Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Farm Women in Older Generations

People say that they worked so hard, but if you look at movies, TV programs, and illustrations of the era, all they did was sit on the porch and either shuck peas or snap beans.

Likewise, according to TV, the only thing that today's women do in the kitchen is slice carrots.

My grandma took care of livestock and drove a tractor.
Said she used to shoot pheasants and rabbits on the farm too (back when it had pheasants).

She was a cool lilttle gal.
Think of her often.

Been gone a while

My great-grandmother shot and killed a black guy who was trying to break in, and buried him somewhere on the farm, back during WWI when The men were gone to war.

My grandmother had to grow the beans and spend most of the morning picking them before she could sit on the porch and shell them ,then there was the blanching and putting them in jars for the winter.

My grandmas and great grandmas were some rugged gals to put it mildly. No way would today’s women put up with the hardships they faced.

The last I remember my grandmother, she was wearing army boots to go in the barn and milk 7 cows, by hand.
She said the big red cow demanded to be milked first.

Just buried my 98 year old mother yesterday. Until just a few years ago, she could work me into the ground. Never just sat around. Always sewing, working in her half acre garden, canning and freezing stuff that she just gave away to family and friends. They do not make them like her any more and the world is a smaller place because of it.

my grand mammy kilt grizzlies by hand. had them drug back skinned before sunset

My grandmothers grew up mostly in town. My grandfathers and their sisters grew up on small farms in Michigan. One in Alpena and the other in the thumb.

An old picture of my grandpa and my great aunt on the their northern MI farm taken in the early 1920’s.

What a different era. They both left the farm and North MI for better job opportunities and both eventually retired to and passed away in FL in the 2000’s in a completely different world from the one that they were born into.

A family near me had a dream to buy a ranch someday, and the old woman, Jesse, shared the dream of her husband, Carl. Carl was log bucker in the days before chainsaws...with the aptly named 'misery whip'. The company, McCloud River Lbr Co paid on how much you actually cut. Carl and his partner would leave their cabin to arrive at the logging site just at first light, buck the huge pine logs all day, with a lunch break, and not return to the shack until the light failed. Carl and his partner were legends in a world of hard workers. A normal day for the other pairs was 6 or 7 hours.
Anyway, Jesse described a typical day to me, some years back. Long before first light she would rise and prepare a full breakfast and rouse the men when it was ready, and pack their lunches and water. After they left, she prepared the day's baking. As it got light she would carry water for the day, do laundry and dishes. While the baking was taking place she would nap. Then she would fill the lamps and saw oil bottles for the next day, maybe gather or split more wood. Then start preparing the evening meal, a huge affair of thousands of calories. After the men had eaten and gone to bed, she would light all the lamps, gather the big 10 foot crosscuts and begin her night job of setting and filing saws and grinding axes well into the night by lamplight. And kept it up for several years. In the height of the depression they found their dream ranch, purchased it with their savings and so far their children have not ran it into ruin. Jesse lived to age 90.

The days of my grandmothers, were harsh to my understanding. A short history. Dads side. Grandpa born 1879, Grandma born 1888. Eastern Oregon loggers and farmers.. Moms side. Grandpa born 1880, Grandma born 1889. Farmers and loggers. Times were different, work was never ending, religion and honesty bound the communities together. Skid houses raised children, cooked for crews, served as church, hospitals and school. Farms were worked in season, and logs were cut the rest of the year. Hard times to us, life to them!

Mom told that her grandmother milked the cows. The red one was always difficult. Great-grandma would come into the house and say to my uncle, Bill, "Villie, you know diese rote Kuh? Das heiBt a son-of-a-bitch!"

Neither would today's men put up with the hardships they faced.

My Grandparents had the last farm on their lane in Northern , Wisconsin. G'pa was working on the Soo Line.

My Grand mother would have to tie the kids inna chair to keep them from getting burned on the wood cook stove, or other dangers. Then she would run through the woods with a axe to chop a hole in the creek for a pail of water.

Me and your gramms hunted pheasants together. With Steve McQueen and Paul Newman

Your about as full of schit as a Christmas turkey

My grandparents homesteaded on the Northwest Angle (the tip of Minnesota that juts above the 49th parallel). Granddad died in the Spanish Flu epidemic, leaving grandmother with four young boys,, aged 1 to 8. She managed to raise them by herself, on a small farm along with running a store and post office.

Recall that Joe Foss was hassled by the early TSA after 911. For having a “sharp pointy object” in his carry on.
Sheboon airport security and a team of others to [bleep] dumb to realize it was his Medal of Honor.

Up through the depression, life was hell for a farm wife. What changed it the most was electricity. Light, cooking, cleaning, milking, etc. Rural electrification made it vastly easier on the women. A while back I saw a rerun of Silverado. The good looking widow, Hannah, was determined to make a go of farming new land. She said that her looks wouldn't last long but she was going for it. She was right.

