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Australian Feminist Studies, Vol. 18, No. 41, 2003

Women in Agriculture: the ‘New Entrepreneurs’

MARGARET ALSTON

Women are distinguishing themselves as the ‘new entrepreneurs’ of agriculture in

Australia and their efforts are revolutionising production practices in this country. Yet

these efforts are largely overlooked by an industry and rural media that are predomi-

nantly male dominated and who view women as located in the private realm of the

family farm. They are also largely overlooked in feminist literature because of a

perception of rural women as conservative and because of an inherent urbocentrism in

feminist theorising.1 Yet it could be argued that women working in agriculture have

made valuable gains for women in the way they structure their lives and work within the

strictures of a family production unit. In this article I wish to show that the efforts of

twenty-first-century farm women, the ‘new entrepreneurs’, continue a tradition of women

who have made significant contributions to the agricultural industry in Australia. I want

to do this by, firstly, examining women’s role in Australian agriculture as ‘entrepreneurs’

in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and, secondly, considering the twenty-first-

century efforts of women as ‘new entrepreneurs’. In making these links I want not only

to celebrate the enormous contributions of women to agriculture but also to expose to

public view the dimensions of their contribution. Equally significantly I want to point to

processes that have rendered the efforts of female entrepreneurs invisible. I will argue

that Australian agriculture is at a crossroads as a direct result of globalisation, loss of tariff

protection and exposure to world markets and can no longer afford to disregard the

critical efforts of its female entrepreneurs who are crucial to the future of agriculture.

Women—Invisible Farmers

Women engaged in agricultural pursuits are often critically aware of women’s efforts in

relation to agriculture and farm family development in Australia. In my own family, my

grandmother arrived as a 12 year old together with her 13-year-old sister from Ireland.

They never saw their family again, both marrying farmers and contributing to the

Australian farms where they lived out their lives. What is disappointing to researchers

like me is that we usually know these stories of incredible courage by accident. There is

a black hole surrounding women’s history that is sketchily filled by resort to diary entries

and letters of nineteenth- and twentieth-century women. Very little of women’s history

is recorded in official sources because, as Anne Summers2 notes, ‘Australian’ and ‘male’

became synonymous and in agriculture historically ‘farmer’ and ‘male’ have tended to

become interchangeable.

ISSN 0816-4649 print/ISSN 1465-3303 online/03/020163-09 2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd

DOI: 10.1080/0816464032000102247

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164 M. Alston

This process of rendering women invisible farmers has been assisted by official sources.

A good example is the debate in the Victorian parliament in the 1890s, where it was

determined that women working in ‘unwomanly’ occupations such as farming and

mining should not be recorded in official census statistics.3 It was considered that such

a move would give the impression to the world that Australia was a developing country,

not a developed country. With such extraordinary logic, women working in agriculture

and other ‘unwomanly pursuits’ were removed from the census. Statisticians of the

twentieth century continued this tradition, building on the invisibility of women. Even

today it is nearly impossible to gain an understanding of the extent of the work of women

in agriculture.

In order to fill in some of the gaps I want to present some historical evidence on the

work of agricultural entrepreneurs who happened to be women.

Women—Entrepreneurs in Australian Agriculture

Nineteenth-century women made extraordinary efforts to assist in the establishment of

family farming as the dominant mode of agricultural production in Australia. Working

long hours in often very difficult and isolated conditions, we find hints of their existence

in such works as Henry Lawson’s The Drover’s Wife. If we look at the works of women

writers of the time such as Barbara Baynton, Rosa Praed, Mary Gaunt, Katherine

Susannah Pritchard and others we find a story of hardship, of overwhelming hard

work, of isolated child bearing and rearing, illness, isolation and pain.4 We also catch

glimpses of extraordinary heroism and confounding entrepreneurialism in the diaries and

letters of educated women. Some of these women are worth mentioning. Elizabeth

McArthur was a pioneer in the merino sheep industry. Much of the credit for her work

is given to her husband, John, despite the fact that for 17 years during the development

phase of this industry he was absent from Australia. He was either in prison in England

or living in England where he remained on his release to assist the children with their

studies while they went to English schools.

Another woman whose contributions are overlooked is Mary Penfold, an early settler

in the Adelaide hills. Together with her husband she established a vineyard on their

property. Her husband was a medical practitioner often called away for long hours to

visit his patients on horseback. Mary occupied herself as farm manager, working hard on

her Magill Estate. Her diaries record various farm transactions, an account of the

purchase of plough shares in Adelaide, payments to workers and a unique entry in the

1850s which says simply ‘Began making wine’.5 Because colonial women were not

expected to work in the fields, the growth of the famous Penfold’s wine industry is

attributed historically to her husband.

