Editor’s Note: We are highlighting scholarship that will be featured at the RWSA 15th Triennial conference in Jonesboro, Arkansas, USA, May 15-19, 2024.
New Zealand became the first self-governing country in the world in which women gained the right to vote in parliamentary elections as authorized by an act of parliament in 1893 (https://www.archives.govt.nz/discover-our-stories/womens-suffrage-petition). This presentation explores activism and advocacy work and how it is rhetorically presented in three women’s organizations in New Zealand: Rural Women New Zealand (RWNZ), The New Zealand Federation of Women’s Institutes (NZFWI), and National Council of Women of New Zealand (NCWNZ). Based on their websites and social media, two are clearly political and involved in gender rights while the third appears to be primarily focused on social activities and community events.
NCWNZ, established in 1896, has historically promoted “improvements to the quality of life of women, families and the community.” Their work has shaped the society and economics of New Zealand. They are currently focusing on a gender equal New Zealand (https://www.ncwnz.org.nz/about).
RWNZ, founded in 1925, began as the women’s group associated with the Farmer’s Union and thus has a rural focus. The group now serves as “an authoritative voice on health services, education, environment and social issues in the rural sector” focusing on empowering women and girls (https://ruralwomennz.nz/about-rwnz/).
NZFWI, begun in 1921, claims not to be political and primarily provides social activities for its members. However, a Facebook post from October 2022 indicates that the members celebrated equal representation in Parliament; while this shows progress for gender equality, it represents a binary. Although not necessarily politically active, they clearly value gender rights and also support various charitable causes via fundraising (https://www.wi.org.nz/).
Research Directorate, Mariano Marcos State University, Philippines
Editor’s Note: We are highlighting scholarship that will be featured at the RWSA 15th Triennial conference in Jonesboro, Arkansas, USA, May 15-19, 2024.
Space-time accessibility measures explicitly acknowledge the importance of gender roles as a key social and spatial constraint for women, constraining their behavior, limiting their activities and confining them to a smaller geographic area. The core of this study is to use an accounting framework on gender roles in the seaweed fishery for a rational resource management and promoting gender sensitive seaweed fishery systems for sustainable community transformation and development. It will map out human activities to depict the differentiated roles that men and women significantly play over time and space, that is, the spatio-temporal model in seaweed gathering and marketing. Descriptive statistics, frequency counts, percentages and means were used to treat the data.
While both gender can gather seaweeds in the supra and intertidal zones, only the males travel the subtidal zone. With a lesser time spent, the females are confined in the nearby supra and intertidal zone. This is because of the time spent and the risk involved in travelling the subtidal zone. It proved once more in the attitude of the respondents that “man are more risk taker” There is this gap in seaweed gathering at the subtidal zone. Still a men’s domain because they go there by boat.
While men are the sole seaweed gatherers at the subtidal zone, women take the burden in sorting, classifying and cleaning the gathered seaweeds and ultimately drying the seaweeds.
Further in-depth study in the spatio temporal activities should be done and other household members should be included in the study.
Editor’s Note: We are highlighting scholarship that will be featured at the RWSA 15th Triennial conference in Jonesboro, Arkansas, USA, May 15-19, 2024.
The Appalachian mountain range is a weird area full of weird people. Repeatedly, it is described, at best, as peculiar. Its people have been deemed backwards “white trash.” However, the relationship of Appalachia to race and class has never been simple—at times distanced from whiteness like the Jackson Whites and at other times used as the idyllic, hardworking Anglo-Saxon. Most histories completely ignore the large groups of non-white people who call the area home and have simplified the issues of the region as just racial or just class based, but never both. Appalachia has been a place in the dominant American imagination that could hold outcasts, but in turn could never be assimilated, never folded into the dominant hegemony. One of America’s favorite pastimes is constructing and re-constructing Appalachia from the outside, which often simplifies the intricacies of race and class in the area. Rather than continue to dichotomize Appalachia, scholars should take cues from the youth on TikTok, and allow activists from the area to determine how they will be represented and what value that will garner for them.
This paper is divided into four sections: a brief history of the limits of whiteness; an overview of socialist movements that arose in response to coal industry; the resurgence of (gendered and classed) dialogue about Appalachia surrounding the election of Donald Trump; and finally an application of the prior concepts to the social media platform TikTok, focusing on a popular transgender woman in the “yallternative” community.
We are highlighting scholarship that will be featured at the RWSA 15th Triennial conference in Jonesboro, Arkansas, USA, May 15-19, 2024.
The narrative of African American, southern women is often one of submission, subservience, and victimization. However, the author herself is a third-generation landowner. An examination of the researcher’s own matriarchal lineage inspired this project. Family interviews say that after the slave owner was killed in the Civil War, his sister freed the slaves and divided the land amongst them. Dr. Upshaw’s grandmother, Clara Mae Lewis Adams, was the only child of Henry Lewis, the son of a freed slave. The family land was considered part of heir property and was not individually recognized until the early 1990’s. At this time the heirs came together and legally divided the land, receiving deeds to specific plots. Clara Adams’ deed was passed down to Alice Adams Upshaw upon her death, and is now entrusted to the care of Allison Upshaw. Clara Adams worked as a domestic and only attended school until the third grade. How was she able to maintain ownership of the property when women nor Blacks were legally allowed to own land? How did an entire Black community manage to keep land during Reconstruction and in the Jim Crow South?
