Women Pioneers in Farming: A Gendered History of Agricultural Progress

Abstract

N OCTOBER 1999 a conference will be held in Bonn, Germany on the topic of 'Women farmers: the missing link in innovation adoption.' The objective of the conference is to establish the role and significance women had and have in agricultural progress in the countries of the South. In recent years, an awareness of the innovative achievements women have contributed to agriculture has not only grown in the field of development co-operation, but in the industrial countries as well. Growing numbers of women at agricultural faculties and in occupational sectors, which have been dominated by men until the present, indicate the increasing participation of women in restructuring agriculture. Women today are irrefutably agents of innovative means and models for the future in agriculture. 'Let us now praise famous men'?The present commitment women bring to agricultural progress appears at first glance to be unprecedented in history. Whereas in the last few decades women and gender research have proven that it is possible to discover many women in history who have made substantial theoretical and methodological contributions to scientific progress -even in so-called male domains such as mathematics, theology or physics (cf. Alic 1986; Schlüter 1992; Keller 1992; Orland and Scheich 1995) -a history of women in agricultural sciences seems to be even more of an 'anomaly' than in physics.The everyday life of women has been the primary object of research in the agriculturally oriented literature on women to date. Since the beginning of the century, many remarkable studies have been made throughout Europe on female small farmers and professional women farmers, on maids working on I

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