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Women that Count: The Missing Link in the Modernization of Agriculture in Nineteenth-Century France1 My gratitude goes to Thierry Bonnaud for his unwavering interest and support. I am also indebted to Laura Sayre for her much appreciated translation work. This chapter appears OA with funding from the Institut Agro Dijon (CESAER), under the licence CC BY-NC-ND. Nathalie Joly
Women have an undeniable role in the prosperity of the farm, albeit one that is difficult to define. It is certainly for this reason that the agents of agricultural progress never entirely ignored women, with at least some writers in all periods taking up the pen to educate ‘the gentler sex’ in their role on the farm. For if women participated actively in the production and reproduction of farm capital, why should they not be instructed, like their husbands, in methods to increase the profitability of their own activities and those of the family as a whole? Why not train women to handle numbers and take an active part in the management of the farm?
This chapter sheds light on the social construction of women’s role in the running of the farm over the ‘long nineteenth century’.2 Following E. Hobsbawm, I take this to be 1789–1914, E. Hobsbawm, L’ère du capital (1848–1875) (1994). It is intended as a contribution to the history of agricultural accounting from a gender perspective. The instructional literature I will use is considered to be a powerful producer of norms. It allows us to see how women’s conduct has been framed in terms of their economic role on the farm, beyond their role in the household, or ‘the province belonging to them’ to use the hackneyed phrase of domestic manuals. Accounting activities such as record-keeping, listing, tabulating, drawing up a balance sheet, and so on situate women within the division of labour. The aim here is to consider what degree of agency is attributed to them within discourses pertaining to the appropriateness and value of instruments of measurement. Hopwood has stressed the importance of placing accounting practices within the cultural and interpretative contexts in which they were embodied and given their effectiveness.3 A. G. Hopwood, ‘Accounting and Everyday Life: An Introduction’, Accounting, Organizations and Society 19 (1994), pp. 299–301. Calculation, typically austere in nature, necessarily requires an element of rhetorical motivation, but it is above all important to look at the institutional aspects of this rhetorical process. This perspective, which constitutes the theoretical foundation of ‘The new accounting history’,4 P. Miller, T. Hopper, and R. Laughlin, ‘The New Accounting History: An Introduction’, Accounting, Organizations and Society 16 (1991), pp. 395–403. proposes to identify the institutional and legitimatized practices and forms of discourse that share a common vocabulary and set of objectives, as outlined in Foucault’s archaeological approach.5 M. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language (1972). For instance, Miller and O’Leary have located the construction of standard costing and budgeting strategies in the wake of a wide range of calculation programmes and techniques which emerged in the first three decades of the twentieth century and which came together to regulate the lives of individuals at work.6 P. Miller and T. O’Leary, ‘Accounting and the Construction of the Governable Person’, Accounting, Organizations and Society 12 (1987), pp. 235–65. The authors have highlighted how accounting ‘assisted in rendering visible certain crucial aspects of the functioning of the enterprise’ by routinely raising questions of waste and inefficiency in the employment of human, financial, and material resources. In close connection with a series of diverse strategies such as the development of scientific management, the creation of intelligence tests, and the rise of industrial psychology – to recap the authors’ demonstration – cost accounting and budgeting contributed to a regulation of ‘the individual person[,] to make her accountable by reference to [a] prescribed standard of performance’.7 Ibid., p. 241. The first half of the nineteenth century saw the emergence of a popular economic discourse aimed at the inhabitants of the countryside, at the very moment when France was looking to small and medium-sized farms to modernize their agricultural practices. The guiding hypothesis of this chapter is that the rational education of rural women and girls is part of a familialist strategy driven by scholarly elites and the state. Actors must acquire new knowledge to adapt to new economic circumstances, including mounting calls for increased productivity and the mobilization of more capital in agriculture. They also need to subscribe to a ‘set of beliefs associated with the capitalist order that help to justify this order and to support, by legitimizing them, the modes of action and the devices that are consistent with it’.8 L. Boltanski and E. Chiapello, Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme (1999), p. 46. To paraphrase Weber, it is necessary for them to acquire values and psychological responses in ‘elective affinity’ with the capitalist economy emerging at this period.9 M. Weber, L’éthique protestante et l’esprit du capitalisme (Paris 1964). It is this educational work, and the institutional dimension of its rhetorical process, that I will specifically consider here. My objective is to examine what kind of knowledge the historian may gain from employing a gender perspective, and conversely what is lost when the role of women is ignored within the process of change. In the remainder of this chapter, I will offer a view of the ideal vision of the woman farmer’s role and skills in the economy of the farm, including accounting and the many other tasks women were encouraged to perform, both independently and together with their husbands.10 I use the terms ‘woman farmer’ and ‘farm woman’ (women farmers, farm women) in this chapter to express the French word ‘fermière’. In either language, the point is to recognize the woman’s role as an economic agent on the farm, not simply her status as the ‘farmer’s wife’. I will draw on both academic and popular literature targeting a female audience and give a brief historical contextualization of this literature. The first section describes the beginnings of economic education in the second half of the eighteenth century. The second focuses on the 1820s through to the 1850s, when popular literature for women began to gain ground and the ambition to teach women to keep the farm accounts, or even to specialize in this task, was more clearly articulated. The third section describes the institutionalization of a new discourse on women’s role in agriculture and the codification of female accounting practices, as evidenced by a major work by Cora Élisabeth Millet-Robinet, author of a highly popular farming handbook which played a key role in reshaping rural and domestic economic models. The fourth section is a discussion of the rhetorical strategies used to address farm work and accounting practices. In conclusion, I will assess how the gender perspective helps us understand the processes and implications of the social framing of economic behaviours as an element of agricultural modernization.