This conference presentation is an ethnographic storying of Black, female, landowners in Alabama’s Black Belt. The author braids together information from public records, interviews, creative nonfiction, as well as cultural and community narratives to dramatically portray these women’s lives.
Gendered Advocacy and Activism, Shaping Institutions and Communities
May 15-19, 2024
Hosted by Arkansas State University, Jonesboro, Arkansas, USA
Johnston, Frances Benjamin, photographer. Indian and black girls exercising with medicine ball, Hampton Institute. , 1899. [or 1900] Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2001703736/.
The conference theme, “Gendered Advocacy and Activisms, Shaping Institutions and Communities,” explores recent challenges to civil rights in various locations internationally, in rural communities. Analyzing how historical activism rooted in rural areas can result in broader change on both regional and national levels, various presentations will emphasize the central role that women and individuals of all genders and sexualities have played and continue to play in shaping and reforming our institutions and communities.
The RWSA is an international association founded in 1997 to promote and advance farm and rural women’s/gender studies from an historical perspective by encouraging research, promoting scholarship, and establishing and maintaining links with organizations that share these goals. The RWSA welcomes public historians and archivists, graduate students, and representatives of rural organizations and communities as conference participants and members, in addition to academic scholars from diverse fields, including sociology, anthropology, literature and languages, Indigenous Studies, and history.
Location and Travel:
Conference sessions will take place on the Arkansas State University campus. We estimate that conference registration will cost $150 US, with reduced rates available to students and low-income participants.
A block of hotel rooms will be available to conference participants at the Embassy Suites by Hilton, Jonesboro Red Wolf Convention Center in Jonesboro. Hotel rooms containing either 1 King-sized or 2 Queen-sized beds will cost $134 US per night plus taxes (or approximately $150/night including taxes). If you would like to share a hotel room with other conference participants, we encourage you to post a roommate request on this spreadsheet.
Jensen-Neth grant recipients should email their roommate preferences to RW******@gm***.com. All other conference attendees should contact the hotel directly to reserve a room (telephone: +1 870-619-4482). Ask for the “Rural Women’s Studies Association” room block rate.
The closest airport is Memphis International Airport in Memphis, Tennessee (79 miles to Jonesboro, Arkansas). Ground transportation can be arranged from the airport.
Arkansas State University is located on land traditionally inhabited by the Quapaw. This community occupied this area for many generations before being forcibly removed and relocated to Oklahoma. Despite this injustice, the Quapaw managed to preserve many of the traditions essential to their cultural identity. Information describing the Quapaw traditions and beliefs can be found athttps://www.quapawtribe.com. Acknowledging the theft of land and lives of indigenous peoples like those of the Quapaw, is a step toward decolonization. The continuance and preservation of these cultures and communities helps to reverse the erasure of original peoples. This is an acknowledgment of the structural racism and colonialism that is present in academia and society at large. Through empathy, cooperation, and action strides can be made to create a more equitable reality.
Local Arrangements Committee: Cherisse Jones-Branch
Program Committee: Cynthia Prescott (Co-chair), Tracey Hanshew (Co-chair), Ashimolowo Olubumni, Oluwaseun Boye, Margaret Evans, Cherisse Jones-Branch, Tanya Watson, Catharine Wilson
Wednesday, May 15
9:00-9:45 a.m. – Welcome Session
BREAK – 10:00-10:30 a.m.
10:30am-12:00pm – Concurrent Sessions
Session 1: Violence and Exclusion
Chair: Cameron Wimpy, Arkansas State University, USA
Mansi Bhagat, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India, “The Transition of Marginalised Women in India and Their Challenges”
Lisa C. Childs, University of Arkansas-Fayetteville and Division of Agriculture Fayetteville, Arkansas, USA,“Interracial Marriages and Family in Arkansas’ Ouachita Mountains, 1870-1920”
Berhanu Asfaw Weldemikael, Institute of Ethiopian Studies, Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia, “LGBTQIA+ in the Ethiopia Public Sphere”
2: Individual Stories in Overlooked Communities
Chair: Sarah Potter, University of Memphis, USA
Nikki Berg Burin, University of North Dakota, USA, “‘This has made a wreck of both of our lives’: The Cultural Politics of Breach of Promise Incidents in Dakota Territory”
Donna L. Shelton, Arkansas State University, USA, and Essie Trice-Hewett, Arkansas, USA, “Daughters of the Delta: Gertha Trice and Women’s Activism in the Arkansas Delta”
BREAK – 12:00-1:00 p.m.
1:00-2:30 p.m. – Concurrent Sessions
3: Dressing the East and West
Chair: Sarah Lampert, University of South Dakota, USA
Elyssa Ford, Northwest Missouri State University, USA, “The Cowboy from West to East: Western Wear in Newspaper Advertisements”
Tracey Hanshew, Eastern Oregon University, USA, “A Bunch of Whiskers Proposing Laws to Censor Women’s Dress”
Cynthia Prescott, University of North Dakota, USA, “Camp Fire Girls and Cultural Appropriation”
Holly M. Kent, University of Illinois Springfield, USA, “‘We Don’t Chase Liquor or Cowboys’: Imagining and Marketing Rural Appalachian Style in Contemporary Fashion Culture”
4: Women’s Economic Power Around the World
Chair: Diane McKenzie, University of Lethbridge, Canada
Samuel Umoh Uwem, University of Hradec Králové, Czech, and Umoh Adetola Elizabeth, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, “Market Women Leaders in Corridors of Power and Governance Nigeria Markets”
Jeannie Whayne, University of Arkansas, USA, “What do 21st Century Arkansas and Congolese Women Have in Common?”