My favourite early entrepreneur woman is Eliza Furlonge, a Scotswoman who, faced

with the death of several of her children, was determined to protect her surviving two

sons. She was initially unable to persuade her Scottish businessman husband of the

wisdom of moving to Australia so she set about organising the venture herself. In 1826

she apprenticed the boys in a Wool House in Prussia, learning the wool classing trade.

She herself walked over 1,500 miles on foot through Saxony and Prussia gathering fine

Saxon sheep. One hundred were gathered and herded to Hamburg and shipped to Hull

where Eliza and her two sons walked them to Scotland for shipment to Australia. Before

she could do this, the new Australia Company, which was established in Britain to take

advantage of the new colony’s opportunities, bought the first shipment, so Eliza repeated

the journey twice more. Each time she gathered a flock for her sons, who were sent to

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Women in Agriculture 165

Australia with the sheep where Eliza and her husband, finally persuaded, joined them.

The Melbourne Age in 1908 described Eliza Furlonge as someone who had ‘notably

stimulated and largely helped to mould the prosperity of an entire state and her name

deserved to live for all time in our history’.6 It is discouraging that very few Australians

recognise her name or realise the significance of her achievements.7

These three examples serve to highlight the outstanding efforts of some great

nineteenth-century Australian farm women. What I would also like to point out is that

generations of ordinary Australian women have laboured in agriculture and their efforts

have been ignored by those with the power to misrepresent. The twentieth century saw

massive movements of families, particularly following the world wars, to the land through

the Soldier Settler Schemes. Lake8 notes the efforts of the soldier settlers’ wives in

Victoria in the early part of this century who worked alongside their husbands in cruel

conditions. Evidence to the 1925 Royal Commission on Soldier Settlement suggests that

most farms, particularly in the dairying area, were unviable without the unpaid work of

a wife. Women were cruelly overworked and many reported their health breaking down.9

The following quotes from women’s letters to the Countryman newspaper were reprinted

in Lake’s book:

If a farm won’t pay without women having to make slaves of themselves in this

fashion, well the quicker we give them up the better …

In the dairying districts one story only is needed—that of over-tired mothers

and the slavery of little children. Men must be roused to take some action …

I have been on a farm 25 years, and before my health broke down, I always

helped with the milking and when we sent our milk to the city I was always

in the sheds at 5am. Now at just 50, I am completely broken down …

Despite the repeated theme of extreme hardship, until Lake’s detailed investigation the

efforts of these women were not officially recorded or acknowledged.

I would also like to draw attention to the efforts of Australian farm women during the

1950s and 1960s. When I conducted research with farm women in 1990–1991, I was at

first astounded and then dismayed to find that women had made very significant

contributions of which I had been unaware and which received little mention in the

agricultural texts and history books. I am referring to the small enterprises and

subsistence production conducted by women in many areas of Australia. It was not

unusual for women to run their own enterprises, funds from which were used to pay the

consumption costs of the family. I found women who had run up to 1,000 hens for egg

production and meat, others who had turkeys, and still others who sold cream and

butter.10 Most of these women had also produced their own vegetables and made most

of the family’s clothing.

I started off my life on the farm with 20 chooks and that 20 grew to 1000 … I

looked after all those chooks … oh it would be probably more than ten years,

I really did … I used to sell the eggs to the Egg Marketing Board … and I used

to sell butter to the hotels … well it was very good. I furnished eventually all

our home. All the furniture you see here, that’s from my eggs.

The end of these small-scale women’s productions was brought about by government

regulations working to the benefit of large-scale production companies and to the

detriment of women on farms.

When it finished was when they brought in that you had to register your chooks

and they were five pence … that came in the sixties … Oh yes I was angry!

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166 M. Alston

The fellow came onto the place and asked me how many chooks did I have,

and at that particular time I had about 55 and you were allowed, I think it was

25 … before you had to register them. So he went down and counted them!

And I said ‘Don’t worry about counting them because I won’t register them

and that’s it!’ And that was it—I sold them.

What is significant about these women’s stories is not only that women’s incomes were

necessary to ensure that the family maintained an adequate quality of life but also that

women’s enterprises were overturned by the power of the state working to send them out

of business. Irish researcher Sally Shortall, in her 1998 book Power and Property11 records

a similar process with women in dairying in the United Kingdom and Europe.

