Agriculture’s progress on the gender front has been uneven. Country Guide’s, I have to admit, has been uneven too. So yes, let’s celebrate women’s gains, but remember that more must be done.
I wondered recently if Guide should do an issue where all the farmers and all the business advisors, in fact where all the sources we talked to would be women.
To drive home the point, we wouldn’t mention it. We’d just do it, print an all-women issue. And we’d let the world notice.
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I confess I started out really liking the idea. But in the end I dropped it. Not, obviously, because we couldn’t have filled an issue with insightful, skillful, professional women performing at the top of the industry.
Instead, I dropped the idea because I liked it too much. I wanted it to be true, but it’s too early. It would have too much of a “mission accomplished.”
In short, Guide would be guilty of closing the door on any further exploration of gender issues at a time when we need to persevere and keep driving forward.
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An important day in my life occurred many years ago when I did a story on a women’s shelter that was opening in rural Ontario.
I did the story even though I couldn’t imagine that any farm family I knew could ever need such a service.
I was set straight pretty quickly, and with an appropriate bump. “Open your eyes,” I was told. Didn’t I know of women who disappeared from public view after they married, who stopped returning phone calls, who never went to town on their own?
Much good has been done, but the terror hasn’t gone away. It runs too deep. Nor have the attitudes and presumptions that lead to it across the range of social, economic and educational strata in the countryside.
I remember too when Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein was charged with sex crimes, and I wrote in this spot that the question wasn’t whether there are any Harvey Weinsteins in agriculture, but how many there are. Who knows whether I was right. In agriculture, the topic has gone silent.
And I remember getting a call from an upset reader who told me, not as long ago as we’d like to think, that
I stop writing about women on the farm. Didn’t I know, he said, that his four-year-old son always wanted to go with him on the tractor while his six-year-old daughter insisted on staying home with her mother. As if their responses weren’t socially conditioned.
It all dies hard. We have more progress to make, across all kinds of borders. How do we make Canada’s farms equitable at every level, instead of simply saying the opportunity is equal?
In many respects, Canada’s farming men have made real progress. In fact, I have also wanted us to do serious writing about how much progress many men have made. It’s another one for the wish list.
There’s so much more to say. So much has been gained. And yes, we should feel great about that. But let’s not be satisfied.
You won’t see that women’s issue of Guide any time soon, but we’ll continue writing abut gender issues.
Are we getting it right? I’m at [email protected].
