I
If the outside, the forceful work, in a word, the whole of a Farm and Market essentially concern the Farmer, one will agree that the interior detail is particularly the responsibility of the Woman Farmer; it is she who is the principal agent, and is always present, the necessary supervisor of the Backyard and of the Domestic realm; it is to her, finally, it is to her care, to her vigilance, to her capacity that the prosperity of the Farmer is most often due.
1 Louis Rose, La bonne fermière ou éléments économiques utiles aux jeunes personnes destinées à cet état [The good farmer woman, or economic elements useful to young people destined for this state] (1767), pp. 11–12. Rose described himself as county magistrate of the city of Béthunes.Imbued with the educational spirit of the Enlightenment and the precepts of the French economists known as Physiocrats, Louis Rose’s
La bonne fermière ou éléments économiques utiles aux jeunes personnes destinées à cet état, published in Lille in 1767 and apparently the first French agricultural manual directed at a female audience, clearly asserts the significance of the woman’s economic role on the farm. Deploring that nothing has yet been written about these ‘ménagères par excellence’,
2 Rose, La bonne fermière, p. aij. The term refers to the tasks of farm management and administration, as consecrated by Olivier de Serres in his Théâtre d’agriculture et Mésnage des champs. these ‘meritorious women’,
3 Ibid., p. iv. while the ‘celebrity women, the scholars, the devotees, the
précieuses, the little mistresses, the gallants, etc. have received a thousand literary tributes’,
4 Ibid., p. aij. Rose offers to rural girls an ‘Economic Code’
5 The capital letters here and in subsequent citations are in the original. to prepare them for their future roles as Farm Women. His introductory speech does not show any particular originality, since it merely repeats the clichés of the moment, the views held by the Physiocrats (a group of eighteenth-century French economists) on the essential role of agriculture for society, of science as an enlightening force and the need for large landowners to implement at their own expense ‘what genius & sagacity can suggest of better’.
6 Rose, La bonne fermière, p. aiv. On the other hand, Rose defends the idea of women’s economic role and their skills on the farm which is much more innovative. The opening chapters of the work (‘The good Woman Farmer in her household, in her kitchen’, and so on), again, lack originality, situating the work in the tradition of home economics books listing the wide range of knowledge and skills a well-informed woman should possess and which allow her to fully hold her rank at her husband’s side. But when the author comes to describe women’s agricultural activities, to which he devotes two-thirds of his book, his prescriptions come from practice – the practices of the women he has observed in his immediate circle and of whom he offers the small details, the reasonings, and sometimes the little ‘secrets’. Observation, calculation, and prudence guide her management of the barnyard as well as the particular care she takes to fatten the oxen. Thus, ‘the slightly educated farm-woman knows that animals that are too old can fatten up easily’
7 Ibid., p. 138. and it is up to her to establish the animals’ feed ration as carefully as possible, adjusting the different ingredients according to the needs of the animals at a given moment. If the animals sell better at Easter, the ‘intelligent woman fattener’ can even hold them until Whitsunday.
If she calculates the cost of fertilizer, the farm woman expects to find her account. This will depend on the year, the quantity of grain and the cost of fat. For the great science of a woman farmer who understands her household well is to think long and hard about all her needs, in order to make the supplies in time.
8 Ibid., p. 142.She can use her sagacity to ‘apply herself only to the species of livestock where she will feel more profit’.
9 Ibid., p. 146.In this first ‘ode’ to ‘La bonne fermière’,
10 Manuals referring to the ‘Fermière’ or the ‘Ménagère’ (in the agricultural sense) in their titles were regularly published throughout the nineteenth century. Louis Rose claims that the Farmer’s prosperity is fully dependent on his wife’s contribution. Combining example with argument, he describes the case of a prosperous farmer, ‘very intelligent and very diligent’, who holds a farm of about three hundred acres on a rather difficult soil and whose wife, ‘a true housewife and excellent farmer […] earns more money with her farmyard and by her thriftiness, than he amasses with his crops and sheep’.
11 Rose, La bonne fermière, p. 12. Although supplied in the form of an anecdote, this marks a change whereby formal recognition is given to the woman’s pre-eminent role in the agricultural economy, thanks to her specialized skills and her specific management abilities. No elaborate recording techniques are provided, simply the recommendation to keep a register ‘where everything is written’ accompanied by the observation that it is ‘the Farm Woman, often enough, who keeps it, because she is more usually at home’. In passing, he cautions the reader against any negligence: ‘if she is late in annotating, she forgets her bonuses and loses them: she must be paid for them with accuracy …. To sell at home and in cash is the safest and best method on a farm.’
12 Ibid., p. 40. Anticipating the possibility of widowhood, the author recommends that information be shared between husbands and wives: ‘the Farmer will sometimes take his wife on a walk to the field, the woman Farmer will ask him from time to time to pass by her Dairy’.
13 Ibid., p. 42. The result is a perfect union, in the mutual interest of the couple: ‘everything will be weighed and considered, the husband will always be the master, the wife the mistress and reason their sovereign’.
14 Ibid., p. 24.It was not until the first half of the nineteenth century that accounting techniques and the spirit of quantification invaded agriculture, becoming the alpha and omega of economic conduct.
15 T. Depecker and N. Joly, ‘Agronomists and Accounting: The Beginnings of Capitalist Rationalisation on the Farm (1800–1850)’, Historia Agraria 65 (2015), pp. 75–94. But the ‘Bonne Fermière’ prefigures a model of family economic conduct that will be taken up and reinforced in later writings. It also raises a pioneering question of interest to the history of agricultural accounting: how much do women earn for the farm? As long as they do not keep their own accounts, this question cannot be answered, thus hindering our understanding of their exact role in the farm economy. A few decades later, as we will see in the next section, accounting education took on a new dimension, which in turn provides insight into the farm woman’s economic contribution.