Are you a farmer, but can’t seem to call yourself one?

Not all farmers are wearing boots and driving tractors.

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Kirsten Diprose writes on why so many rural women struggle with their farming identity. This article was first published in the Rural Women’s Day Magazine, October 2023. Photo by Georgie Mann.

“What’s your connection to rural Australia?”  That’s the very first question I generally ask guests on my podcast Ducks on the Pond.  But my female farming guests often struggle to identify whether they are a farmer or not.

Now, there’s no wrong answer; you are who you are. But the farmer question has long been tied to how women’s work in agriculture has been recognised (or not, as the case may be).

For many years, I would skirt around this question of whether or not I was a farmer, by saying “I live on a farm”. Strangely, it frustrated me that when I was explaining my career, that I would have to weave in the line “I married a farmer” for my career to make sense (going from being a TV journalist in Sydney and Melbourne, to working in south-west Victoria in regional newsrooms). But I now push back on the thought processes (and ego!) that made me so uneasy at the time. I didn’t like my marital status to be part of my career story (surely it’s irrelevant?) and I felt like I needed to explain why my career seemed to be moving in the wrong direction.

But now, I realise the personal is the political (to borrow on the famous feminist slogan from 1960s), which was part of a broader aim to break down the traditional dichotomy between the public sphere and the private sphere. The public sphere is where ‘work’ happens and government and politics comes in and the personal sphere is meant to be our home lives. Traditionally the public sphere was dominated by men, while women mainly operated in the private sphere (as mothers and homemakers). A lot has changed since the 1960s, but politicising some of those ‘personal sphere’ subjects like childcare, women’s health issues and the share of domestic duties can still be hard to get onto the public sphere agenda. Yes, who does the dishes, is political!

So, coming back to the farm now, women have also been traditionally shut out of the public sphere of agriculture. For all the men who built farming businesses, they couldn’t have done the long hours, without the domestic help of their wives (and I think many men would happily acknowledge this too).

In our first podcast episode, “Do you call yourself a farmer?” – we looked at the history of women on farms in Australia, to get a better idea of why some of us still feel ‘unnatural’ about this job title. On official documents, women couldn’t even call themselves ‘farmers’ in Australia until 1994. But to truly understand the relationship between women and the word ‘farmer’ we need to go back hundreds of years.

The ’farmer’s wife’ was an essential part of Australia’s settler history, and according to Dr Jessie Matheson, who completed her PhD on rural women in Australia’s early colonial history, farming women were meant to have a moralising, “God’s police’ role in the new colonies. While many women on farms, worked in the family farm (as an extra labour unit), there’s evidence that in NSW and Victoria, in the 1890s, women were encouraged to officially record their work as ‘domestic duties’. 

“And the idea was, was that if we had women working the land, we wouldn't look like we were this shining beacon of the New world anymore, “ Dr Matheson said.

“It was an old world thing to have to have women toiling on the land,” she said.

“So they'd recategorize women, as you know, housewives and doing domestic duties to sort of perpetuate this idea of what Australia was going to represent.”

It’s funny how the status of work can change. Now, being a housewife is often given a low status (and it shouldn’t) in society, but back then, it was high status.  This was probably true for farming families right up into the 1970s (and perhaps beyond), because it meant a man could afford for his wife to not work (another high-status signifier).

I’m not sure when the status switch for “house-wife” happened. But it has impacted women on farm greatly. It has left many rural women in ‘no man’s land,’ with their professional identity. Are they a farmers’ wife? (Not in today’s age!) A farmer? How much farming work do you have to do, to be a farmer? Is it about business or land ownership?

I know many women who feel like they can’t use the word “farmer” if they’re not the ones sitting on a tractor or pulling lambs. Of course, there are many women doing the physical farming and rightly calling themselves farmers. But where this does leave the women who do the book work, pick up parts, run after the kids and cook dinner most (or every) night?  These women might have other identities off-farm too, as teachers, nurses, psychologists, board directors or small business owners.

It took me a while to say it. I gradually moved from saying, ‘I live on a farm,” to when I was with my husband, I’d say “We’re farmers.” Now I own it. I’m a farmer. I do the book work, I (very) occasionally move mobs of sheep. I pick up parts. I do most of the home duties that allow my husband to work long and sometimes erratic hours. I also have a career in communications off the farm, that I have always worked in (although at different ‘speeds’ since becoming a mother and a farmer).

So, I can’t talk about my profession, without talking about the personal. The personal is the public …. and it’s all political. My career has been undoubtedly shaped by the personal (i.e. who I married), but that’s just how I arrived at the farm. As rural women, our roles in farming businesses and the broader community can still go unseen in the public sphere (even if they are recognised by our families at home – which, thankfully is true for me).

 So that’s why I always encourage rural women to put their hand up for the front facing roles in agriculture. And it’s why I created Ducks on the Pond; it’s a platform for rural women only –to raise the profile of women on the land. We’re not all farmers, but we all have a story to tell and wisdom to share.

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 Kirsten Diprose is a farmer in Caramut, in south-west Victoria. She is also a communications specialist, podcaster and former ABC journalist. She is the founder of the Rural Podcasting Co, which helps businesses and individuals shape their own stories. She is the co-host and founder of of Ducks on the Pond, alongside Jackie Elliott.