Putting the Barn Before the House: Women and Family Farming in Early Twentieth-Century New York

Description:

Putting the Barn Before the House features the voices and viewpoints of women born before World War I who lived on family farms in south-central New York. Grey Osterud explores the flexible and varied ways that families shared labor.

Review Quotes:

Building on her 1991 book Bonds of Community: The Lives of Farm Women in Nineteenth-Century New York, Grey Osterud returns to the Nanticoke Valley of south-central New York State, this time with a focus on the early 20th century.. Personal narratives, interviews with two dozen women over many years, are at the core, and are the greatest strength, of the book.. Osterud makes a compelling case that gender flexibility and integration, reciprocity, mutual aid, social equality and collective action were the core values of the rural way of life in the Nanticoke Valley for generations.