." Other cases of overlap were less
extreme. Mrs. Hayward, for example, insisted upon a rigorous discipline and
cleanliness in milking. A dairy woman interviewed by Thomas Rudge threatened to leave off cheesemaking if her employer did not stop dunging his
7
Wedge, Chester, 57; 1843 Parliamentary Report, 5, 67; Marshall, Gloucestershire, I, 265;
Acland and Sturge, Somersetshire, 53.
8
Quoted in Chris Howell, Memories of Cheddar (Chilcompton, Chris Howell, 1984), 89. It is
not clear who is speaking, but Bill Parsons is named in the acknowledgements for that page.
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254
SALLY MCMURRY
pastures, for she believed that the resulting grass made poor cheese. No
dairy woman wanted to deal with milk from cows munching on daisies, wild
garlic, or turnips, all of which imparted their flavor to the milk. Mrs. Agnes
Scott's book on Dairy Management (1861) revealed an accomplished
dairywoman intimately versed in every aspect of her cows' diet. Milking, of
course, was done by men and women together; numerous published materials
referred to farmers who hired both men and women to milk, and novelists,
perhaps most notably Thomas Hardy, portrayed the milking shed as a meeting
place for the sexes. If this pattern extended to the typical cheese dairy operation, the necessity for collaboration between men and women is evident.9
In the actual cheesemaking, the sexual division of labor was used to protect
and even to enhance women's position. The positive uses of a sexual division
of labor for women are evident in published accounts and descriptions of the
world of cheesemaking. These descriptions appeared as cheese dairying expanded and as English cheese became widely known. They are commonly
cited to illustrate the varied and complex processes of home cheesemaking,
but another aspect of their contents—the strong commitment of English
dairy women to maintaining their traditions, and their reluctance to share
information with outsiders, especially men—deserves attention.
Male writers' complaints about dairywomen's stubbornness occurred consistently from the first extensive reports in the late eighteenth century through
the next fifty years. Josiah Twamley gathered the material for his Dairying
Exemplified (1784) from dairy women and acknowledged their help in his
introduction. But once these obligations were dispensed with, he proceeded to
criticise dairywomen for what he regarded as their narrow-minded outlook.
Twamley, a cheese factor, was vexed with the unpredictable and uneven
quality of farmhouse cheese. It was an unthankful office, he declared, to try
and persuade dairywomen to change to a more rational system. They were too
"often very partial to their Mothers" and demanded, "What does he know of
Dairying or how should a Man know anything about cheesemaking?" Charging that these hidebound women were not aided by "Philosophy, by which
they might learn the different qualities, and effect of the materials they use, or
knowledge, how to apply them in a Physical, or Practical manner," he accused dairywomen of refusing to be "Open to Conviction, or . . . [to] pay
any regard to my Opinion or Advice."10
There was another dimension to this phenomenon. Cheesemaking women
not only resisted the changes writers suggested they implement; they actively
protected their traditions from men's curiosity in the first place. William
9
Cooke, Somerset, 35; Burton, "Letting of Dairies," 35; Hayward, quoted in the Genesee
Farmer, August 1854 (Rochester, New York), 277-80; Rudge, Gloucester, 285; Agnes Scott,
Dairy Management, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1861), 5-15; Howitt,
Rural Life, 133; Marshall, Gloucestershire, II, 96, 105; Farmer's Herald (Chester) (FH), 1
(October 1854), 75; FH, 1 (December 1854), 90-91.
10
Josiah Twamley, Dairying Exemplified (Warwick: J. Sharp, 1784), 9-11, 16-17.
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W O M E N ' S WORK IN AGRICULTURE
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Marshall toured Gloucestershire and North Wiltshire for the Board of Agriculture in 1796, and found the cheesemakers there to be secretive in the
extreme:
[Cultivation is a] public employment, open to anyone who travels across the site of
cultivation; [cheesemaking is] a private manufactory,—a craft,—a mystery secluded
from the public eye; and what may appear extraordinary, the minutiae are seldom
familiar, even to the master of the dairy, in which they are practised! The dairyroom is
consecrated to the sex; and it is generally understood to require some interest, and
address, to gain full admission to its rites.
He concluded with a complaint similar to Twamley's: "The art is evidently
destitute of principles. So far from being scientific, it is altogether immechanical. It may be said to be at present, a knack involved in mystery." This
sense on male observers' part of a mystery inaccessible to them persisted well
into the next century. William Youatt (1846), prominent agricultural writer,
noticed it, as did the American author, landscape architect, and traveller
Frederick Law Olmsted, in 1859. In 1845, Henry White, a longtime Cheshire
resident, wrote that "I have not solicited the privilege of prying into the
mysteries pursued in these dairies, nor could I expect to have been so indulged
if I had. . . ."He also noted that in Cheshire, the ancient process of "thrusting," which had required cumbersome poles operated by men or boys, had
disappeared, and "both poles and men are now almost entirely expelled from
the Cheshire dairies."11
Though some women (like Gloucestershire's Mrs. Hayward) shared their
secrets, testimony in published materials consistently points to male ignorance about cheesemaking method. A Mr. Willis won a prize for cheese in
1861, but when queried about it by other farmers at a club meeting, he replied
that "he could not interest them in it, as he left it entirely to his wife. They
[the men] took the milk into the house, and then considered they were done
with it. If they wanted information, they must ask his wife." The chairman of
the meeting was highly amused, saying that he "thought now he had a call
upon the lady, as her husband had given him the liberty, and after a few other
humorous observations," he then continued the meeting. The humor of the
situation was not so much that Willis appeared ridiculous for his ignorance,
but that his inept handling of the situation seemed to suggest that allowing
men to question his wife about her cheesemaking and what she did in the
cheese room was the same as permitting male strangers to visit her, a married
woman, in her private sanctuary.12
11
Marshall, Gloucestershire, II, 184-5; Youatt, The Complete Grazier, 137; Olmstead,
Walks and Talks, 127; Henry White, "A Detailed Account of the Making of Cheshire Cheese,"
JRASE, 6 (1845-6), 107, 111. See also "Cheese-Making," FM (1862), 523; Rudge, Gloucester,
297; Wedge, Chester, 51-57; John Bravendar, "Fanning of Gloucestershire," JRASE, 11 (1860),
153.
