Abstract
Prevalent notions of farming associate men working with technology and women working with their hands. Agribusiness has contributed to advancing agricultural technology such that most farmers engage in some kind of machine work, regardless of gender, in order to stay in business. In this presentation I examine how women’s agricultural work reveals gendered tool ideologies. I ask how do Dutch gender norms manifest through female farmers’ use of tractors and other farming machinery? Agricultural technology has both perpetuated some gender norms while challenging others. This paper is based on informal interviews with eight female farm owners in the Netherlands during seven months of fieldwork; in these interviews they explained that the productivity that tractors can offer does not seem limited by gender but by one’s ability to transcend gender. Although there is substantial existing research on rural women’s historical roles in farming, I add additional layers to this work through the analysis of gender technological ideologies, kinship, and relationships to nature among a small sample of women farmers in contemporary Netherlands. This research furthers our understanding of the relationships among power, economics, and gender. In attempting to balance traditional roles of labor and domesticity, the woman farmer actively challenges normative gender roles through her technological use of tractors and other machinery, her motherhood duties, and the pastoral ideal.\r \r Keywords: Agriculture, Gender, Eco-feminism, Technology