IV
Whether aimed at a popular readership or a higher-class audience, the instructional literature discussed in this chapter honoured women’s economic conduct while striving to reinforce their managerial role in farming. The authors played a key role as transmitters as well as prescribers of experience, albeit in varying proportions according to what they felt women and girls should learn to improve and fully perform their role on the farm. Thus, the first point of discussion here will be the social agenda these writers have for family farm women. Then I will ask to what extent the ‘good practices’ given as models correspond to reality. In the next section I will consider the impact of these instructional writings, including the question of women’s agency in the process of agricultural modernization.
(a) The ‘assistant–steward’ versus the ‘secretary–accountant’
The advice offered in these writings varies considerably in its socio-economic significance. Some authors provided instructions accompanied by many practical illustrations, such as Rose in his
La bonne fermière, or Millet-Robinet with the remarkable knowledge contained in her
Maison rustique des dames. Rose claimed to portray farm women’s activities and management in practical ways, using details provided by experienced women whose names he did not bother to mention.
1 Studying the role of farm women in science, Heide Inhetveen noted that the earliest agricultural literature appearing in vernacular languages in the sixteenth century across Europe contained detailed depictions of the tasks that housewives had to perform on large farm estates. But she deplored the fact that women were treated anonymously and not given credit for their knowledge by the male authors. H. Inhetveen, ‘Women Pioneers in Farming: A Gendered History of Agricultural Progress’, Sociologia Ruralis 38 (1998), pp. 265–84. Millet-Robinet drew on her own knowledge and personal experience of agriculture, pleading for women to be educated and given responsibility on an equal footing with men. Both intended not merely to teach accounting techniques, but to transmit the most efficient and economic ways of managing those areas of production which were in women’s hands. This first group of authors presented the woman as ‘the assistant–steward’ on the farm, performing a specifically economic role in tandem with her husband. The way they described women’s activities helps us understand their place within the division of agricultural work and knowledge. It acts to disperse ‘the darkness by which the history of women in agriculture was shrouded’ as Heide Inhetveen pointed out.
2 Ibid., p. 268. But women’s own experience was only valued for a short period. When agriculture came to be regarded as a science and as a trade just like all others in the course of the nineteenth century, female experience-based knowledge was eclipsed by science-based knowledge crafted in the laboratory, a place women would not be allowed to enter for almost half a century.
Other authors offered writings with a strong normative and moral flavour. They moved directly to advice-giving and tended to reduce women, as spouses, to management tasks. Their aim was to explain what should be counted and how. This second group of writers supported a model of the farm wife as ‘secretary–accountant’. Simple techniques of recording and balancing the accounts were taught to women and even to young girls. Double-entry book-keeping, which agronomists in scholarly circles were discussing throughout this period, was rarely made available to a female readership. Indeed, helping to concretize the principles of political economy, the double-entry technique appeared both as a masculine technique and as an emblem of the farmer–entrepreneur. It was therefore up to the father to introduce his successor to the subtle details of this technique.
3 For a published dialogue between a landowner and his son on double-entry accounting which was awarded a prize by the Royal and Central Academy of Agriculture, see N. Joly, ‘Louis Gossin. Comme le sang dans le corps des animaux: Le capital circulant expliqué à la jeunesse rurale (1838)’, Entreprises et histoire 88 (2017), pp. 182–8. In any case, this pattern of male transmission of knowledge was already being practised by the keeping of the ‘livre de raison’ on large estates.
4 S. Mouysset, Papiers de famille: Introduction à l’étude des livres de raison (France, XVe–XXe siècle) (2007).Writings addressed to young girls were particularly edifying. Appealing to common sense and sometimes in a tone of admonition, they distilled simple advice meant to leave a lasting impression on the mind. A few eloquent little stories or proverbs, as the moralist Bujault excelled in offering, were supposedly sufficient to regulate parents’ and children’s conduct: ‘In the long run, a small amount of money makes a big profit’; ‘Have your children write down the proceeds of your harvests, your purchases, your sales and your expenses’. By contrast, writings directed to highly educated women used more elaborate arguments, putting the discourse of political economy at the service of philanthropic and moral instruction. This second range of writings, which became dominant in the second half of the nineteenth century, were prescriptive rather than descriptive in any simple sense. Writers portrayed the farm or the estate as a place for making money. They considered farming activities as entirely calculable and entrusted these calculative tasks to the care of women and girls, providing them with detailed instructions for setting up accounts. This literature should be studied more closely to achieve a fuller understanding of its empirical and moral advice.