12
"Cheese-Making," FM (1862), 524. Some women rejected publicity out of concern for
competition, but most also seem to have explicitly excluded men.
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SALLY MCMURRY
Women's near-monopoly of cheesemaking knowledge was reinforced with
beliefs about gender that mingled cultural and biological ideas. William
Marshall thought that cheesemaking's "fair professors . . . claim[ed] a degree of NATURAL CLEVERNESS, to which we have no pretensions." Other
writers found women's supposedly "gentle, "delicate," or "patient" temperament well suited to milking and to cheese production.13
Leonore Davidoff has interpreted the writings of men like Twamley and
Marshall as signs of men's appropriation of a moneymaking skill possessed by
women and therefore as another symptom of the decline in agricultural women's status and occupational opportunities. Davidoff cites Twamley's writings
as a sign of "specialized organization accompanying] a move toward more
scientific methods of cheesemaking" and of a "shift from craft skills to more
experimental methods." But the shrill tone and the repetition over time in the
pattern of commentary among male observers suggests frustration more than
success at gaining access to this female-dominated realm. In short, the people
these writers most wanted to heed their message ignored it. There are several
reasons why this was probably the case. Few of the writers' targets were likely
to read books on cheesemaking. Moreover, even if the factors passed the
message along, male writers possessed no claim to knowledge that women
cheesemakers did not already have. Bacteria and enzymes were unknown, and
so the basis of published method was empirical observation—the same as that
followed by traditional cheesemakers.14
Thus on many English cheese dairy farms, women were able to exercise a
substantial amount of control over their work. For some, this extended to
hiring, as farmers' wives took charge of obtaining dairymaids. An 1829 letter
from one Cheshire woman to another described her requirements for a
dairymaid: "I want a clean, active, stirring woman—one that is not afraid of
work." She would pay £6 1 Is 6d per year and required her dairymaid to be
"steady in her conduct and go regularly to church."15
Because of their skills, cheesemaking women often enjoyed an elevated
status in family and community. Historically, economic activity of women has
not always translated into social status, but in the case of English cheesemaking it apparently often did. A historian of Cheshire, W. B. Mercer, noted that
hired cheesemakers there were entitled to live with the family and to share
their meals and (alone among the servants) to receive the title "Mrs." or
"Miss." David Underdown suggests that early-modern Somerset's skimmington ritual can be interpreted as a sign of cheesemaking women's status.
13
Marshall, Gloucestershire, II, 185; J. Burke, Farming for Ladies (John Murray, 1844), 408;
Matthew Milburn, The Cow: Dairy Husbandry and Cattle Breeding (William S. Orr, 1851), 7779; "Cheshire Farming—its Present Aspect and Future Prospects," FH, 11 (May 1864), 36-37.
14
Davidoff, "Role of Gender," 204; Val Cheke, The Story of Cheesemaking in Britain
(Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959), 1-8.
15
W. B. Mercer, "Two Centuries of Cheshire Cheese Farming," JRASE, 98 (1937), 75;
Howitt, Rural Life, 248-9.
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W O M E N ' S WORK IN AGRICULTURE
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In this ritual, the community both ridiculed and vindicated a husband who had
been abused (physically or verbally) by his wife. Surrogates representing the
pair acted out a drama in which the person representing the man rode backward on a horse, holding a distaff, and the person representing the woman
beat him with a milk skimmer, an essential cheesemaking tool. Perhaps the
most compelling evidence of this status is contained in the many observations
about the economic importance of cheesemakers' activity to the household, as
summarized in the epigram "the pail pays the rent." James Caird estimated
that on many Cheshire farms, cheese accounted for as much as three-quarters
of farm income at mid-century. At the end of the century, a writer in the
Journal of the British Dairy Fanners' Association recalled that in the heyday
of farmhouse cheesemaking, the dairymaid had often been regarded as "the
head of the house." This reference is hyperbolic but nonetheless suggestive of
cheesemaking's unusual influence within the household.16
The sexual division of labor in American farm-based cheese dairying,
originally based upon English custom, eventually diverged in significant
ways. Colonists had brought British cheesemaking methods with them to
America, but in the generations following settlement, specialized cheesemaking knowledge atrophied because markets were scarce, cows seldom milked
year-round, and cheese but an insignificant element in the diversified Northern farming enterprise and diet. Not until the period after about 1825 did
cheese dairying emerge as a specialty in American agriculture. In the emerging dairying districts of central New York, New England, and Ohio, cheese
dairying farms producing thousands of pounds annually became common.
Under conditions different from those in England,American cheese dairying
households fashioned a different division of labor. Most strikingly, although
women did much of the work, Americans possessed no deeply entrenched
commitment, social or intellectual, to women's involvement. English dairywomen's tendency to "consecrate the dairy-room to the sex" was notably
lacking. Moreover, men participated in cheesemaking to a greater extent.
Some were employed on farms as head cheesemaker: In a court case regarding
a patent for cheesemaking equipment, several men testified that they had been
hired to make cheese. Occasionally proprietors made the cheese themselves.
New York State farmer Timothy Jackson's 1863 claim that he had not missed a
cheesemaking day in thirty years was not unusual, and men participated in
exchanges in the agricultural journals about cheesemaking.17
16
Mercer, "Two Centuries," 85; David Underdown, "The Taming of the Scold," in Anthony
Fletcher and John Stevenson, eds., Order and Disorder in Early Modern England (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1985), 116-37; Acland and Sturge, Somersetshire, 52; Caird,
English Agriculture, 252; "Devon and Cornwall Conference," JDBFA, 13 (1898), 71. Susan
Amussen, in An Ordered Society, argues that yeomen in pastoral villages more often appointed
their wives sole executors of their wills than did farmers in arable areas (p. 84).
17
Utica [New York] Weekly Herald, August 26. 1873; Black River Herald, May 21, 1863,
(Boonville, New York); Moses Eames, "Plan for a Cheese House," Transactions of the New
York State Agricultural Society, 11 (1851), 264.
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258
SALLY MCMURRY
Several demographic, historical, and cultural factors may help to explain.