Anupama Saxena and Akash Tawar, Guru Ghasidas Central University, India, “Women Empowerment through ‘Gauthans’: A Case Study of Flagship Project of a State Government in India from Perspective of Women Empowerment”
BREAK – 2:30-3:00 p.m.
3:00-5:00 p.m. – SPECIAL EVENT – Hillbilly film screening and discussion session
5:30-6:30 p.m. – Opening Reception
Thursday, May 16
8:30-10:00 a.m. – Concurrent Sessions
5: The Archives, the Arts, and Activism
Chair: Katherine Jellison, Ohio University, USA
Kerri L. Bennett, Arkansas State University, USA, “Silenced Stories: Uncovering Women Writers in the Mississippi Delta”
Kimberly Hieb, West Texas A&M University, USA, “The Amarillo Philharmonic Club and Women Composers of the Texas Panhandle”
Elissa Stroman, Texas Tech University, USA, “From the Dugout to the Concert Hall: Women’s Work Cultivating Classical Music in Lubbock, Texas, 1890 to 1930.”
6: FarmHer and Female Power
Chair: Jodey Nurse, McGill University, Canada
William V. Scott, Texas Tech University, USA, “Stolen Moments from the Ernst Farm: Letters to a Texan in the CCC”
Morgan Wilson, University of Notre Dame, USA, “Farm to Table-Bringing a 19th C. Farm Woman from the Archive to an Audience”
Mary Curtin, Caroline Murphy, and Una Woods, University of Limerick, Ireland, and Christine Cross, Napier Business School, Edinburgh, Scotland, “Gaining Ground? An Examination of Female Ownership and Participation in Farming in Ireland”
Bose Adebanjo Olaniyan, Director Establishments and Industrial Relations, Bureau of Establishments and Training, Nigeria, “Socioeconomic Intervention in Agricultural Practices; as Panacea to Healthy Living among Rural Women”
BREAK – 10:00-10:30 a.m.
10:30am-12:00pm – Concurrent Sessions
7: Domestic Violence, Sexual Assault, & Activism
Chair: Nikki Berg Burin, University of North Dakota, USA
Ajibola Oluwakemi Taiwo, Ogun State Ministry of Information and Strategy, Nigeria, “Curbing Domestic Violence in Abeokuta: Successes and Failings”
Captain Lilian Tugume, Ministry of Defence and Veterans Affairs, Uganda, “Rethinking Sexual and Reproductive Health Rights of Adolescent Girls and Young Women Living in Rural Areas in Africa”
8: Rural Black Women and Reimagining the Limits of Activism in the American South
Chair: Cherisse Jones-Branch, Arkansas State University, USA
Beatrice J. Adams, College of Wooster, “Mothers of the Struggle: Black Mothers and the Civil Rights Generation”
Allison Mitchell, University of Virginia, “The Foot Soldiers: Patricia Stephens Due and the Congress of Racial Equality’s Voter Education Campaign in North Florida”
Brooke A. Thomas, University of Alabama, “‘We Understand that federal funds are Available:’ the AKA Mississippi Health Project, Mississippi Midwives, and the New Deal”
Pamela Walker, Texas A&M San Antonio, “I am not going to stop until I am a registered voter: Rural Black Women and the Mississippi Movement After Freedom Summer”
12:00-2:00 p.m. – SPECIAL EVENT Luncheon and Keynote Speaker:
Sarah Eppler Janda, Cameron University, USA, “‘To Speak So Forthrightly as to Offend: Expressions and Consequences of Gendered Activism on the Prairie.”
2:00-3:30 p.m. – Concurrent Sessions
9: Contraception Use and Misuse
Chair: Sankeev Acharya, Arkansas State University, USA
Justina Licata, Indiana University East, USA, “When the Local Becomes International: How Bangladeshi Feminists Campaign against Norplant Impacted the International Women’s Health Movement”
Ashimolowo Olubunmi, Federal University of Agriculture Abeokuta, Nigeria, “Female Agriculture Undergraduates Perception and use of Contraceptives in Federal University of Agriculture, Abeokuta, Nigeria”
Akanle Florence Foluso, Ekiti State University Ado Ekiti, Nigeria, “A Human Right Approach to Sexual and Reproductive Health of the Hearing Impaired Adolescents in Developing Countries”
10: Gender and Education
Chair: Sara Egge, Centre College, USA
Alejandra de Arce, National Council for Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET), Argentina, “Women Agronomists and Rural Extension Policies (Argentina, 1910-1970)
Megan Birk, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, USA, “Campus Babies and Modern Motherhood”
Michelle McCain, Western Governors University, USA, “Black Students Perceptions with PWI Online Instruction”
BREAK – 3:30-4:00 p.m.