As dairying became viable for big business ventures, women were nudged out of

dairying—a traditional occupation for women.

From the 1980s onward two significant movements occurred. Firstly, we have

recorded evidence of women continuing their efforts to add to the family income through

their off-farm work. Significantly, 80 per cent of off-farm work is undertaken by

women,12 making the work of women one of the most important aspects of farm family

survival. The off-farm work of women doubled between the 1980s and the late 1990s13

when off-farm income realised 38 per cent of the farm family income, rising to a peak

of 83 per cent during 1991–199214 and settling to 63 per cent in 1994–95.15 The second

significant factor was that women became more politically active, questioning their

invisibility and demanding that their status be redefined.

One of the consequences of their activities was the establishment of the Rural

Women’s Unit in what was the Australian Department of Primary Industries and Energy

(now DAFFA) in 1995. In 1997 this unit undertook a critical assessment of women’s

contribution to agriculture, documented in the Missed Opportunities report16—one of the

enduring legacies of this unit to women in farming. This work was due largely to Helen

Board who, in 2001, stepped aside as Head of the Regional Women’s Unit in the

Department of Transport and Regional Services after six years of leading Rural

Women’s Units in both departments, negotiating on behalf of women.

The results of the Missed Opportunities research indicate that women are making a

significant contribution to their industries and communities. As this work has never been

counted before, it comes as a shock to realise that women are so critical to the ongoing

viability of agriculture.

The study revealed that 70,000 women identify as farmers and that 40 per cent of

farm business partners are women. Further, it noted that women contribute:

• 28 per cent of total farm output (about $14.5 billion);

• over 80 per cent of off-farm income (about $1.1 billion);

• $8 billion through unpaid household work;

• 48 per cent of total real farm income ($28 billion) through paid and unpaid work; and

• $0.5 billion to rural communities through their voluntary work.

Despite this, women hold less than 8 per cent of agricultural leadership positions.17

In Australia, the development of rural women’s policy units within government

agricultural departments and the activism of farm women has allowed a major

re-evaluation and recognition of gender roles in agriculture and for the first time given

us some dimension of women’s contributions. Yet I would argue that women have always

made a significant contribution to agriculture, but their efforts have been discounted and

ignored, leading to a very biased view of agricultural history.

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Women in Agriculture 167

Women—the ‘New Entrepreneurs’

Moving to the present time, we can assess the role of women as ‘new entrepreneurs’ in

agriculture. Not only are there over 70,000 women engaged in the everyday grind of

farming in Australia, there are many of these who are contributing to innovation and

development within their industries and farming communities. Again, I would argue that

these roles have been largely hidden at least until the Australian Broadcasting Corpor-

ation’s Lucy Broad undertook to establish the Rural Woman of the Year Award in the

1990s. In recent times the award has been sponsored by the Rural Industries Research

and Development Corporation (RIRDC). This award immediately captured the imagin-

ation of agricultural women, opening up for scrutiny the lives and work of many farm

women across the nation. What we learnt, to our amazement, was that there was a new

generation of adventurous, highly creative women carving out new industries and new

agendas for agriculture. In 2000 Annie Pfeffer won the overall national award for her

work in strengthening the sunflower industry. She wished to expose the use of imported

palm oil, very high in saturated fat, in the food chain.

The 2001 State winners included:18

• Frances Bender from Tasmania who, with her husband, is developing Australia’s

largest privately owned Atlantic Salmon business;

• Jon-Maree Baker, who is the youngest Director of the Australian Cotton Industry

Council and is working to establish women’s Industry Network Cotton;

• Sharyn Munnerley who, working to develop calf rearing, has established the Aus-

tralian Calf Rearing Research Centre;

• Jeanette Gellard, from Kangaroo Island, who is working to develop resource packages

outlining agricultural employment and business opportunities;

• Dianne Grasham, who has developed Dairypage, Australia’s most successful dairy

website;

• Rhonda Tonkin, who has vertically integrated her wildflower production in Western

Australia; and

• Carmel Wagstaff, the co-ordinator of the Australian Agricultural Company Training

Program.