My condolences.

And they are all blue dog democrats re-electing commies.

My mom used to say, a man may work from sun, to sun, but a woman's work is never done.

grand father born 1884 grand M born 1883 had 17 kids worked farms and what they could till they could homestead land and move up my mom born 1911died 2011 not only worked the farms but at 15was cooking for threshing crews that my grandfather had as they worked on farms in northern Saskatchewan. and eventually became a nurse.


Norm
ps family landed in Canada june 1664.

Feedback dresses.

My maternal grandmother (b. 1888?) was one of 18 children. Grandma shucked out one a year for about 20 years. They lived on a huge farm near a small community.
...and yeah, the boys worked on the farm. The girls worked in the house....until the cotton was ready to pick!
When the cotton was ready, regardless of gender, if you were old enough, or young enough ... as the case may be, you picked cotton.
I had one great aunt who never married. When asked why she never married and had kids.
"Mama might'a had those kids, but she didn't raise 'em! I did! I raised all the kids I ever intended to!" Aunt Winnie was a hoot to be around!
My mother (1921-2020) was one of 6 kids.
Her dad passed away in 1932 during the Depression. The small community supported her and 4 of her children until she could move to town.

My paternal grandmother only worked outside the home on an "as-needed" basis....which was seldom.
Grampa served in WWI and married grandma after he returned.
He was a "rig builder" in the Kilgore oil field back when drilling rigs were wooden, static and steam operated.
He was an absolute artist with a double bit axe.
He drove a truck when times got hard and even helped build 30 miles of highway when it was mostly horse drawn equipment.
He bought and paid for 160 acres of red gravel/sugar sand land in East Texas and built his own home on it.
He used to tell me, ""One of these days, it'll all be yours, and it ain't got a crying dime against it!"
After he passed, grandma and dad took care of that! 😖

My wife's paternal great grandparents settled the land we're on in the last 1904 "land rush". Such as it was!
We have the original homestead deed!
To complete the deed, he had to show an agricultural profit within 5 years.
Not many tractor on southern OK in those days.
I can't imagine breaking enough of this red clay dirt to make any kind of profit with wheat! 😳
His wife would walk 12 miles to town to sell her butter and eggs to purchase what few groceries that would buy!

Those old folks were some kind of tough!

My Dad's Mom was born in 1896 and was 4'10" & 90lbs of dynamite. Shucking corn and stringing beans is what they did when they were resting for a spell.

Feed sack JFC

And beans and fatsack.

You know folks, my Wife works as hard as they did.

I bet she does

Both of my grandmothers started out on farms. One on a tomato farm in Homestead Florida and the other on a corn farm in Illinois. Both married my grandfathers on the promise to get them off the farm ! Both of my grandfathers were good for their promises. None of my grandparents had any nostalgia for the farm.

Neither did my grandparents. Good factory jobs in the suburbs after WWII were a lot less work with better pay and benefits. One took a job with General Motors and the other as tradesmen with Dow Chemical.

I know that they missed parts of a rural lifestyle but none had a desire to go back to small scale farming as an occupation.

We moved to the current farm in September 1962. We brought 4 milk cows with us from the farm they rented. Dad was an over the road truck driver and spent 5 days a week on the road. Mom milked the cows by hand during the week and dad on the weekends. We eventually had 6 milkers and she did them all in the mornings and we helped at night after school.

The laws on selling milk changed in 1968 so the milkers went away but we kept cattle until dad passed in 1978. Mom sold the cattle in 1979 and moved to Ames. We have rented the tillable ground since then but the pasture is growing over since we no longer have cows.

I wish I had the money for new fences and I would start running cows but being 50 miles away means I would have to do a lot of commuting or move back to the farm. The wife who grew up on a farm as well says she is not going. Sometimes the choices get that much harder instead of easier.

kwg

You must hate otto spell!

My grandmother started life as a sharecroppers daughter in Wharton, Texas. She always swore she'd get her pistol and start robbing banks instead of ever picking cotton again. She was a small, tough woman who worked dawn to dusk her whole life and I don't believe she ever got more than a hundred miles from home. She refused to put my grandad in a home after he came down with dementia and spent her golden years caring for him. In her 70s she fell off a chair while changing a light bulb in her kitchen and broke a hip. It crippled her and in the following years she lost her husband, oldest son, and a grandson. It turned her mean and bitter in her final years, but we kids loved her and I miss her very much. My wife is cut from the same cloth, but easy living is spoiling her

You don't know many farm women, do you?

My Mom was as conservative as a Lady cough be.

LMAO... maybe if you live in all the highly liberal States. but elsewhere that would be the most ignorant statement I've seen on the fire for a long time...