One possible, though speculative, reason for the greater degree of men's
involvement in American cheesemaking has to do with sex ratios. Disproportionate numbers of men emigrated from England during the nineteenth century, and (especially among young adults) women outnumbered men in most
districts, including the West Country dairying districts. In Somerset in 1861,
for example, women in the age group 20 to 24 years old outnumbered men by
20,500 to 15,400, or about 133 women for every 100 men. By contrast, in the
central New York dairying region, there were more men than women (106
men for every 100 women), at least in cheese dairying households. Certainly
these large-scale comparisons must be regarded as tentative, in the absence of
British data from the local level; but these very practical circumstances may
have influenced the sexual division of labor in the two countries.18
Second, in America cheesemaking was often new to all concerned, male
and female; and no long-established custom dictated that all of the work must
be done by women. Moreover, the reason for taking up cheese production was
not that Americans discovered it as food but that cheese offered better returns
than the old staples of wool or grain. Men's participation in cheesemaking
was afforded cultural sanction by cheese's status as a commodity. They studied cheesemaking methods with an eye for efficiency and shipping quality;
flavor was often a minor consideration. In this context, the association of
women with cheesemaking was a loose one and depended more upon immediate economic circumstance than upon cultural inheritance or generational ties.
Under these circumstances, women were unable to monopolize the craft skills
of cheesemaking and found fewer rewards, material or psychological, for the
heavy toil of home cheesemaking. By the 1850s, complaints from women
about the excessive labor of dairying began to appear in the agricultural press.
Farm daughters, well educated (often ironically thanks to income from cheese
sales), sought less arduous and more prestigious work, especially as teachers
in the rapidly developing public school systems.19
Thus the participation of women in American cheesemaking, never wholly
committed in the first place, was under attack when economic conditions
favorable to centralization appeared during the era of the American Civil War.
In 1861 the Union government switched to paper currency and went off the
gold standard; prices jumped for goods exported to Great Britain (still on the
gold standard). Northern wheat and dairy products began to make up for
the loss of cotton revenue. In England, devastating droughts and an epidemic
of the dreaded rinderpest among cattle decimated English dairying capacity,
creating further opportunities for imports. In the case of cheese, sustained
demand from the English working classes also encouraged American pro-
1
\
|
I
j
18
Census of Great Britain (1861); Sally McMurry, "Culture and Agriculture in Central New
York: The Industrialization of Cheesemaking, 1826-85" (manuscript in progress).
19
Mrs. M. B. Bateham, column in the Ohio Cultivator, 4 (1848), 111-2.
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W O M E N ' S WORK IN AGRICULTURE
259
ducers to centralize. In response to these combined developments, American
cheesemakers set up factories in unprecedented numbers.20
The basic principle of cheese factories was simple. Farmers or their hired
workers hauled milk to the factory twice daily from a distance of up to five
miles, usually less. The number of patrons varied considerably, from fewer
than a dozen to as many as sixty or seventy, as did the number of cows whose
milk was collected from 150 to over 1,000. Factories of 300 to 600 cows were
the most common. Most factories produced from 100,000 to 200,000 pounds
of cheese per the season of May to November. Neither the technology used in
factory cheesemaking, a larger-scale and more sophisticated but not fundamentally changed version of home cheesemaking equipment, nor the methods
changed significantly before about 1890. The chief significance of the cheese
factory system lay in its capacity to mass-produce large quantities of a relatively uniform, middling-quality article. Factories quickly supplanted home
cheesemaking: By 1880 farm-made cheese comprised less than 5 percent of
the total United States output, which shot up from 103 million pounds in 1860
to 243 million pounds in 1880 and 298 million in 1900. Though women were
employed in the factories, the overall involvement of women was much
reduced. Factories were owned and managed by men who passed down
cheesemaking knowledge to their male employees.21
Why did American cheesemaking centralize so rapidly while the English
kept to farmhouse cheesemaking? One reason may be that the absence of
entrenched regional methods inhibited resistance to factories. Moreover, factories, run mainly by men, may have succeeded partly because American men
had not been so thoroughly excluded as had English men from cheesemaking
knowledge during the home production phase. Low land costs and favorable
exchange rates also helped the American cheese industry. The factories also
probably appealed to the individual American home cheesemaker because
they eliminated the time-consuming task of finding a market if the farmers
lacked, as they often did, close access to transportation and were not usually
served by specialized marketing agents. But most contemporaries (including
factory patrons themselves) agreed that, all things considered, for the individual farmer there was little or no financial difference between making
cheese at home and sending milk to the factory. The key advantage, cited
more often and more emphatically than any other and almost never challenged, was that it saved women's labor. American women accepted with
20
On Civil War prices, see Ralph Andreano, ed., The Economic Impact of the American Civil
War, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Shenkman, 1967), 1 4 - 1 5 ; David Gilchrist and W. David Lewis,
eds., Economic Change in the Civil War Era (Greenville, Delaware: Eleutherian Mills-Hagley
Foundation, 1964), 6 2 - 6 8 ; Taylor, "English Dairy Farming," 100.
21
Reports of the New York State Cheese Manufacturers Association, 1864-1868; United
States Census (1860, 1870, 1880, 1900); Eric Brunger, "Changes in the New York State Dairying
Industry, 1850-1900" (Ph.D. thesis, Syracuse University, 1954), 90; Eric Lampard, The Rise of
the Dairy Industry in Wisconsin (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1963).
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260
SALLY MCMURRY
alacrity the opportunity to be relieved of what they had come to regard as an
onerous burden without the compensation of special status. American supporters of the factory system argued that it would "greatly relieve the farmer's
wife." "The flesh and blood of our wives and daughters," proclaimed one
leading dairyman, "are of too much consequence to be worn out by this
ceaseless toil." 22
The land-grant colleges responsible for agricultural education, also established during the Civil War era, institutionalized the shift in dairying work
from women to men. These institutions developed agricultural colleges for
men with home economics departments for women. Very few women enrolled
in the dairying curriculum, which was located in the agricultural colleges.
Even the language of American cheese dairying reflected male appropriation
of this domain; it stressed technical and scientific expertise and dismissed
intuitive qualities associated with women. Thus American cheese dairying, in
the absence of a social setting supportive of women's participation, was
defeminized long before English cheese dairying.23
The increase in United States cheese production did not result in greater
domestic consumption. Overall per capita consumption there remained low, at
around four pounds per year, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From 1860 to 1900 the United States was a net exporter of cheese, with
the largest proportion of cheese by far sent to Britain, where annual per capita
consumption was an estimated eight pounds in 1878 and as much as eleven in
1905. Factory-made cheese found a market among the growing British manufacturing classes. American cheese was regarded as inferior in flavor, texture, and keeping quality to the best British-made cheese but significantly
better than the worst British farm-made product.24
Competition from this product severely challenged English cheesemakers.