4:00-5:30 p.m. – Concurrent Sessions
11: Home Demonstration, Women’s Organizations, and Empowerment
Chair: Linda M. Ambrose, Laurentian University, Canada
Adrien Lievin, University Lille, France, “Home Demonstration, Rural Education, and Women’s Political Empowerment in Appalachia, 1911-1945”
Peggy D. Otto, Western Kentucky University, USA, “Doing it Their Way: How Farm Women Resisted Early Extension Curriculum and Shaped Their Own Clubs”
Margaret Thomas Evans, Indiana University East, USA, “Activism and Advocacy in Three Women’s Organizations in New Zealand”
12: Rural Women and Social Media
Chair: Locardia Chitombo, Zimbabwe
Kaceylee Klein, University of California Davis, “Socialism in ‘Trump Country:’ A ‘Yallternative’ View”
Edith Chinelo Onuama and Michael Okpara, University of Agriculture, Nigeria, “Appraising Social Media Advocacy for Gender Equality in Nigerian Rural Communities”
Friday, May 17
8:30-10:00 a.m. – Concurrent Sessions
13: ROUNDTABLE–Gender, Economy, and Community: Recent Books in Rural North American History
Moderator: Debra Reid, The Henry Ford
Discussants:
Katherine Jellison, Ohio University, USA, Amish Women and the Great Depression (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023)
Jodey Nurse, McGill University, Canada, Cultivating Community: Women and Agricultural Fairs in Ontario (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022)
Steven D. Reschly, Truman State University, USA, Amish Women and the Great Depression (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023)
Pamela Riney-Kehrberg, Iowa State University, USA, When a Dream Dies: Agriculture, Iowa, and the Farm Crisis of the 1980s (University Press of Kansas, 2022).
14: The Gatherers and Advocacy
Chair: Pamela Riney-Kehrberg, Iowa State University, USA
Susan G. Aquino and Zenaida M. Agngarayngay, Mariano Marcos State University, Philippines, “Spatio-Temporal Analysis in Seaweed Gathering and Marketing in Selected Coastal Areas in Ilocos Norte Philippines”
Zia Rahman and Maisha Tabassum Anima, University of Dhaka, Bangladesh, “Empowerment through Dissent: The Mobilization of Theme Rural Women in Bangladesh – A Case Study of Sylhet’s Tea Garden Workers Movement against Wage Inequality”
Taaja El-Shabazz, Brown University, USA, “A Child’s Place: Working Mothers as Homemakers and the Cotton Plantation as a Site of New Deal”
BREAK – 10:00-10:30 a.m.
10:30 a.m.-12:00 p.m. – Concurrent Sessions
15: Advocating for Political Rights in Africa
Chair: Salina Makana, University of Memphis, USA
Ogunlami Serifat Abolanle, Ogun State Government, Nigeria, “Empowering Rural Women in Ogun State, Nigeria for a Fulfilled Life”
Oladotun E. Awosusi, University of Fort Hare, South Africa, “Gendered Activism and Refugee Protection in Post-Apartheid South Africa”
Oluwaseun Boye, International Breweries PLC, Nigeria, “Rights and Roles of Women in Politics”
16: Suffrage and Rural Political Power
Chair: Elyssa Ford, Northwest Missouri State University, USA
Sara Egge, Centre College, USA, “Making Citizens in Rural America: Marietta Bones, Deputy Clerk of Court”
Jennifer Helton, Ohlone College, USA, “Grassroots Women’s Suffrage Activism in the Rural American West”
Diane McKenzie, University of Lethbridge, Canada, “Do You Consider Yourself a Feminist?”
12:00-2:00 p.m. SPECIAL EVENT: SMART Repro presentation with Brittany Scott, Christina Ballard, and Dr. Jerica Rich, assistant professor of Animal Science.
SMART Repro is a woman owned business in Jonesboro, Arkansas, that is a USDA-inspected and approved small ruminant semen and embryo collection facility. The center is dedicated to showcasing the decades-long work of American sheep and goat producers to the international market and is one of only three such facilities in the world. The Panel will discuss the impact of their services, particularly on rural women’s economics outside of the United States.
2:00-3:30 p.m. – Concurrent Sessions
17: Victimhood: Overcoming Stigmatization and Discrimination
Chair: Jaein Lee, Arkansas State University, USA
Sheetal Arya, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India, “Gender and Geopolitics: A Case Study of Indo-Pak Border”
Nkiru Christiana Ohia and Joshua Ogueri Okpara, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, “Gender Differentials in the Stigmatization and Discrimination against Inmates of Leper Settlements in South East Nigeria”
18: “Everyday” Activism
Chair: Kelly Houston Jones, Arkansas Tech University, USA
Meighan Mantei, Carleton University, Canada, “‘I learned to Pick my Battles’: Girls’ Everyday Resistance in Oil Country”
Allison Upshaw, Stillman College, USA, “reFraming: Dramatic Narratives of African American Female Landowners in Alabama’s Black Belt”
Valandra, University of Arkansas, USA, “Before They Had Bootstraps: A Case Study of Intergenerational Black Women’s Activism in Rural Arkansas, 1880-1944”
BREAK – 3:30-4:00 p.m.