The 2002 winners included:

• Robbie Sefton, a farm partner who has established a nationally competitive public

relations company run from her New South Wales sheep and grain farm;

• Carol Mathew, an Alpaca Breeder, and Director of the Australian Alpaca Coopera-

tive;

• Angela Whittington, a Western Australian stonefruit farmer, who has developed an

export industry for her fruit into Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan and for

vegetables into Singapore;

• Jeanette Reader, who has been active in the Tasmanian Women in Agriculture

movement;

• June Gill, a wildcatch fishing partner who has founded the South Australian Women

in Fishing group and worked to gain national recognition for women in the fishing

industry;

• Kate Hadden, who works in sustainable land management with the Tiwi people in the

Northern Territory; and

• Mary Lancaster, a Queensland banana grower active in industry groups who is

working to develop fruit wines as a by-product of her industry.

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168 M. Alston

These women are the gifted and talented winners who represent the tip of the iceberg

of farm women’s ingenuity and agricultural development. They provide a visible focus

for public recognition of the many women engaged in agriculture on a day-to-day basis.

Their recognition, and the $20,000 bursary that is part of their award, has allowed the

various winners not only to gain confidence in the value of their individual efforts, but

also allowed them to make a greater contribution to their industries as the bursaries are

to be spent on industry-related developments.

Despite this public recognition it is important to remember that the vast majority of

farm women spend their lives working on farms for several hours a week. Additionally,

if they are under 55, they will be spending a significant portion of their time in off-farm

work, often in casual or low-paid positions, to support their families.19 They will also be

taking major responsibility for the caring work of their extended families and will be

almost solely responsible for the household work.20 It is these women who deserve greater

attention from feminist theorists. It is these women who survive on very low incomes,

with diminishing local services, and little recognition of the value of their contribution.

They accommodate an exclusionary discourse and often spend their lives working on

properties in which they have no ownership stake.

Rendering Women Invisible

The invisibility of women in agriculture has meant that people can be taken by surprise

when women’s achievements and contributions to agriculture are noted. The processes

that lead to their invisibility deserve attention. Historically the state has been instrumen-

tal in sidelining women through a number of overt processes, including introducing

regulations that restricted women’s enterprises and removing them from census statistics.

Other ways include restricting women’s entry to agricultural colleges until the 1970s, thus

ensuring that women lacked access to agricultural training.21 Another powerful process

in restricting women’s influence in agriculture (not necessarily state regulated) has been

patrilineal inheritance practices—passing the farm from father to son, thereby ensuring

that farm daughters do not gain access to the power and status associated with farm

ownership. Dempsey22 suggests that less than 5 per cent of farms are passed to farm

daughters. The most common way for women to enter agriculture is through marriage

and the most common way for women to gain sole ownership to property is through

widowhood. Men in positions of influence in industry groups, and the academy, have

shaped a discourse of agriculture that ignores the invisibility of women and overlooks the

subjugated agricultural knowledge of women.

In feminist discourses, women in agriculture have also been largely invisible because

of their rural environment and because of their location in, and support for, a family

production system. Despite the patriarchal nature of this system, it is a system where they

find great value through working with the land and it is a system that provides them with

familial private power and influence.23 It is often, therefore, difficult for women in

agriculture to critique a family system that significantly disempowers them. Feminist

discourses must recognise these dilemmas while providing a framework that strengthens

the position of women in agriculture.

The Consequences of Making Women Invisible

As a result of women’s invisibility in agriculture the general public’s perception is that

most farmers are men. The results of this invisibility are that women’s contributions to

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Women in Agriculture 169

farm family viability are often ignored. It is not uncommon for women working off the

farm to be seen as incidental to the business of farming, despite the fact that it may be

their income that keeps the family in farming. Additionally, women’s views of agriculture

and agricultural innovation, and the social consequences of agriculture such as health,

education and other quality-of-life issues are often sidelined in debates about agriculture

and rural community development.

The research and development agenda is driven by a skewed view of the significant

issues that impact on people and production. In an international context, Sachs24 gives

several examples of the way agriculture has developed with little consideration for

women’s knowledge. One of these examples will suffice here. She notes that rice has been

scientifically bred primarily for yield potential, ignoring other factors that may affect the

quality of women’s lives. For example, in many Asian regions rice is not only grain but

also straw. Women use the straw for thatching, making mats, feeding livestock and for

fuel. However, the high-yielding varieties produced by scientists are shorter and have less

straw. So the focus of research has been on the trade value of rice while the non-grain

products so essential to Asian women have been overlooked. Women’s subjugated

agricultural knowledge has not been a factor in international research developments,

arguably slowing the resolution of such problems as global hunger and environmental

degradation.25

As Fran Rowe argued on meeting with the Prime Minister, John Howard, on World

Rural Women’s Day in 1996:26

We are different Prime Minister, not because of any particular characteristic,

but because we are a valuable, Australian resource which is unrecognised,

under-utilised and which has the potential to assist regional Australia to

achieve our vision of an energetic, thriving rural sector.