Lower prices probably contributed to worsened labor conditions for English
dairywomen: They had to produce more, possibly with less help, to survive.
Agricultural commentators, such as P. A. Graham and H. Rider Haggard,
recorded their conversations with cheesemakers who struggled hard just to
break even. Many cheesemakers, especially those whose farms already produced milk, found that these conditions and the rise of the liquid milk trade
22
Transactions,
New York State Agricultural Society, 24 (1864), 242; American Agriculturist, 27 (February 1868), 58; Reports of the New York State Cheese Manufacturers Association (1864), 227.
23
On the land-grant college system, see Willard Cochrane, The Development of American
Agriculture: A Historical Analysis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979), 2 4 0 - 5 7 .
24
"Is Cheese or Butter Most Profitable?," American Agriculturist, 37 (July 1878), 258; T. R.
Pirtle, History of the Dairy Industry (Chicago: Mojonnier, 1926), 139-40; the Census of Great
Britain for 1925 estimated that in Britain that year 2.84 million hundredweight of cheese had been
imported to the country, and only 7,500 hundredweight exported. On the relative quality of
American and British cheeses, see Moore's Rural New Yorker, 15 (October 1, 1864), 318, and
Taylor, "English Dairy Farming."
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W O M E N ' S WORK IN AGRICULTURE
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presented them with an irresistible temptation to stop making cheese. The
number of farmhouse cheesemakers and the output of English cheese dropped
significantly. By 1908, only about 360,000 hundredweight were produced.25
It is not clear to what extent the shift to liquid milk also meant a shift to
male labor—that story, though of great interest, lies outside the scope of this
inquiry. Many English observers thought cheesemakers were only too glad to
give up the so-called dairy slavery, and some, like Richard Jefferies, associated these attitudes with new cultural values of leisure, refinement, and education. For many, the liquid-milk trade undoubtedly was a welcome development; but from the point of view of assessing women's position within
cheesemaking, the significant aspect of English farmhouse cheesemaking in
this period is that although it declined, it did not disappear. Farmhouse production prevailed over unsuccessful attempts to introduce the factory system.
As late as 1925, factory-made cheese probably accounted for only a quarter of
the total output. Official and informal estimates of farmhouse output in the
period 1870 to 1930 vary. Reports from the cheese-producing regions indicated that after a steep decline prior to the turn of the century, output revived
again in the early twentieth century, especially in Cheshire and Lancashire.
Government statistics show a rise in farmhouse production between 1908 and
1930, from 360,000 hundredweight to 500,000 (for England and Wales).
Others estimated the total farmhouse make in the 1920s at as much as one
million hundredweight. Whatever the exact totals, thousands of farmhouse
cheesemakers clearly still actively plied their trade. 26
A careful student of English dairying, David Taylor, has attributed the
25
P. A. Graham, The Revival of English Agriculture (Jarrold and Sons, 1899), 98; H. Rider
Haggard, Rural England (New York: Longman, Green, and Co., 1902), II, 252, 254, 335. On the
decline of cheesemaking, see Taylor, "English Dairy Fanning," Orwin and Whetham, History of
British Agriculture; P. J. Perry, British Farming in the Great Depression 1870-1914 (Newton
Abbott: David and Charles, 1974); Bond, "Derbyshire," 165-189; E. F. G. Walker, "Dairy
Farming: Fifty Years Ago and Now," Journal of Bath and West of England Society, 5th ser., 2
(1907-08), 8 6 - 1 0 1 ; George Gibbons, "Report on Cheesemaking in Derbyshire," JRASE, 2nd
ser., 17 (1881), 5 0 3 - 4 2 .
26
On women's work in liquid-milk dairying, several studies are suggestive: Bouquet, Family,
Servants, and Visitors; Marjorie Cohen, "The Decline of Women in Canadian Dairying," Histoire Sociale—Social History, 17 (November 1984), 3 0 7 - 3 4 ; Jefferies's remarks are found in
Hodge and His Masters (Smith, Elder and Co., 1880), 183, 2 0 3 - 1 8 , 2 2 7 - 3 3 .
Also see the United Kingdom's Census of Production for 1924, Section VII (Food, Drink and
Tobacco, published 1931), 106; James Caird, "General View of British Agriculture," JRASE, 14
(1878), 2 7 9 - 9 4 ; William Goodwin, "Agricultural Production," JBDFA, 31 (1917), 4 9 - 5 8 , R.
Mullock, "The Cheshire Cheese Industry," JBDFA, 24 (1910), 6 3 - 6 9 ; T. A. Holborn, "Lancashire Cheese-Making," JBDFA, 24 (1910), 2 1 - 2 3 ; Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries,
Agricultural Output of England and Wales for 1925 (Parliamentary Accounts and Papers, 1927,
XXV), 6 1 - 6 8 ; Census of Production for 1907, Section VII (Food, Drink, and Tobacco), 4 6 2 509; Census of Production for 1924, 103-17; Census of Production for 1930, Part III (published
1934), 109-25; Census of Production for 1935, Part III (published 1940), 1 1 4 - 3 1 ; Ministry of
Agriculture and Fisheries, Committee on Distribution and Prices of Agricultural Produce, Interim
Report on Milk and Milk Products (1923, Cmd. 1854), 6 5 - 7 1 .
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262
SALLY MCMURRY
failure to establish cheese factories largely to the appeal of the liquid milk
trade, because milk offered greater returns than did cheese.27 This explanation
is convincing in its essentials, but the reason why factories failed to take root
in England are worth examining more closely. The allure of selling fluid milk
did not attract all the dairy farming families within the market's orbit: Some
chose to continue farmhouse cheese production despite access to the liquidmilk market. Indeed, the same characteristics of the English market which
made fluid milk selling possible may also have facilitated resistance to factory
cheesemaking. England was of course more densely settled, and its railroad
system more developed, than in the United States; the well-developed and
specialized network of cheese factors (middlemen) effectively exploited these
conditions, making it fairly simple for individual cheesemakers to sell their
product. Accessible transportation also encouraged farmers to continue making traditional soft cheese, as this perishable product could be shipped quickly. But nonetheless, in many areas, small local cheese factories modelled
along American lines were debated and in some cases tried but ultimately
rejected.