My grandmother was not a farmer but was a depression kid. I remember stopping in to visit on my way home from a business trip and was offered a bologna and cheese sandwich. I accepted and was provided a single piece of bologna and cheese on white bread. They were conservative in their lifestyle..

Sadly...a bunch of them were FDR democrats.


They carried on that "loyalty" for years in a lot of cases.

Generally either commodity prices or farm programs or sometimes both will be better under democrats.


When asked, the old time FDR types would say that they owed the farm to Roosevelt.

Democrats have always been good at buying votes.

The willfully ignorant think they only buy minority votes.


Buying minority votes is a piss poor investment these days. The money gets them more return when they spend it on middle and upper class whites.

My maternal grandmother, on the right, was not a farmer. Easy life...

My Maternal Grandma left the Czech Republic after German soldiers ate the family dog during WWI. She walked through the lines alone as a 16 year old all the way to Italy where She worked on a on boat on the way to America. She met my Czech Grandfather in Chicago. I asked her why they modified the family name and she responded that they came to America to be Americans.

Again you must hate otto spell!

Striking resemblance.

ahahah I bet you thought it was funny johnny reb

🤪

my grandmother always worked hard on the farm and was an excellent cook ,i still mis her and my mother was a hard worker and great cook too mis her too . both always said don`t ever be a farmer life is short and farm work is to hard . but if i could do it all over i wished i would have stayed on the farm for life food was fresh and tasty and work is work. yes grandma and my mother knew how to cook and work dang those were good times on the farm .

I wish I still had her forearms... Lived to just shy of 102, half of which without a husband.

Could probably still gut you like a fish at 100.


Something special about people who can smile and laugh while elbow deep in shìt.

My paternal grandmother homesteaded by herself in central Montana in 1919, after growing up on a farm in southern Minnesota. She eventually married the next-door homesteader, whose Norwegian parents had immigrated to Wisconsin when he was two. That was when the western homestead grant had doubled from 160 to 320 acres, and between their homesteads they had a a square mile, so did okay during the 1920s.

She was tougher than her husband in many ways, and a better shot, hunter and horseback rider, which may or may not involve why he shot himself during the Depression, in the office of the local Wells Fargo office where he worked.

She continued to farm the homestead, as well as teach school, and eventually became superintendent of the county school system. She was also a friend of the famous Ed McGivern, who set various shooting records. Among other things, she had Ed perform shooting demonstrations on the high school football field--which my father attended. (She also used a .22 rifle to hunt upland birds, often waiting until her husband and his buddies had missed with their shotguns before shooting.)

She was also the first person to climb the highest local mountain. But that was apparently partly because nobody had ever wanted to before.

She passed away when I was eight, but got to know her pretty well before then.

Precisely why I cherish this photo. Her commute was about a mile across the Sacramento River from a shack in Collinsville to Pittsburg California in a skiff. My dear Mother was no different.

Mule Deer;
Good evening once more, I hope the day behaved for you both and that you and Eileen are well.

Thanks for that family history, it never ceases to amaze me how truly tough some of those pioneer folks had to be.

My father in law's people came from Minnesota, his father having had enough of the tough winters there when he got stuck in the barn during a blizzard for a couple days. Of course the rest of the family was stuck in the house so they didn't know he was alive. It makes a lot of folks look twice when they hear someone moved to Manitoba to get away from the bad winter, but that part of Manitoba had less harsh winters usually.

On my late Mom's side, I never knew my Grandmother and neither did she really as she died when Mom was four.

My Grandmother on my late father's side came here with her husband, her sister in law and her husband who was AWOL from the Romanian Army. If they'd been caught in Romania, at very least the husband would have been shot. There's more to the story of their escape and it's not good, but they made it here and made a life for themselves against all odds.

Thanks again for sharing that bit of your history and Montana's history as well really.

All the best to you and Eileen as we head into the Christmas Season.

Dwayne

Mom grew up 1/2 mile from her grandparents farm, worked on and around it her
whole childhood. Swearing the whole time, "I will NEVER marry a farmer."

She met and married my dad, a logger, sawmiller, truck driver....farmer.

Learned to run tractors, log and flatbed trucks, off bear, stack and grade lumber...
Did what they needed doing.
Including cook for the crews and can beans!
Then running the Huckster route selling eggs and butter.


My wife grew up in a trailer park, couldn't drive a manual transmission.
Now has a CDL, (used to run a 13), can stack wood, fire, cut, and wrap deer meat, learned canning, making sauerkraut, gardening...


Our 20 year old daughter is engaged to a drywaller.
I keep telling him to take her to small side jobs.
He thinks she is too fragile to do anything! 🤣🤣🤣
She tightened him up!
Learned to do light work,
he won't try changing things up to use her.

We cut a road open recently, she showed up after her workday.
Throwing wood off the road, moving rocks....
The dimwitt was shocked, couldn't believe that 120 pound girl was
doing that work.