It is time to recognise and incorporate women into the mainstream agricultural agenda

and it is time for that agenda to adjust to the vision of its female constituents. This

recognition can be assisted by feminist engagement with issues relating to women in

agriculture, by further theorising on women in family production units and power

differentials, and by an ongoing analysis of the agricultural discourse.

Making Women Visible

There is a thread running through post-colonial Australian history of women engaged in

agriculture working at the cutting edge to create and develop agricultural industries.

There is also a thread running through this history that has worked to reduce or diminish

women’s contributions and which leads to women rarely being seen as legitimate farmers

and leaders. If we are to avoid being constantly surprised when we find new evidence of

women’s engagement in agriculture, a number of areas need to be addressed. Firstly, the

‘discourse’ in agriculture that so solidly legitimates men’s place as farmers and equally

effectively reduces women’s contributions must be dissected. Equally importantly, women

themselves must have the confidence to assert that they are ‘farmers’ too, not merely

‘farm wives’ or ‘farm helpers’ but genuine farm business partners working for the good

of our enterprises. I do not doubt that most farm families appreciate the contributions

of female members. However, translating this into the wider agricultural discourse in the

public sphere is the ongoing challenge for women in agriculture. Changing the language

and the way women view themselves is a good starting point.

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170 M. Alston

In addressing the issue of women’s invisibility the efforts of the Rural Women’s

Network officers in the State and federal bureaucracies are worth noting. It is they who,

with the support of women in the community, can influence the language and

agenda of agricultural industries through attention to policy documents and the

shaping of agricultural discourse. Support should also be given to the rural women’s

non-government organisations which are working actively to ensure that women’s

agricultural perspective is heard and represented in the corridors of power. These

organisations have been working on such issues as reconciliation and environmental

sustainability. The alternative agricultural discourse being created through the women’s

networks is overshadowed by the dominant masculinist production discourse emanating

from the traditional farm organisations.27 A feminist engagement with these organisations

would assist in shaping these subjugated discourses.

Further, the issue of women’s invisibility in the industry can be assisted by continued

questioning of the lack of women in agricultural leadership positions. The use of the

concept of merit to justify the exclusion of women is endemic in selection processes for

leadership positions but, as Clare Burton pointed out long ago, merit is defined by the

politics of men’s gender advantage.28 The discounting of women’s place and the equation

of men with agriculture make it too easy to ignore the extraordinary contribution women

can make to agricultural policy and vision.

Finally, let me suggest that women also need to examine critically the practices and

customs they condone. Do women value their daughters’ desires to be farmers and future

inheritors in the same way they might value these ideals from their sons? We might

consider the position in Norway, where a similar gendered farming profile was evident

during the twentieth century. As a result, an Allodial law was introduced in the 1970s

that gave the right to the first born to inherit agricultural property.29 Consequently, many

more women are now seen as legitimate farmers and women’s position is given a great

deal more credence. Is this the answer for Australia?

In conclusion, let me say there is much for women engaged in agriculture to celebrate.

High achievers are being acknowledged and women across the country are committing

themselves anew to a great industry. But if women are to ensure that future generations

do not scratch their heads and ask themselves ‘were there any women engaged in

agriculture in 2002?’ there is much to be done. Take a look at the public face of

agriculture and ask how a visitor from the twenty-second century might view the public

evidence of women’s involvement in agriculture. The official evidence is scant. There are

few female leaders, the agricultural newspapers give little space to women, census

statistics would lead us to believe that there are few farmers who are women, very few

women inherit farms, and research and development funding has not given a great deal

of focus to a women’s agenda. Women owe it to the early female entrepreneurs and to

farm daughters and granddaughters to change the way agriculture is interpreted and

portrayed. It is time to reclaim women’s ‘herstory’ and to build up the profile of women

in agriculture and decision making.

Equally, there is a need to examine the very nature of agriculture in this country. I

would argue that the concentration on production has caused us to lose sight of social,

environmental and economic sustainability of our farms and communities. This focus has

led to a decline in our inland communities, an export of jobs and an import of

unemployment. Women are entering the debate about genetically modified organisms

(GMOs), the World Trade Organisation (WTO), globalisation and rural community

decline and their views deserve to be heard. Feminist engagement with this discourse

would add great strength to their message.