Contemporaries debating the cheese factory question mentioned a variety
of circumstances that they believed inhibited the spread of cheese factories in
England, such as tenant mistrust of landlords and fiscal restraint in an era of
depression. Reluctant to mix carefully produced milk from their own farms
with other milk of unknown quality, many farmers believed cheesemaking
could not successfully be adapted to mass-production methods and felt vindicated when some early English factories failed because they produced mediocre cheese. But the central argument made against cheese factories was that
the best cheese was made at home, by women. In 1886, at a British Dairy
Fanners Association meeting in Cheshire, the loudest applause was registered
for advocates of home cheesemaking. Even proponents of factories conceded
that "of course none of these reasons [for setting up factories] can apply
where a skillful mistress, proud of the reputation of her dairy, conducts
everything on her own well-ordered premises." I would argue that the resistance to cheese factories in England was supported by a coherent cultural
structure underpinned by one dominant element: the sexual division of labor.
Farmhouse cheesemaking changed in adapting to new circumstances, but the
prior decades of cultural experience exerted a decisive influence upon the
social structure of English cheese dairying well into the twentieth century.28
27
Taylor, "English Dairy Farming," 151, 156.
On the general debate over cheese factories, see the following articles: H. M. Jenkins, "On
the American System of Associated Dairies," Milk Journal, 1 (January 1871), 13, 15-16;
"Landlords and the Cheese Factory System," Milk Journal, 1 (March 1, 1871), 43; "The Cheese
Factory Question in Cheshire," Milk Journal, 1 (April 1, 1871), 82; Report on the Derby Cheese
Factory, Milk Journal, 1 (August 1, 1871), 184. See also J. P. Sheldon, Dairy Farming (Cassell,
Petten, Galpin, and C o . , n.d., circa 1880), 2 6 7 - 7 0 ; H. M. Jenkins, quoted mJRASE, 2nd ser.,
14 (1878), 680; "Cheshire Dairy Conference," JBDFA, 2 (1886), 7 5 , 111.
28
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W O M E N ' S WORK IN AGRICULTURE
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As before, the cheese-producing regions were located mainly in the north
and west. Also as before, cheesemaking operations were varied, ranging from
small family-run grass farms (still the majority) to larger-scale producers with
hired dairywomen. Women's involvement continued in home cheesemaking
everywhere. When the Royal Agricultural Society of England visited prizewinning dairies in 1878, 1886, and 1890, in nearly every case the mistress of
the house supervised and claimed credit for quality. In 1924, T. J. Young
observed that "female labour is absolutely predominant" on Cheshire cheese
farms. As late as the 1930s, Somerset dairyman Jeffrey Adams recalled, he
had never heard of a man making cheese until he reached adulthood.29
As the craft tradition and prestige of cheesemaking persisted, so did the
ambiguity of women's position in home cheesemaking. At a Cheshire discussion of cheese factories, one speaker received cheers when he predicted,
ominously, that "if there were factories their wives and daughters . . . would
always be wanting gigs and four-wheel carriages to take them about." The
advocate for factories, H. M. Jenkins, complained that many fanners would
refuse to send their milk to factories because "the cheese being made either by
the farmer's wife or one or more of his daughters, he considers that the labor
costs him nothing; that the work is a duty in the former case, and a wholesome
discipline in the latter." These remarks reveal that as before, participation in
farmhouse cheesemaking was not necessarily with the choice and consent of
all involved. Thus English dairy farmers opposed cheese factories for the
same reasons their American counterparts advocated them. 30
Whether praised or exploited, women's work in farmhouse cheesemaking
anchored a social system in which strong localism, family cohesion, manual
labor, subsistence activity, and community occupied high importance. Moreover, without women's continued presence in home cheese production, the
other elements in the system could crumble, because each depended in some
way upon women's traditional work. Thus although English farmhouse
cheesemaking may have seemed (as Taylor suggests) an anachronism, it persisted at least in part because it made social sense to the families involved in
it. Farmers' unwillingness to mix "their" milk with that produced by others
and their skepticism about the potential of factory method were related to
29
James Long, The Dairy Farm (W. H. Allen, 1889), 34, 68; James Sadler, "Small Holdings
and Dairy Farming," JBDFA, 25 (1911), 7 - 1 2 ; A. D. Hall, A. Pilgrimage of British Farming
1910-1912 (John Murray, 1913), 24; Haggard, Rural England, II, 2 4 9 - 5 0 ; "Report on the
System of Cheesemaking Practised on the Four Dairy Farms," JRASE, 2nd ser., 14 (1878), 3 7 42; J. C. Morton, "Dairy Farm Prize Competition," JRASE, 2nd ser., 22 (1886), 1 2 7 - 5 1 ; "Farm
Prize Competition of 1890," JRASE. 3rd ser., 1 (1890), 7 7 6 - 8 2 1 ; T. J. Young, "Agriculture in
the County of Chester," JRASE, 85 (1924), 175; Jeffrey Adams, transcribed interview with Mary
Gryspeerdt, no. 122, Somerset Rural Life Museum, Glastonbury.
30
"Typescript transcription of Cheshire farmers' debate on cheese factories, Harding Family
Papers," Institute of Agricultural History, Reading; H. M. Jenkins, "Report on the Cheese
Factory System," JRASE, 2nd ser., 6 (1870), 2 0 1 - 2 .
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264
SALLY MCMURRY
women's dominance of home cheesemaking. Each cheesemaker developed
methods tailored to the individual farm where she worked, which accounted
for the unique quality of the milk produced by a particular group of cows
feeding on specific pasture grounds. This extreme localism was reflected in
women's proprietary attitude to their recipes. A parallel, less individualistic
but nonetheless strong localism was that associated with the various regional
cheeses of England. The key role of women in maintaining family cohesion
was evident in a denunciation of cheese factories that appeared in the Chester
Chronicle in 1867. In addition to raising technical objections, its author
asserted that the factory system was acceptable if fanners wanted only to
make money, but not if they wanted "employment for themselves and family." He singled out daughters particularly, worrying that they would be "obligated to find employment away from home." Even Joseph Harding, a leading
innovator in English cheesemaking, firmly placed his innovations in the context of the farmhouse system. In 1868, he criticized the factory system,
reasoning that
There is seldom any employment which offers itself to the daughters of dairy farmers . . . in the absence of which, they must . . . find their places behind the counter,
or in the position of governesses. . . . In both cases they would have to exchange a
mother's influence, home comforts, and the position of superintendants of an intellectual and respectable employment . . . for that (to say the least of it) of a servant.