4:00-5:30 p.m. – Concurrent Sessions
19: Rural Black Women and Emancipation in the American South
Chair: Cherisse Jones-Branch, Arkansas State University, USA
Kimberly Green, Independent Scholar, USA, “Black Women in DeValls Bluff: Agency from the Western Sanitary Commission within an Arkansas Civil War Contraband Camp”
Kelly Houston Jones, Arkansas Tech University, USA, “Rural Black Women’s Political Roles in Emancipation Celebration”
Kelly McMichael, American Public University, USA: “Breaking the Chains of Matrimony: An Examination of Divorce Among Female Former Slaves in Tennessee after the Civil War”
20: Changing the Farm as the Farmer, Not the Farmer’s Wife: Women Reckoning with the Multigenerational Family Farm
Chair: Sydney Giacalone, Brown University, USA
Participant #1–This farmer lives in Georgia and will speak about her experience engaging in genealogy research regarding her family’s history as enslavers, collaborative work toward racial reconciliation and descendant reparations in her community, and the beginning of transition of her family’s farm toward regenerate practices.
Participant #2–This farmer lives in Iowa and will speak about her transition from conventional to sustainable farming, and activism within the immigrant and environmental justice spaces of agriculture.
Participant #3– This fourth generation farmer will speak as the second generation in her family to run their previously-industrial regenerative farm, and the particular experience of her identity that has informed this transition.
5:30-7:00 p.m. Break
7:00-9:00 p.m. – SPECIAL EVENT – film screening: Women’s Work: The Untold Story of America’s Female Farmers—a documentary film by The Female Farmer ProjectTM along with KRCreative Strategies Studio
Saturday, May 18
10:00 a.m. -11:30 a.m. – Concurrent Sessions
21: Social Reform and Resistance
Chair: Cynthia C. Prescott, University of North Dakota, USA
Lynn Byall Benson, University of Massachusetts Boston, USA, “Outlaws with Agency: Bonnie Parker and 1930s Gun Moll Culture in the Southwestern United States”
Pamela J. Snow Sweetser, Independent Scholar, USA, “Genuine Advocacy, Selective Equity: Middle Class, Evangelical White Women and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union Movement in a Dry State, Aroostook County, Presque Isle, Maine, 1851-1934
22: Empowering and Connecting through Textile Work
Chair: Holly M. Kent, University of Illinois Springfield, USA
Kacie Hopkins, York University, Canada, “Visual Research: Grounding in Stitches”
Hillary Loomis, Southern Illinois University, USA, “Work-songs, Wool Waulking, and Wild Women, Earliest accounts of Female Powered Cloth-Fulling in Scotland”
12:00-2:00 p.m. – SPECIAL EVENT: Lunch RWSA Business Meeting and the next Berkshire Conference
2:00-3:30 p.m. – Concurrent Sessions
23: From Penciled Notes to Table Talk: Exploring Rural Women’s Voices in the Historical Record
Chair: Shelly Lemons, McKendree University, USA
Tanya Finchum, Oklahoma Oral History Research Center, “Dust, Drought, and Dreams Gone Digital: Oklahoma Women in the Dust Bowl Oral History Project”
Steven Kite, University of Arkansas-Fort Smith, USA, “There and Back Again: A Historian’s Tale”
Shelly Lemons, McKendree University, USA, “A Place at the Table: Hidden ‘Conversations’ in the Historical Record”
24: Rural Childcare and Women in Agriculture: A Panel Discussion on the intersections between on-farm safety, farmer well-being, and farm viability.
Chair: Nicole Gwishiri
Florence Becot, National Farm Medicine Center, National Children’s Center for Rural and Agricultural Health and Safety, Marshfield Clinic Research Institute, Marshfield, Wisconsin, USA
Shoshanah Inwood, The Ohio State University, Ohio, USA
Nicole Gwishiri, Women for the Land Southeast Program Manager, American Farmland Trust, Lexington, Kentucky, USA
Gabrielle Roesch-McNally, Women for the Land Director, American Farmland Trust,
BREAK – 3:30-4:00 p.m.
4:00-6:00 p.m. – SPECIAL EVENT – Maria Cristina Moroles and Lauri Umansky: Águila: The Vision, Life, Death, and Rebirth of a Two-Spirit Shaman in the Ozark Mountains: A Reading and Discussion
16 DAYS OF ACTIVISM, OGUN STATE. GENDER DEVELOPMENT INITIATIVES & PARTNERS.
Date: 30th November, 2023
Location: Sobeyi Village
Total Number of Attendees: 50
Number of Females: 50
Number of Males: 0
INTRODUCTION
This was handled by the Assistant programme officer for Gender development Initiative (Oyelowo Olayinka) who introduced Gender Development Initiative, Ogun She Leads Network, and other partners. The opening prayer was taken by one of the girls, Olayinka Haliat.
DISCUSSIONS
The Assistant programme officer explained the reason for the day’s celebration which in partner with #Givingtuesday, as to sensitize the young women on menstrual hygiene. She illustrated the fear a beginner may encounter during their first menstrual flow, also how menstruation is not something to be ashamed of or feel less of yourself. The young women were also urged to try as much as possible to always go out with at least one sanitary pad, because most women start their period in public unknowingly, also without access to menstrual products, as this will therefore help a sister.