(b) Did norms rule practice or vice versa?
The view of female agency this literature conveyed was not disconnected from reality. The observations we have of women’s work on estates and family farms support the idea that the respective positions of men and women within agricultural knowledge and decision-making systems were complex. Only rarely do they provide us with information on women’s role in accounting, except in some isolated cases. For instance, we know that Anna, Electress of Saxony (1532–1587), skilfully managed the Prince of Saxony’s estates and contributed to two treatises on agronomy that originated at the court of Dresden. Ursula Schulde, who documented the financial management skills of this remarkable woman, pointed out that early modern books on the education of princesses spread the ideal of the ‘house-keeper princess’, who understood and supervised agriculture.
5 These were texts from Christian Oeconomy, books on marriage and texts known as the Mirror of Princess, see U. Schulde, ‘Cultiver selon “les bonnes règles et avec profit”: La création d’un savoir agricole à la cour de l’électeur et de l’électrice de Saxe à Dresden’, in Nadine Vivier (ed.), Élites et progrès agricole (2009), pp. 59–81 at p. 71. It has been generally asserted in the literature that elite practices spread downward as education levels rose in rural countries. Scarlett Beauvalet considered that the ability of women to sign official documents was indicative of them securing a role in the exploitation and management of accounts. As she noted, in the last third of the sixteenth century, ‘very few women were literate at the time of marriage. After 1720, there were none who could not at least sign their name, and one saw more and more women farmers multiplying their accounting entries, and the farmers delegating great responsibilities to them.’
6 S. Beauvalet, ‘Les femmes dans le monde rural à l’époque moderne, XVIe–XVIIIe siècles’, in Nadine Vivier (ed.), Ruralité française et britannique, XIIIe–XXe siècles: Approches comparées (2002), pp. 89–116 at p. 96. Sometimes, accounting practices are mere presumptions, in the absence of sources. Studying the accounts of Robert Loder’s estate in southern England for the years 1610–1620, Jane Whittle wondered whether his wife kept accounts on her own, for there is no mention of the fruits of the wife’s activities in the accounts kept by the husband. Her work therefore appeared ‘as an empty space, a silence in the records, and their activities must be reconstructed from circumstantial sources’.
7 J. Whittle, ‘Le travail des femmes dans les ménages ruraux anglais, 1450–1650: Trois approches alternatives’, in Vivier (ed.), Ruralité française et britannique, pp. 77–87 at p. 83. Observations closer to the period examined in this chapter confirm women’s familiarity with writing and counting. Schlumbohm’s study of Dutch couples who, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, emigrated to many parts of Germany to farm in the dairy sector reported that ‘their wives had a certain level of education that enabled them to cope with accounting and written exchanges with the authorities’.
8 J. Schlumbohm, ‘“Zu Schreiben und die ganze Beschaffenheit der Sache”: Signierfähigkeit und Schriftgebrauch bei Bauern und Heuerleuten des Kirshspiels Belm, ca. 1770–1840’, in H. E. Bödeker and E. Hinrichs (eds), Alphabetissierung und Literalisierung in Deutschland in der Frühern Neuzeit (1999), pp. 163–80 at pp. 170, 172. He also stated that the wives of these farmers demonstrated their skills when they found themselves in charge of the farm as widows.