These anxieties likely had a firm basis in reality, for in Western Europe
generally, as agriculture increasingly dispensed with women's work, rural
women migrated from their homes in disproportionate numbers. The attempt
to keep women in cheesemaking, then, may have represented family strategies, again ambiguous when they involved the women's own position in the
household, that would preserve the family structure in changing economic
circumstances. 31
J. C. Morton, a prominent English dairy writer, supported the establishment of factories, but he too accorded legitimacy to farmhouse cheesemaking
in some instances. His comments on cheesemaking in Cheshire (1875) are
revealing for what they imply about farm families' motivations:
Not unfrequently both the farmer and his wife had risen from the ranks of farm and
household labour. To deprive either of the accustomed daily task would in such cases
be equivalent to an entire and most uncongenial change of life.
Here Morton alluded to the values of family work and cooperation that seem
still to have held sway in these cheesemakers' lives. Similar values prevailed
31
Typescript copy of a letter from Robert McAdam, Crewe, to the Chester Chronicle, dated
December 5, 1867, in the Harding Family Papers, Institute of Agricultural History, Reading.
Joseph Harding, "The Factory System of Cheesemaking," FH, 15 (April 1868), 25-26; B.
Angkarloo, "Agriculture and Women's Work: Directions of Change in the West, 1700-1900,"
Journal of Family History 5 (Summer 1979), 111-20; Michael Anderson, Family Structure in
19th Century Lancashire (Cambridge University Press, 1971), 79-86.
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W O M E N ' S WORK IN AGRICULTURE
265
in the Cheddar cheesemaking community. One Somerset cheese dairyman
recalled that in his neighborhood, if a family switched to liquid milk production, they were suspected of being lazy or, neighbors speculated, that perhaps
their womenfolk could not make good cheese.32
Some families resisted the idea of sending milk to the factory because they
thought it would disrupt their stringent, delicately balanced family economy.
The agricultural commentator, J. P. Sheldon, wrote derisively in 1872 that
some farmers were under the necessity of, at all events, simulating opposition to the
[factory] scheme, because wives would not relinquish the butter-money. This perquisite they could not forego. Also pigs were an element of discord. "How about
losing my pig-manure?" said the farmer. "On what must I rear my calves and feed my
pigs if you take all the milk away?" said the farmer's wife.
Butter, made on a small scale from whey or cream, was a key element in the
family's—more particularly the wife's—access to ready cash. Cheese factories which took whole milk would eliminate that source of household continuity and of women's money income. In Wiltshire, this consideration was
reported a deterrent to the establishment of cheese factories. The pig, too, was
a crucial item in the family and farm economy because it consumed whey,
produced manure, and was used as an item in the family's diet and in local
trade. Although factory advocates did not take these objections seriously,
perhaps they should be reconsidered in historical perspective. Given that
farmhouse cheesemaking operations often were undertaken on small holdings, it is quite possible that pigs and butter loomed large in the family's
economic calculations, whether as means of subsistence, as generators of
cash, or as supporters of the land's fertility.33
The desire to preserve traditional social forms went beyond the family to
the local community, especially the community of cheesemakers. Many believed that good dairymaids were found in families or in the blood of a region.
Cheesemaking families intermarried: Mr. Walter Baber of Somerset recalled
that his father used to say that "every girl he had as a cheesemaker went off
and got married. It was what young men in those days wanted, everybody was
a cheesemaker of any consequence, and who would they find better than a
wife who had been trained [in] the real art of cheesemaking!" Wider kinship
ties and occupational intermarriage, then, may have also been part of the
social network farmhouse cheesemakers were trying to preserve.34
32
J. C. Morton, "On Cheese-Making in Home Dairies and in Factories," JRASE, 2nd ser., 11
(1875), 264, 266, 269; Aubrey White, transcribed interview with Mary Gryspeerdt, no. 139,
Somerset Rural Life Museum; James Sadler, "Dairy Farming in Cheshire, 1883-1908," B and
W, 5th ser., 3 (1908-09), 182. See also P. A. Graham, Revival, 98.
33
Sheldon, quoted in Morton, "On Cheese-Making," 285; F. M. L. Thompson, "Agriculture
Since 1870," in Elizabeth Crittall, ed., A History of Wiltshire, IV (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1959), 9 2 - 1 1 5 ; Ruth Winnington, "Memoir," Shropshire Farm Records Collection, SAL
8 / 2 / 1 , Reading University Archives.
34
Harding Family Papers, typescript summary of a dairy farmers' meeting in Chester; Mercer,
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SALLY MCMURRY
Though twentieth-century cheesemaking families retained the social basis
of the old system, the traditional ways did not remain entirely unchanged.
Many shifted their emphasis to cope with new conditions. Near Highbridge in
Somerset, for example, a pocket of Caerphilly makers sent their wares to
Welsh colliery workers. In the Cheddar area, local makers aimed for a highquality product for the London hotel and upper-class trade, while producers in
Lancashire and Cheshire made a quick-ripening soft cheese for the northern
manufacturing cities.35
Of greater importance to women's work was the increasing visibility of
men as systematizers, teachers, and researchers. This trend was first manifested in the partnership of Joseph Harding with his aunt and wife, who are
credited with developing a system for Cheddar cheesemaking during the
1850s and 1860s. Men's further emergence as important actors in the field of
cheesemaking was due largely to the growth of scientific cheese manufacture
later in the century. Bacteriologists and chemists acquired an elementary
understanding of the role of organisms and enzymes responsible for the development of individual characteristics in cheese. Practical by-products included
starter cultures and manufactured rennet extract. Many aspects of cheesemaking continued to be mysterious (and indeed still have not been completely
unravelled). If agricultural science did not provide an entirely formulaic approach, it nonetheless added much to the cheesemaker's required knowledge
of milk and of animal physiology. This knowledge was disseminated mostly
through agricultural education, and because men generally enjoyed better
access to education than did women, it is not surprising to see them enter
cheese dairying as a formal education became more useful in the trade.36
It would be tempting to see in this development, as perhaps Twamley and
Marshall did, a replacement of traditional knowledge (the province of women) by formal scientific education (possessed mostly by men). In England,
this did not happen. Women showed continuing interest in dairy education and
enjoyed access to it, comprising a significant portion of the student body in
such institutions as the British Dairy Institute, the Dairy Schools sponsored by
County Councils, and travelling dairy schools.