QUESTIONS AND CONTRIBUTIONS
The Assistant programme officer enlighten the young women on how to keep the body clean when menstruating, frequent change of sanitary pad, washing of hands before and after changing menstrual materials, and frequent washing of genitals during their period. There was also discussion on disposal of menstrual products after usage. One of the young women, Ogunfemi Nofisat, spoke about her experience during her first period, she explained it as being scared and uncomfortable but later got used to it as time goes. There were sessions where sanitary pad was distributed to the young women and pictures were taken.
In North America in the late-19th and early 20th centuries, manufacturing and wholesaling firms relied on armies of traveling sales personnel to interest buyers in their product line. Their customers were typically retail store owners and sometimes the ultimate consumer, say the “private clients” of a drummer selling an upmarket line of clothing or accessories.
In the vernacular of the day these peripatetic vendors often were termed “drummers”. While the noun form is obsolete, the cognate expression “to drum up business” recalls this older term. Usually, although not invariably, the commercial traveler was male. The occupation assisted to supply thousands of dry goods, jewellery, hardware, boot and shoe, clothing, tableware, grocery, and other small merchants spread across the nation. Although a drummer’s sales “territory” might encompass localities of any size, it classically covered medium-size and smaller towns and their hotel culture, viz. “corridors” and smoking rooms, dining rooms and bars, and sample rooms, to exhibit products to merchants.
So common yet noteworthy were drummers, they became a stock figure of American culture. Newspapers and magazines often profiled them, frequently to humorous effect. Their emblems were a flashy style of dress, volubility, a quick joke and wide smile, a cigar, and railroad schedule. With the onset of more sophisticated methods of advertising and the department store in larger urban centers, the drummer’s role lessened in importance, but continued in the business system, nonetheless.
Business and social historians have studied the drummer phenomenon, for example Walter A. Friedman in his (2004) The Birth of the Salesman: The Transformation of Selling in America. Friedman usefully distinguished commercial travelling from peddling, canvassing, retailing in a shop, and other forms of product merchandising. See also Timothy B. Spear’s (1995) 100 years on the Road: the Traveling Salesman in American Culture, and Susan Strasser’s “The Smile That Pays: the Culture of Traveling Salesmen”, a chapter in (1992) The Myth-Making Frame of Mind: Social Imagination and American Culture, James B. Gilbert, editor.
“Commercial Traveller,” from the Occupations for Women series (N166) for Old Judge and Dogs Head Cigarettes. Issued by Goodwin & Company, 1887. The Jefferson R. Burdick Collection, Gift of Jefferson R. Burdick, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Accession Number: 63.350.214.166.42. Open domain.
Between about 1880 and the onset of World War I, the general American press and trade journals, as well as fictional treatments and both stage and film productions, gave increasing attention to a small subset of the drummer class, the female drummer.
Like her male counterpart she was typically in her twenties or when seasoned, thirties, as any drummer past 40 was viewed as expendable by the employer due to presumed reduced vigor and ability to withstand the rigours of the road.
Opportunities for women were limited in the product distribution chain at the time. Women frequently worked in retail stores, low-paying employment viewed as temporary until marriage beckoned. Of course, too, the “factory girl” phenomenon emerged in the 19th century. These and other contemporary female occupational roles have been extensively studied. But salesmanship away from the retail environment, and drumming in particular, was generally a male preserve, with exceptions such as book agency and marketing insurance to females. Spears noted (see p. 145) that women drummers in the late 1800s did not exceed 1% of the total, and even by 1910 the percentage did not exceed 2%.
Probably due to the relatively small number of women who worked as drummers, they have received, at least by my canvass, little scholarly attention. But there were, at a minimum, hundreds of them in the United States in the 1880s through to World War I. They form a fascinating subset of the drummer corps, worthy of serious attention. In 1885 one still might find news articles dismissive of female attempts to travel on the road. The Weekly Calistogian of April 22, 1885 in “Women as Drummers”, enumerated a dubious list of reasons why women did not belong in this field. The journalist assumed a woman’s charms would be a major part of her success, and this would not work with the large married set of merchants and buyers. He also thought women could not handle the drinking that was characteristic of the male drummer, an aid to chumming with merchants, or carry his “irrepressible pertinacity and lordly assumption”.
But women drummers did emerge, due to persistence and independent thinking, and soon newspapers covered the phenomenon more responsibly and realistically. The women might sell any goods, from copperware to corsets, but often handled soap and cosmetics, clothing, food or beverages, and other goods associated with family life. Some had notable success, earning high salaries and commission but even an average female drummer could make $1000 annually, compared, said one report, to 80% of that for most store clerks (“Women on the Road”, Buffalo Evening News, July 27, 1903). Many women did even better, and some treasured the freedom and independence of the road.
Female drummers were visible enough to form the subject of an 1898 comic stage musical, A Female Drummer, by Charles E. Blaney, which ran successfully in regional and urban theatres. This kind of attention cemented their status, along with the more numerous male corps, as period cultural symbols. Some news accounts considered the female drummer a manifestation of the New Woman creed then current, others disclaimed any such connection.
The popular media generally portrayed the women as conducting themselves respectably and being treated in similar fashion by merchants and male drummers. A (Canadian) account, in the Stanstead Journal, September 24, 1896 (originating in San Francisco), is typical, portraying a young “Miss Byrne” as all-business and able to give male drummers “pointers”, even as they presumed to teach her the ways of effective selling. The article can be read as an early reproval of mansplaining.