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Women in Agriculture 171

NOTES

1. Margaret Alston, Women on the Land: the Hidden Heart of Rural Australia (University of New South Wales

Press) Kensington, 1995.

2. Anne Summers, Damned Whores and God’s Police (Penguin) Ringwood, Victoria, 1975, p. 58.

3. Marilyn Lake, The Limits of Hope: Soldier Settlement in Victoria 1915–38 (Oxford University Press) Melbourne,

1987, p. 179. See also Desley Deacon, Managing Gender: the State, the New Middle Class and Women Workers

1830–1930 (Oxford University Press) Melbourne, 1989; and Susan Magarey, Passions of the First Wave

Feminists (University of New South Wales Press) Sydney, 2001.

4. Dale Spender, The Penguin Anthology of Australian Women’s Writing (Penguin) Ringwood, Victoria, 1988.

5. Senator Margaret Reynolds, ‘Address to the National Rural Women’s Forum’ in Margaret Alston (ed.),

National Rural Women’s Forum, Parliament House, Canberra 7–8 June: A Report to the Department of Primary

Industries and Energy (Centre for Rural Social Research) Wagga Wagga, 1995, p. 43.

6. Reprinted Wagga Wagga Daily Advertiser, 27 January 1989, p. 2.

7. Following publication of this item in the Wagga Wagga Daily Advertiser, I followed up the story, eventually

making contact with a female ancestor who was resident in a nursing home.

8. Lake, The Limits of Hope.

9. Lake, The Limits of Hope, pp. 177–8.

10. Alston, Women on the Land.

11. Sally Shortall, Power and Property: Women and Farming (Macmillan) London, 1998.

12. Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation (RIRDC) and Department of Primary

Industries and Energy (DPIE), Missed Opportunities: Harnessing the Potential of Women in Australian Agriculture

(Commonwealth of Australia), Canberra, 1998; Society of St Vincent de Paul, A Country Crisis: a Report

on Issues Confronting Rural Victoria (Society of St Vincent de Paul) Melbourne, Victoria, 1998.

13. Jayne Garnaut, Caroline Rasheed and Gil Rodriguez, Farmers at Work: the Gender Division, Australian

Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics (ABARE) and RIRDC (Commonwealth of Australia)

Canberra, 1999.

14. Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics, Changes in Nonmetropolitan Population, Jobs and

Industries: Preliminary Report to the Department of Transport and Regional Services (Commonwealth of Australia)

Canberra, October 1999.

15. Jayne Garnaut and Heather Lim-Applegate, People in Farming: ABARE Research Report 98.6 (Common-

wealth of Australia) Canberra, 1998.

16. RIRDC and DPIE, Missed Opportunities.

17. Margaret Alston, Breaking through the Grass Ceiling: Women, Power and Leadership in Rural Organisations

(Harwood) UK, 2000.

18. Note that no national winner was selected in 2001 or 2002.

19. Margaret Alston, ‘Women and their Work on Australian Farms’, Rural Sociology, vol. 60, no. 3, 1995,

pp. 521–32.

20. Alston, Breaking through the Grass Ceiling.

21. Alston, Women on the Land.

22. Ken Dempsey, A Man’s Town: Inequality between Women and Men in Rural Australia (Oxford University Press)

Melbourne, 1992.

23. Margaret Alston, ‘A Study of Farm Women’, unpublished PhD thesis (University of New South Wales)

Kensington, 1993. An important exception to this generalisation is French feminist theorist Christine

Delphy. See, for example, Christine Delphy and Diana Leonard, Familiar Exploitation: a New Analysis of

Marriage in Contemporary Western Societies (Polity Press) Cambridge, 1992—Ed.

24. Carolyn Sachs, ‘Reconsidering Diversity in Agriculture and Food Systems: an Ecofeminist Approach’,

Agriculture and Human Values, Summer 1992, pp. 4–10.

25. Caroline Sachs, Gendered Fields: Rural Women, Agriculture and Environment (Westview Press) Boulder, 1996.

26. Rural Women’s Unit, Rural Women Meet the Prime Minister: World Rural Women’s Day, 15 October 1996,

Parliament House Canberra (Commonwealth of Australia) Canberra, 1996.

27. Alston, Breaking through the Grass Ceiling.

28. Alston, Breaking through the Grass Ceiling. See also Clare Burton, Raven Hag and Gay Thompson, Women’s

Worth: Pay Equity and Job Evaluation (Australian Government Publishing Service) Canberra, 1987.

29. Sally Shortall, Power and Property: Women and Farming (Macmillan) London, 1998.

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