Wisconsin Women on the Farm

Perhaps the most striking phase of women's activity was their work on the farms. The importance of this army of workers cannot be overestimated, for without them agricultural production would in many cases have been stopped, although it must not be forgotten that the use of labor-saving machinery and the influx of new settlers were also factors in the maintenance of farm production throughout the war. Labor-saving machinery had been used before 1861, but its use became more common during the war period. At first mowers and reapers were utilized only on the largest farms; later their use was more general, and supplemented by that of the harrow, the grain-drill, the cornplanter, the steam-thresher, the revolving horse-rake, the rotary-spade, the steel plow, the thresher, and the two-horse cultivator.

In many of the poorer communities, however, there was little or no labor-saving machinery and the women who did their own farm-work gathered in their crops in the old-fashioned way. The experience of Mrs. D. is a good illustration. In the part of the country where she lived, many of the women had no horses and were forced to harness oxen. She herself had to haul wood, and inexperienced as she was she broke the wagon-tongue in the process. Some of the women in her neighborhood sheared sheep, took the wool home, carded and spun it and made socks. Mrs. D. used to burn brush and build fences herself, and she also hoed and raked. She had once a trying experience with an unruly yoke of cattle, which used to get into the grain; often she had to get up in the middle of the night in order to drive them out. At one time she went to church, and returned to find fifteen of her neighbor's cattle in her wheat. She raised not only wheat, but also a little buckwheat; she hired a man to cut it, but threshed it herself. She had planted sixty bushels of sugar-cane on her farm and invited the soldiers in the neighborhood to a cutting bee; as a result she and the children lived well that winter on buckwheat and molasses.

Such instances as the preceding were common in Waushara County, which had a poor and sandy soil and very little wealth. Many of the women in that county had patches which they cultivated with the help of children, for every able-bodied man had left for the front. A young girl went one beautiful afternoon out in the meadows to help her father. He did not want her to do a man's work; before the war, the women of his family only milked the cows and attended to the garden. He was an old man, however, and needed help, therefore he finally allowed his daughter to spread the hay; which occasion she afterwards declared was the proudest of her life.

Another woman living in Waushara County was left with only three old men to help her. They cut the wood, she tended to the cows, cut hay with a scythe, and cradled and bound her oats. Mrs. B. drove ten miles to Weyauwega to get wood to build a barn, hauled it back herself; and then shingled her barn.

In some towns the women formed sewing-circles to make clothing for these women-farmers. They cut out and made children's garments as well as women's, and sold them as cheaply as possible to the women on the farms. Occasionally women became agricultural laborers, but this was not common, for in many communities the people could not afford to pay for help. In a few places, however, German women hired out by the day and received good wages.

The number of women doing work on the farms increased as the war went on, because most able-bodied men were taken from their agricultural work and pressed into service in the army. Mrs. Livermore gives a vivid picture of her visit to Wisconsin and Iowa in the early summer of 1863, which shows to what extent women were then working on the farms.

As we dashed along the railway, let our course lead in whatever direction it might, it took us through what seemed a continuous wheatfield. The yellow grain was waving everywhere; and two-horse reapers were cutting it down in a fashion that would have astonished Eastern farmers. Women were in the field everywhere, driving the reapers, binding and shocking, and loading grain, until then an unusual sight. At first it displeased me, and I turned away in aversion. By-and-bye I observed how skilfully they drove the horses round and round the wheat field, diminishing more and more its periphery at every circuit, the glittering blades of the reaper cutting wide swathes with a rapid, clicking sound that was pleasant to hear. Then I saw, that where they followed the reapers, binding and shocking, although they did not keep up with the men, their work was done with more precision and nicety, and their sheaves had as artistic finish that those lacked made by men. So I said to myself, "They are worthy women and deserve praise; their husbands are probably too poor to hire help, and like the helpmeets God designed them to be, they have girt themselves to this work -- and they are doing it superbly. Good wives! Good women!"

One day Mrs. Livermore drove twenty miles across the country, through the same "golden fields of grain and between great stretches of green waving corn." Some accident to her carriage caused her driver to halt opposite a field where six women and two men were harvesting. She walked over and accosted them:

"And so you are helping to gather the harvest!" I said to a woman of forty-five or fifty who sat on the reaper to drive, as she stopped her horses for a brief breathing spell.

"Yes ma'am," she said, "the men have all gone to the war, so that my man can't hire help at any price, and I told my girls we must turn to and give him a lift with the harvesting."

"You are not German? You are surely one of my own countrywomen-American?"

"Yes, ma'am; we moved here from Cattaraugus County, New York State, and we've done very well since we came. It came very hard on us to let the boys go, but we felt we'd no right to hinder 'em. The country needed 'em more'n we. We've money enough to hire help, if it could be had; and my man don't like to have me and the girls a-working out doors; but there don't seem no help for it now."

I stepped over to where the girls were binding the fallen grain, They were fine, well-built lassies, with the honest eyes and firm mouth of the mother, brown like her and clad in the same sensible costume.

"I tell mother," said Annie, standing very erect with flashing eyes, "that as long as the country can't get along without grain, nor the army light without food, we're serving the country just as much here in the harvest field as our boys are on the battlefield -- and that sort o' takes the edge off from this business of doing men's work, you know."

Further conversation disclosed the fact that amid their double labor is the house and field, these women found time for the manufacture of hospital supplies, and had helped to fill box after box with shirts and drawers, dried apples and pickles, currant wine and blackberry jam, to be forwarded to the poor fellows languishing in far-off Southern hospitals. My eyes were unsealed. The women in the harvest field were invested with a new and heroic interest, and each hard-handed, brown, toiling woman was a heroine.

A Prairie du Chien soldier writes:

There were four brothers of us, all single and all under age when we enlisted. This left two small brothers, three young sisters, and a father and mother to do the work of the farm. This meant planting and harvesting crops, cutting, curing, and stacking hay, fixing fences, chopping wood, caring for the stock, and in fact doing all the work that had been done before by the boys. These things my mother and sisters helped to do. This was the condition all through our section. From many families the husband enlisted, leaving the mother with small children. The mother and the small brood carried on all the work of the farm as they were able. They cleared land, chopped down trees, and clad in brown denim dresses they burned the brush and cultivated the soil. They gathered and marketed the crops and thus became not only self-sustaining, but actually had a surplus with which to help the nation. Two girls, whom I well knew, became as expert in harvesting grain and in chopping wood as any man in the country.

One women went from Madison into Columbia County, where she took up uncultivated land, which she broke herself; there she planted and raised crops and was thus able to support herself and her four small children. Her ambition was to make a home for her children, and for her husband if he ever returned; she knew that she might have been forced to accept charity if she had remained in Madison.