There is little hint in contemporary popular media of female drummers being subject to sexual harassment. But newspapers and magazines were mostly a “family” medium, not the kind of space where serious social problems were examined even if they were recognized as such, barring the occasional expose piece but this was not the usual fare of most newspapers. Male drummers were often referred to as “mashers”, but such behaviour was regarded as typical, even expected, hence not calling for special condemnation.
Thus, valuable as a press survey is in other respects, it might mislead on this point. Resort to works of fiction and memoir tells a deeper story. In numerous works of fiction ca. World War I the author Edna Ferber, a daughter of a small town dry-goods merchant, recounted the experiences of Emma McChesney, aka Mrs. McChesney. A mother and divorcee, she went on the road to notable success selling petticoats. In the 1913 Roast Beef, Medium: The Business Adventures of Emma McChesney, the protagonist recounts an attempted seduction by a handsome younger male drummer she meets in a small town hotel. She fends him off successfully, in part because he was married, and perhaps also in acquiescence to conventions of the day her readers would have regarded as mandatory.
A New York society figure and widow, Alice Foote MacDougall, became a successful coffee vendor and restaurateur (1910s-1930s), a career prompted by early widowhood and financial distress. In her 1930 memoir Alice Foote MacDougall: The Autobiography of a Business Woman, she describes a similar seduction attempt, this time by a country rogue who was driving her from a remote railroad station to her destination, a sanitarium she hoped would buy her line of coffee and cocoa. She fought him off with the handle of the buggy’s bull whip and a strong tone. She wrote:
“Then the gentleman stopped the horses, and pressed close to me and began to make love. His horrid breath heated my cheeks. I was conscious of his face coming closer and closer to mine. Disgust — there isn’t a word in the English language strong enough for what I felt. The whip was in the socket. I seized it. Words are often useless things, but the words I used, the whip held near the lash with the butt-end free, the look in my face, carried some idea to the beastly creature and he desisted. I did not get to the sanitarium nor have I ever tried to return. He turned his horses about and we drove back to the little town. Any woman can imagine my relief when I saw the train arrive to carry me back to wicked New York. Thus one business episode ended.
That was all it was, an episode of a business day. It did me no harm. I laughed over it the next day and for many months after would recite part of the poem, “The White Goblet and the Red,” that had been recited with so much fervor by my amorous companion.
This is the kind of thing that happens to women in business. This is the price one pays for emancipation —it is scarcely worth while, it seems to me. Perhaps because I am mid-Victorian”.
My survey of the female drummer phenomenon suggests no real pattern, by which I mean among the women themselves. On the issue of sexual harassment, Alice Foote MacDougall, an avowed Victorian who would have remained a housewife had she been able, seemed to regard instances as inevitable, and thus ineradicable. Edna Ferber, via the voice of Mrs. McChesney, by contrast evinced a more no-nonsense approach, invoking prevailing morality to dissuade mashers from their course, e.g., where married, or attempting to seduce the older women.
In Part VI of my recent blogpost series, “’The Ubiquitous, Irrepressible Drummer’”, I review two examples of the rare female whiskey drummer, able to penetrate the male sanctum of the saloon to sell their wares successfully. While both dressed soberly and maintained a business mien and style, one paid for drinks on the house and drank the wares with her customers, a practice most male whiskey drummers followed, while the other abjured this ritual. In the same Part VI, I discuss a case where a woman, contrary to the picture usually portrayed in the press, may have granted sexual favours to increase her income on the road. To what extent such practices occurred and were encouraged by their employers, in the specific context of commercial traveling, is a fecund subject for historians.
Finally, the spurs to enter drumming varied too, from early widowhood and consequent financial need to simple curiosity and wanderlust. The road provided a rare opportunity for a woman of limited means to escape the straitened course otherwise available including shop clerk, factory worker, nurse, or servant. The motives seemed more various than for males, who (most of them) ended married with a family to support, hence assuming the occupation for more conventional reasons.
Excerpt from “What is agricultural ethics and why does it matter?” in Key issues in agricultural ethics, edited by Professor Emeritus Robert L. Zimdahl http://dx.doi.org/10.19103/AS.2023.0125.01
The title of this chapter illustrates the curious grammar of the word ethics. Native speakers of English commonly speak of ethics as something that people have or lack. In this sense, ethics are rules of behavior or patterns of conduct. Readers should notice the shift from the plural ‘are’ in the previous sentence to the verb ‘is’ in the title of the chapter. The meaning of the word ‘ethics’ changes from naming a collection of related practices, activities or principles to indicating a singular practice or activity. While this might seem like a trivial observation, it is indicative of a deeper confusion that has dogged the reception of Robert Zimdahl’s important work on agricultural ethics. This explains why there is a need for a chapter called ‘What is agricultural ethics?’
This chapter will work through some meanings of the word ‘ethics’ as it might be applied in the context of agriculture and food systems. Readers will arrive at my answer to the question ‘What is agricultural ethics?’ at the endpoint of this journey, but here is a start: Agricultural ethics is a specific discipline for inquiry into the myriad normative issues that interpenetrate every aspect of agricultural production and food systems. As understood in the specific sense developed here, agricultural ethics matters because some unique features in the institutionalization of agricultural science and education have created gaps in the thought processes that support policy and the innovation process for agricultural technologies. The chapter concludes with some remarks on teaching agricultural ethics.