"You got a lot to learn about our women boy. They'll cook you breakfast,
work beside you all day, then fix supper while you rest."

Sunday they will get prettied up and make you look better walking into church.

I remember Mama cookin' on the ground.

Name that tune

Ma once nearly beat a peddler to death with a live chicken... no? wait!.. that was Tom Joads Ma... seriously tho, my Irish Gramma once chased a Preacher off the farm during the depression... suckin' ass for free garden vegetables...

Daddy Sang Bass?

Was the name or was it something else?


Edit...no...that wasn't the song.

Hahaha!

Looked it up. I was kinda close.

Mama’s got a squeeze box daddy gets no sleep

Daddy Frank sang by Merle Haggard

Well the kids don't eat and the dog can't sleep, there's no escape from the music in the whole damn street.

Both of my grandmothers were farm wives helping on the farm in in Iowa.

Who did that song...

Guitar, a squeeze box, a fiddle, a bow. Little band-a-playin every song they know.

Hoo ?

The Who.

Both of my grandmothers seemed to be working on something all day.

One owned a ran a farm while raising 3 children after losing her husband right after the last child.

It was a much different time than now.

My mother in law grew up on a farm, the third of 11 children. She always preferred being on a tractor or in the barn to working in the house. At 19 she married my father in law and helped run the family business until my wife and her brother took over. She's now 86 and works for the town clerk and court system. My wife is trying to get her to cut back to 3 days a week.

My paternal grandmother was born in 1900 and died in 1995. She divorced my grandfather in the late 20s because, like many if not most of the men in my family, he was a drunk and a philanderer. She ran the farm until WWII at which point she sold it and went to work in a defense plant, staying there until she retired in 1965. She'd kept some acreage when she sold the farm and always had a huge truck garden. She also always had some horses around for us. She kept an old Savage 24 .22/.410 by the back door and, whenever she thought there might be prowlers around, would let fly with a couple of loads of shot out across the horse pasture. She also always kept us grandkids in .22 ammo. The family always stayed on good terms with the owners of the original farm and we boys ran loose all over the hills. We loved to stay there, she never put all the (unreasonable to us) behavioral constraints on us that our parents did.

FDR solidified his support during the depression by extending it for at least seven years while convincing the public he was working for them. He just about destroyed the family farm and replaced it with big business. His monetary policies during the depression made banks hold larger cash reserves and in order to comply they had to call in solvent loans which destroyed businesses and put more people in the bread lines. He introduced us to socialism with social security. He managed to convince the voting public that he was a savior and they rewarded him with four terms. When he died late in the war many service men cried because he was the only president they had ever known and they were convinced he had prosecuted the war almost by himself.
Early America was much different than now. We have grown fat and happy. We are far more dependent on government than anyone ever was. We went from a agrarian society mostly to a manufacturing powerhouse which started to decline as government took charge and complicated manufacturing with restrictive rules, regulations, licensing and fees. My parents and extended family's parents were convinced FDR was a savior because they had suffered the hard times of the depression and thought his government work programs saved America. It was the greatest hoax America ever suffered until the election of 2020.

My grand mother was the best fish catcher and cleaner she would get on anyone who didnt get all the meat when cleaning them. And the best cook ever. I also remember many days shucking corn and snapping beans on the porch. That was bettertimes in my opinion.

The great grandmas and grandmas I grew up with - the many old aunts and their friends - were a completely different breed of women than most of the 20 to 35 year old trash roaming around today. By comparison, they were highly principled and disciplined, unselfish, hard-working and committed to do what needed to be done to make it all work for their own.

Don't count on easily finding one of those today. Sad and sorry, but so very true.

Wanna talk about the guys?

I saw my mother outshoot all the men with a High Standard 22 in 1964
I saw my wife outshoot all the men at trap with a 12 ga Rem 1100 in 1977

that's what i said... Who did that song...

One of my grandmothers was born on the ground on a homestead in 1890. Her mother was a breed who as a child was at the Little Bighorn.
I sat with my grandmother before she passed in the evenings watching the news with the clips of the challenger and moon stuff happening.
Young country we live in.

Osky

Yup.

Three of my Great GrandMothers were farmers / ranchers wife’s. They picked and hoed cotton, plowed fields behind mules, worked cattle, rode horses, milked cows. raised and canned their own food, cooked and raised children and had hard life’s. As did two of my Grandmothers.
They were strong God fearing woman who could out work most of today’s men, and still cook a huge meal after a hard day’s work.
I was fortunate enough to have known those three.

I still have one of thems old cast iron skillets that she fried huge Sunday chicken dinners in, and the last quilt she made when she was 90. She lived to be 94.
I also have the baby quilt she made for me in 1960. The last one she made for a Great grandchild.