Farming Women's Organisations: (Re) Constructing Farm Women's Identities

Abstract

Farm women in Western rural societies make an invaluable contribution to farming and farming communities. However this contribution is underrepresented in agri-industry. Instead farm women are predominantly associated with traditional support and service identities, such as carers and farm helpers. This thesis argues that farming women's organisations create spaces and strategic bases from which farm women may either maintain hegemonic service identities or challenge these through the performance of alternative identities. It addresses questions about the contexts in which farming women's organisations operate; the hegemonic and alternative identities farming women's organisations make available to members; the identities farm women subsequently recognise; and the way in which these identities are maintained or challenged by the collective action of the organisations.

This study explores the identities and action of farm women and their organisations, in Australia, Canada and New Zealand. It constructs an analytical framework that enables an analysis of rurality, narrative identities, organisational collectivity and political action. This framework provides the basis for a feminist methodology which incorporates multiple, and predominantly, qualitative methods. Farm women members and representatives participated in the research through organisational semi-structured interviews, questionnaires and subsequent in-depth interviews. Data were used to determine collective identity, organisational type, narrative identities, and leadership as a form of collective action.

The results indicated that farming women's organisations might be placed on a continuum based on a number of dimensions. This continuum acknowledged, but also blurred the existing binary between established organisations and newer networks. The collective identities of the organisations indicated that both the internalised and externalised constructions of collective identity are dynamic, and influence the narrative identities of farm women and their actions. Overall, members of the established organisations acknowledged and performed service identities, and undertook leadership in a feminised context, characterised by reactive communality. In contrast, members of the newer networks recognised and expressed predominately occupational identities, and undertook leadership in a masculinised context, characterised by agentic competence. Exceptions to this, however, indicated that certain established organisations and newer networks might be placed towards the middle of this continuum, indicating a need to move beyond a binary categorisation of farming women's organisations.

In sum, the thesis has demonstrated that the spaces and practices that farming women's organisations create are influential in maintaining or challenging ontological narratives which have informed dominant notions of rurality, including the hegemonic, traditional, service identities for farm women.