2 Key concepts: ethics and common morality
The twentieth-century philosopher R. M. Hare (1919–2002) recognized a distinction between what he called common morality and philosophical ethics. Common morality, Hare said, is what your grandmother knew to be ethically correct. One does not need a philosopher to explain this. Everyone, Hare wrote, internalizes a set of rules or norms for regulating their own behavior and correlative expectations for the conduct of others. These norms are communicated and socially reinforced through words such as ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ and through legal and religious institutions that codify and promote shared practice revolving around concepts of justice, virtue, honesty and loyalty. It is surprisingly difficult to account for the sources of these norms, but we should not doubt their existence or their binding authority over many domains of personal and social conduct. Similarly, the generally small cultural variations in a community’s normative expectations should not obscure the core of shared norms in virtually every known human society. That is common morality (Hare, 1981).
Hare was hardly alone among philosophers and social theorists in holding such a view, but his understanding of the relationship between the cultural form of common morality and the activity of moral philosophers is helpful in the present context. As noted, most elements of common morality are stable across different cultural groups. These include norms of truth-telling and prohibitions against stealing, robbery and physical violence against others, except in well-specified contexts. However, there are both differences across cultures and change over time within any given society. As an example, slavery was seen as morally justified for a considerable period in Western history. By the time chattel slavery was the dominant source of labor in the agriculture of the American South, it was viewed as a dubious and regrettable but necessary practice. The perspective shifted finally to the judgment that slavery is morally unacceptable. This transition marks a change in the common morality that was of particular importance for agriculture. Hare argued that philosophical ethics plays a special role in these transformations. It is an activity that assembles and curates intellectual resources for questioning common morality on specific points. A philosopher or social critic deploys these resources to offer rationally based assessments of how or whether changes in common morality are warranted.
Many contemporary philosophers would accept the notion that there is little point in questioning those aspects of common morality that seem to raise no disagreement, but they would also agree that philosophical ethics can be helpful both in challenging problematic aspects of common morality and in resolving that challenge in a manner that is ethically progressive. Hare used complex reasoning to support his judgment that there is one best way to pursue questions at the philosophical level (a form of utilitarianism). There is continuing debate among philosophers on this matter. Some agree that a well-specified ethical theory should rule over analysis at the philosophical level, whether or not they agree with the specifics of Hare’s approach. Others, including myself, think methods in philosophical ethics cannot be specified much beyond a general commitment to the exchange of reasons and a good faith effort to understand and then accept, modify or rebut the views of those with whom you, at first blush, disagree. (A more detailed discussion of methods follows later in the chapter.) In either view, progressive approximation of the morally correct response is possible, and fallibility is a pervasive feature of the human condition.
Other philosophical views create barriers to the critique and evaluation of common morality in agricultural universities and research institutes. The influential economist Glenn L. Johnson (1918–2003) thought many agricultural scientists had adopted a flawed positivist philosophy of science. In this view, normative principles have no place in science, so agricultural scientists simply refuse to discuss ethical norms bearing on their science or the practice of agriculture (Johnson, 1976). The view is flawed because the statement ‘normative principles have no place in science’ is a normative principle. Scientists cannot follow it without doing what the principle itself says that they should not do (Thompson, 2004). Alternatively, the training of applied scientists (and I would add, especially social scientists) encourages them to adopt a stance of critical disengagement from disagreements about the ethics of farming practice. There may be good reasons for adopting this stance, but the model proposed by Hare shows that an ability to withhold the expression of one’s moral commitments in certain instances does not imply that moral inquiry is impossible. Like any inquiry, moral inquiry can be frustrating and end in failure, but one would hope the practice of science would equip practicing scientists to deal with the possibility of this kind of disappointment.
By this point, readers may have guessed where this is all leading. On the one hand, people who work in agriculture and its supporting industries are subject to the expectations of common morality. They can be said to fail ethically when they do not meet these expectations. On the other hand, agricultural ethics is a form of philosophical ethics. It is the deployment of the analytic, argumentative and discursive tools of philosophical ethics to questions arising in agricultural practices and in the science and policy domains that support the production, processing and distribution of food and fiber. As such, it differs from the ways in which common morality functions to regulate the conduct of farmers, researchers, public officials and others who fill various roles in the food system. Those of us who aim to practice the form of inquiry that constitutes agricultural ethics do not mean to suggest that our work is, in any respect, a replacement for common morality. Much of the time, talk of ethics in agriculture is going to advert back to common morality. No one needs a philosopher to come in and endorse the proscription of lying or theft. However, before considering why agricultural ethics matters, it will prove helpful to provide some examples of how common morality functions in agricultural situations.
The book explores key ethical debates surrounding agriculture and agri-food supply chains, including issues such as animal welfare, use of labour, the effects of new technologies and the overall impact of agriculture on the environment.
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Families in Focus, published by Rutgers University Press, is home to cutting-edge books covering the breadth of scholarship on families and kinship. The editors seek books that explore families —as they adjust to changing intimate relationships, uncertain economic situations, and contested political contexts. We are especially interested in books that highlight differences and inequalities both within and among families.
Families in Focus will publish research based on a variety of methodologies and will also occasionally publish synthetic pieces. We are open to discussing manuscripts at any stage of development.