The British Dairy Institute, firmly established at Reading by the late 1890s,
"Two Centuries," Walter Baber, transcribed interview no. 109, Somerset Rural Life Museum.
A. P. Donajgrodzki, in "Twentieth Century Rural England, A Case for Peasant Studies," Journal
of Peasant Studies, 16 (April 1989), 4 2 5 - 4 3 , argues that rural residents of Yorkshire exhibited
cultural characteristics of peasants, some of which are similar to those described here.
35
J. H. Burton, "Caerphilly Cheese in Somerset," JBDFA, 22 (1908); Ministry of Agriculture, Interim Report, 1923, 6 5 - 7 0 ; Hall, Pilgrimage, 212; Mrs. M. Blackshaw, "The
Cheshire Cheese Industry," JBDFA, 23 (1909), 7 0 - 7 2 ; William Livesey, "Cheesemaking in
Lancashire," JBDFA, 10 (1895), 6 1 - 9 4 .
36
Cheke, Story of Cheesemaking, 1 5 9 - 7 1 , 2 0 1 - 7 ; K. Bond Hills, "Cheesemaking—From a
Farmhouse Craft to an Industry," JRASE, 121 (1960), 102-8; Joseph Harding, speech transcribed
in FH, 15 (May 1868), 36.
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W O M E N ' S WORK IN AGRICULTURE
267
emphasized science and theory in addition to practical work. From 1892-98,
a significant proportion of the 230 male students was born in another country
and the 435 females were largely British, a pattern which continued into the
twentieth century. David Taylor has suggested that these women were genteel
young ladies marking time. This may have been true of the Lady Warwick
Hostel, an agricultural institute intended to train gentlewomen of modest
means, but not of Reading, which charged fees to its young women, many if
not most of whom came from farming backgrounds, who often came from
families with some means, and often had experience in cheesemaking at
home. This is evident in a notebook of comments on students' examinations.
In 1897, for example, the examiners reported that Miss Baynes "has made
cheddar cheese chiefly, but knows a good deal about other cheeses and [is]
thoroughly competent in cheesemaking. (Capital knowledge of practical
dairying gained at home.)" They had less kind words for Miss Way good:
"Very raw, paper very incomplete. Seems to be a good practical Dairymaid.
Milks and makes cheese at home." 37
Perhaps more influential were the various local and travelling schools,
especially those run by county councils after the 1889 Technical Education
Act. These schools stressed practical work rather than theory and did not
require as much as the Reading courses in the way of educational attainment,
travel, or money. Held on the premises of a local working cheese dairy farm,
they offered aspiring cheesemakers training that combined aspects of traditional method with more recent innovations. In 1895 the Journal of the British
Dairy Farmers' Association noted that it had reached 2,000 people, including
many women, in Lancashire alone, through 102 farm visits and 150 classes.38
Many parents apparently expected young women who obtained one of these
kinds of dairy education to use their training to help a family business in
transition. In 1898, for example, the British Dairy Institute examiners noted
that Miss Andrews "is taking charge of a dairy . . . at home. May purchase a
separator and make other changes." Somerset dairy farmer Jeffrey Adams
remembered that his wife, as a young woman, had attended the dairy school at
37
Taylor, "English Dairy Farming," 153; Graham, Revival, 173-5; British Dairy Institute
Papers, Reading University Archives; Miles Benson, "Practical Dairy Education and the Work of
the British Dairy Institute," JBDFA, 18 (1903), 5 0 - 5 3 ; "Devon and Cornwall Conference,"
JBDFA, 13 (1898), 75. Lena Sommestad, "From Dairymaids to Dairymen" (unpublished paper,
1990 Berkshire Conference), notes that in Sweden, government-sponsored education in dairying
stressed placing large numbers of women in training leading to lower-level positions but encouraged men to enter curricula leading to supervisory jobs. It is not clear if this happened in England.
38
"Lancashire Dairy Conference," JBDFA, 10 (1895), 4 0 - 5 4 ; reports on education in the
JBDFA, 14 (1899), 289, and 15 (1900), 5 2 - 5 4 ; James Long, "Education in Dairy Farming,"
Transactions, Highland and Agricultural Society, 4th ser., 20 (1888), 1-106; Thomas Plowman,
"The Society's Dairy Schools," B and W, 4th ser., 5 (1894-95), 8 3 - 8 9 ; J. P. Sheldon, British
Dairying (Crosby, Lockwood, and Son, 1893), 152; for descriptions of farmhouse schools, see
Mrs. Vera Baber, transcribed interview no. 170, and Aubrey White, transcribed interview no.
139, Somerset Rural Life Museum.
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SALLY MCMURRY
Cannington in order to learn to use synthetic starter. Another former Somerset
cheesemaker, Mrs. Duckett, learned primarily from her mother but thought
"it was a good idea to learn from those Cannington people. You could pick up
tips." 39
Thus dairying education in England did not seek completely to replace
tradition with science: By modifying but not eliminating the social basis of
farmhouse cheesemaking, it fostered a blend of the two. A well-known collaboration epitomized this blend. At the turn of the century, the chemist, Dr.
F. Lloyd, and the cheesemaker, Edith Cannon, worked together to study the
chemistry of cheddar cheesemaking. Miss Cannon provided the traditional
skill, and Lloyd analyzed the results, which he published in a series of
scientific papers. 40
In this context, the role of instinct retained a place. Instinct, in some form
or other, was still believed by many to be a crucial attribute for a cheesemaker,
and was still more often ascribed to women than to men, again continuing
older associations of gender characteristics with cheesemaking ability. In
1910, Richard Mullock of Cheshire wrote that "we have a race of unequalled
dairy-maids, county born and well grown, with an innate and trained knowledge of the art of practical science of Cheshire cheese-making. . . . It is a
pure domestic, business occupation for the gentler sex, who possess the
touch, taste, and smell, as well as the quickness of brain and technique."