In nineteenth-century France, wives were commonly said to ‘Faire et défaire les maisons’ (‘Make or break the household’), a way of bringing Xenophon’s words up to date, when he described the mistress of a large estate as the ‘mother-bee’ or the ‘garrison commander’. At the dawn of the agricultural revolution, women of middling farm households held an important status and many responsibilities in the cooperation that took place within the farm, as shown by Martine Segalen. The sociologist recorded proverbs that, from one region to another, deployed a ‘varied metaphorical range to affirm the importance of economy in the female management of the household’
9 M. Ségalen, Mari et femme dans la société paysanne (1980), p. 131. and of women’s qualities at work: ‘a thrifty woman makes a good house’ (Champagne), ‘a brave woman in a house is worth more than a farm and livestock’ (Gascony). In line with Walker’s analysis of English working-class households, Ségalen found that the farm woman had a stronger influence on the husband when the household lived essentially from self-subsistence. It was then she who decided how to spend the money her activities brought in – particularly from the sale of milk, butter, eggs, and poultry – the main resources for daily life: ‘holder of the purse strings, dispenser of small sums from day to day, she could mistreat her servants and ridicule her husband in the eyes of the village community’.
10 Ibid., p. 130.Two conclusions can be drawn from these all too rare observations. On the one hand, the model of the ‘assistant–steward’ took over actual women’s practices and spread throughout the social body at different periods and in different countries. As with merchants’ manuals in the modern era,
11 P. Jeannin, ´La diffusion des manuels de marchands: Fonctions et stratégies éditoriales´, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 45 (1998), pp. 515–57. this type of writing selected knowledge both from predecessors’ books and from the surrounding environment. On the other hand, the model of ‘the secretary–accountant’ was fostered as a means of social monitoring for women in the second half of the nineteenth century. Indeed, faced with the threat of rural exodus and its political issues, French conservatives and religious movements actively promoted the home and the image of the mother–wife to the detriment of the wife who worked in partnership with her husband. This ideological framing, endorsed by the literature reviewed here, was expounded in elementary schools,
12 Clarke, Schooling the Daughters of Marianne. with a hands-on introduction to book-keeping. Then it progressed, during the first half of the twentieth century, into agricultural domestic training and women’s circles of the Jeunesse Agricole Catholique.
13 For analysis of this ideological shaping see, for France, M. Perrot, ‘La jaciste: Figure emblématique’, in Rose-Marie Lagrave (ed.), Celles de la terre. Agricultrice: L’invention politique d’un métier (1987), pp. 34–60; for Belgium, E. Gubin, ´Un rempart contre le désordre: Les paysannes belges au tournant du XXe siècle´, Enquêtes rurales 10 (2004), pp. 137–58. The pivotal point of this mentoring was the invention of ‘a separate feminine sphere’ used for the glorification of domestic womanhood.
The great majority of the writers also reflected these dominant social representations. Both male and female authors put an emphasis on feminine virtues: the farm woman’s active zeal for work, the special attention she gave to detail, her sense of moral duty. In doing so, they echoed the Catholic Church’s conception of feminine nature as expressed throughout Europe in the early nineteenth century. Thus, woman was seen as
a new social subject, free from all political passion, gifted with religious sentiments […] with a soul different from and complementary to the male soul […] and as a reserve of civilizing resources.
14 M. de Giorgio, ‘La bonne catholique’, in G. Fraisse and M. Perrot (eds), Histoire des femmes en Occident: Le XIXe siècle (1991), IV, pp. 203–39 at p. 204.Once it had been established that their bodies did not govern their minds, as previously thought, women’s nature could be positively requalified and partly reoriented in the direction of management and business. So it was with the glorification of their so-called innate temperance. Women were thus considered as agents taking more rational decisions because they were better able than men to detach themselves from their emotions. In line with Max Weber’s analysis of the ‘spirit of capitalism’, we may think that temperance became a valuable female trait as it held an elective affinity to the spirit of capitalism. Indeed, moderation counters the human drive to maximize profit and allows the renewal of opportunities for gain in a rational manner. In farming business, calling for temperance at a period when investments were highly valued but somewhat risky was a subtle strategy: thus women could be seen as apt partners to discuss with their husbands how to spend the farming surplus. As this suggests, narratives on female nature deserve more attention in the agricultural history of accounting. Although historians and feminist scholars have solidified the thesis of feminine nature as a stigma, gender narratives may also have shaped women’s conduct in a positive sense by fostering their agency in some domains.