The changes that have taken place in the lives of women in farming are so sweeping that it is important to try and capture them – if only to place contemporary concerns about health, poverty and rural life in a wider perspective. Focusing on women’s lives also reveals key aspects of changes in family life, recognising the all-encompassing nature of women’s role in agriculture.

So let’s begin with very basic matters: life and death. A woman born in 1911 could expect to live to her mid-50s. Today life expectancy is almost 30 years greater. In 1916 a farmer’s wife could expect to give birth to eight or nine children, but one in five would die in childhood. The comparable figure now is four per 1,000. However rural life was healthier than city life, because people were less exposed to infectious diseases, and this remained the case until the 1960s.

Women’s work was essential to the farm economy, but only women on the poorest holdings or the wives of farm labourers worked on a regular basis in the fields. Most farm women spent their time in the house, and nearby, busy with eggs and poultry, feeding pigs or sickly calves, milking cows and domestic duties.

Pin money

Selling eggs gave many women their only independent source of income. By 1916 creameries were already producing most commercial butter, though some women still churned at home for family use.

Pigs might be killed and cured at home. Women’s farm work did not change dramatically until the 1960s, when eggs and poultry became a factory-style enterprise. Milking machines were becoming more widespread, and men, perhaps predictably, began to take a greater role – though cleaning the machinery remained a woman’s chore.

If some traditional jobs were vanishing, EEC entry in 1973 filled the gap – with form-filling, keeping accounts and other paperwork, which were often undertaken by the farm wife.

The abolition of the marriage bar for public servants in the 1970s, and the increasing numbers of married women in paid employment means that many farm wives now work outside agriculture, and their salary is often essential to the farm’s survival. In other cases men have taken off-farm jobs, leaving the women to become the primary farmer. Gendered roles, which were deeply ingrained in farming and rural life are breaking down.

Flight of the girls

The past century has seen a dramatic fall in the numbers working in farming, or living on a farm, and the disappearance of many smaller farms. Until the 1960s most farms had at least two men – a farmer and one or two sons, or a labourer, but fewer farm daughters or servants.

Daughters left the farm at an earlier age, and in larger numbers than their brothers. In 1911 most daughters leaving farming became domestic servants, in Ireland, Britain or America, but over time this changed.

Farmers sent their daughters to school, and kept them there longer than their sons, so that they could secure better jobs – as nurses in Ireland or England, clerks, civil servants or teachers, but in the 1970s farmers still disapproved of their daughters working in factories.

The “flight of the girls” was regularly criticised by men, who claimed that rural Ireland would collapse because of the lack of farmers’ wives. This fear helped drive important changes in farming life. Marriages were often blocked by an elderly parent – who was unwilling to transfer the farm to a son, to enable him to marry, or declined to accept a daughter-in-law without an adequate dowry.

In such cases many farming couples opted for emigration and marriage; some remained single. It is not clear when dowries ceased to form a common part of farming marriages. It would appear that they began to disappear in the 1960s.

A growing economy meant that farmers’ sons had a greater choice of careers outside farming, which meant that parents increasingly had to accept the wishes of their son and future daughter-in-law, if they wanted the family farm to survive.

Services

Rural electrification completed in the 1960s and running water transformed women’s lives – ending the chore of carrying water from the well, giving farm women access to hot water, washing machines and other labour-saving devices.

Farm women and the Irish Countrywomen’s Association had to battle against the opposition of farming organisations, who objected to the cost of rural water schemes being added to the rates. The solution was group water schemes, often initiated and organised by women.

In the past young couples often started married live living in the farmhouse with the man’s parents, and tensions between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law were quite common. Eamon de Valera recognised this when he suggested a government scheme to build dower-houses in order to encourage earlier marriages among farmers.

Rambling

The social life of the Irish farmhouse in the 1930s, as described by Arensberg and Kimball, involved men – young and old – rambling at night to visit friends or play cards in neighbouring homes.

Women, whether married or single, rarely left home except to visit relatives or go to church. One newly-wed farmer’s wife in Tyrone in the 1950s, who had been a nurse in Dublin, described how an elderly neighbour would walk into her kitchen at night to spend the evening with her husband, totally ignoring her presence. She soon put a stop to it.

Dance halls, organisations such as Macra na Feirme, and the ICA, television – another arrival in the 1960s – and cars, by the late 1960s four in 10 rural households had a car or a van – broke down this sense of isolation.

The 1965 Succession Act was another major milestone, because it gave widows a statutory entitlement to their husband’s estate. This was especially important for childless farm widows, who were often expected to hand over a farm to some male relative. There were many predictions in the 1960s that Irish family farms were about to disappear. Their survival reflects the resilience and adaptability of farming families – most especially farm women.

Mary E Daly’s most recent book, Sixties Ireland. Reshaping the economy state and society, 1957-1973, is published by Cambridge University Press.