Here, art and science intermingled. As late as the 1920s, members of the
Reading University agricultural club stressed what they called the "personal
element of the farmer's wife" in successful cheesemaking, resisting a guest
speaker's advocacy of cooperative cheesemaking.41
Farmhouse cheesemaking in England continued in this new pattern until its
demise in the disaster of the Great Depression. After the Milk Marketing
Board (1933) established government intervention in the industry, the number
of farmhouse cheesemakers dropped rapidly, and the Second World War reduced their numbers still further. The Milk Marketing Board, which bought
milk directly, brought a measure of security to dairy farmers and even helped
some cheesemakers stay in business; but its guaranteed market also encouraged many farmhouse cheesemakers simply to produce fluid milk. Wartime
policy in favor of hard cheeses further undermined farmhouse cheesemaking
in such areas as Lancashire. Factory production of a few dominant types
39
British Dairy Institute Examination Papers, Reading University Archives; Jeffrey Adams,
transcribed interview no. 122, and Mrs. Duckett, interview no. 13, Somerset Rural Life Museum.
40
The collaboration of Lloyd and Cannon is described in Cheke, Story of Cheesemaking, 215,
192-5. See also Margaret Knowles, "Use of the Acidometer in Cheese-Making," JBDFA, 15
(1900), 37-40.
41
Richard Mullock, "The Cheshire Cheese Industry," JBDFA, 24 (1910), 63-66; Sidney
White, transcribed interview with Mary Gryspeerdt, no. 136, Somerset Rural Life Museum;
Reading University Agricultural Club Minute Book, March 5, 1923, Reading University Archives. See also Sheldon, Dairy Farming, 196.
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W O M E N ' S WORK IN AGRICULTURE
269
replaced farmhouse cheese production almost completely, and a new era in
English cheesemaking began. Thus government action played a prominent
role in the disappearance of English farmhouse cheesemaking.42
The different patterns of female labor in English and American dairying has
implications for larger historiographical issues. In English farmhouse cheesemaking between 1800 and 1930, the basic division of labor according to
gender persisted, though in varying forms. As we have seen, this finding
modifies contentions by Ivy Pinchbeck and others that women's involvement
in English cheese dairying was reduced or compromised during the nineteenth
century. More broadly, the differential pattern between the United States and
Britain is relevant to the general context outlined by Bengt Angkarloo. In a
1979 essay, he maintained that a general "direction of change" in the West,
1700-1900, was "toward a more pronounced preference for males in the
agrarian labor force." He associated the preference for males with "capitalist
production for the market," maintaining that "opportunities culturally defined
as women's work" disappeared along with diversified subsistence peasant
production. The result, Angkarloo argued, was disproportionate outmigration by women, a defeminization of agriculture.43
In some geographical areas and types of agriculture, defeminization did
indeed occur at the same time English cheese dairying continued to be dominated by women. In southern and eastern England, for example, arable agriculture defeminized earlier than dairying. Keith Snell and Leonore Davidoff
convincingly document a decrease in women's employment in nineteenthcentury arable farming there. Women were gradually excluded from the field
work of harvesting, weeding, stone-picking, planting, and so forth. Snell and
Davidoff attribute the decline (as does Angkarloo) to the rise of large-scale
specialized capitalist grain farming, which in the specific case of England was
encouraged by enclosure and reinforced by the New Poor Law. Several reasons may explain why the situation for women in arable agriculture contrasted
with women's continued employment in dairying. Cheese dairying, though
carried on for market, was primarily done in small, low-capital, family42
Taylor, "English Dairy Farming," 1 4 6 - 5 3 ; B. L. Smith and H. Whitby, "Milk Marketing
Before and After Organization" (University of Oxford Agricultural Economics Institute, 1937);
James Macintosh, "Dairy Farming and Dairy Work," JRASE, 99 (1938), 2 5 0 - 7 9 ; M. A. Dockery, "Developments in the Farmhouse Cheese-making Industry in England and Wales," Geography, 68 (1983), 2 6 3 - 5 . Marjorie Cohen's article, "Decline of Women in Canadian Dairying,"
and also her book, Women's Work, Markets, and Economic Development in
Nineteenth-Century
Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), as well as Lena Sommestad's unpublished
paper, "From Dairymaids to Dairymen," presented in 1990 at the Berkshire conference, have
investigated women's work in dairying in Canada and Sweden, respectively. Both scholars find a
decline in women's opportunities during the 1930s. Because no equivalent work exists for
England, at this point it is not possible to know if the same thing happened there. However,
women were displaced from butter dairying in Ireland in the early twentieth century. See Joanna
Bourke, "Dairywomen and Affectionate Wives: Women in the Irish Dairy Industry, 1890-1914,"
Agricultural History Review, 38:Pt. 2 ( 1 9 9 0 ) , 1 4 9 - 6 5 .
43
Angkarloo, "Women's Work," 114-6.
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SALLY MCMURRY
centered operations. Relatively informal, flexible labor arrangements could
apply. By contrast, large-scale, capital-intensive fanning employing waged
labor posed more rigid labor requirements and excluded female labor. Moreover, partly because of its small-scale nature, English dairying lacked status in
the eyes of the agrarian community; in the high-stakes world of fat beasts and
acres of corn, dairymen were despised as mere "teat-pullers." Perhaps dairying's low status helped to protect women's position. Of course cheesemaking
required considerable skill and was not understood scientifically until very
late, so good dairy women were always in demand. This puts cheesemakers in
a category different from the mostly poor and less skilled workers Snell is
concerned with. Finally, the strong cultural association of dairy production
with women—and the structural position of women's labor as an anchor in a
traditional family system—operated as powerful forces supporting women's
continued participation.44
The contrast between the experience of women in English and American
cheesemaking suggests that the pace of defeminization depended upon more
than the farming specialty. English farmhouse cheesemaking, which existed
within a favorable demographic and cultural context, was more highly resistant to social transformation by the forces of capitalism. This suggests,
then, that though capitalist agriculture undoubtedly transformed agrarian social structures everywhere, capitalism's impact upon the sexual division of
labor was mitigated or exacerbated by local culture and history.
44
K. D. M. Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1985); Davidoff, "Role of Gender"; S. G. Kendall, Farming Memories of a West Country
Yeoman (Faber and Faber, 1944), 15.
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