Putting the Barn Before the House

Putting the Barn Before the House features the voices and viewpoints of women born before World War I who lived on family farms in south-central New York. Grey Osterud explores the flexible and varied ways that families shared labor.

Grey Osterud, an independent scholar and editor, is the author of Bonds of Community: The Lives of Rural Women in Nineteenth-Century New York, also from Cornell.

In this fascinating book Grey Osterud delves into the lives of two dozen women from the Nanticoke Valley in New York to explore women's role in farming and community over time.... Her current book is rich with insight into the patterns of change over time. For those committed to understanding the lives of farm women, this book should not be missed.

Thoroughly researched and skillfully organized, the well-crafted narrative provides readers with both a sense of place and a sense of history.

Colin R. Johnson:

Overall, Putting the Barn before the House succeeds marvelously in accomplishing what it sets out to do, both argumentatively and methodologically.... To be sure, during the past fifteen or twenty years, many studies have carried a brief for oral history research, but few have done so as persuasively as Osterud's. Nor have many studies done a better job of harmonizing information gleaned from oral histories with source material found in more traditional archives.... Osterud has provided readers with a very compelling, meticulously well-researched study that should be of interest of scholars working in a number of different fields.

In this delightful sequel to Bonds of Community, Grey Osterud carries her analysis of family-based agriculture in south-central New York's Nanticoke Valley into the first half of the twentieth century. Osterud masterfully plumbs interviews she conducted with twenty-four women born before 1917, drawing on feminist theory and oral history theory for interpretative insights. Her interviews suggest that concepts of separate spheres and autonomy were foreign to the understandings and experiences of rural women in the earlyt twentieth century.

In 1993, historian Hal S. Barron called Grey Osterud's Bonds of Community 'the most thorough and sophisticated reconstruction of the relationships between rural men and women that we have for the nineteenth century.' In Putting the Barn before the House, which Osterud describes as the sequel to Bonds of Community, she carries the story of Nanticoke Valley farmers into the twentieth century. Using the same exhaustive research and careful analysis, Osterud demonstrates that in Nanticoke Valley, farm families maintained flexible gender roles and strong mutual-aid networks, as well as a 'culture of mutuality,' well into the twentieth century. Men and women agreed that 'putting the barn before the house' was a vital strategy to enable the family to persist on the land and convey it to the next generation. Osterud's gracefully written book is a masterful contribution to rural and agricultural history. Putting the Barn before the House is an exemplary work for historians in any speciality that explores rural and urban social and labor history.

Sarah Carter:

Building on her 1991 book Bonds of Community: The Lives of Farm Women in Nineteenth-Century New York, Grey Osterud returns to the Nanticoke Valley of south-central New York State, this time with a focus on the early 20th century.. Personal narratives, interviews with two dozen women over many years, are at the core, and are the greatest strength, of the book.. Osterud makes a compelling case that gender flexibility and integration, reciprocity, mutual aid, social equality and collective action were the core values of the rural way of life in the Nanticoke Valley for generations.

Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Julia Cherry Spruill Professor of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hillco, author of Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World:

In this exquisite book, Grey Osterud draws on women's first-person narratives, together with a wealth of other evidence, for a fresh and convincing interpretation of gender relations, agency, mutuality, and resistance in rural women’s lives. Among this book’s many pleasures is the artful way in which the author attends to the form as well as the content of oral history interviews, carefully distinguishing her analysis from her subjects’ perspectives and allowing meaning to emerge from the poignant stories women tell.

Lynn Abrams, University of Glasgow, author of Oral History Theory:

Grey Osterud has written an account of American rural life that is suffused with empathy and insight. Elegantly written and deftly researched, this book enriches our understanding of rural society by focusing on the 'women's story' and by allowing several generations of women to be 'the authors of their own lives.' This is a book that rises out of an intimacy with the community of the Nanticoke Valley, which, allied with skillful oral history research and an unromantic eye, results in a compelling story of change and renewal.

Joan M. JensenNew, Mexico State University, author of Loosening the Bonds: Mid-Atlantic Farm Women, 1750–1850 and Calling This Place Home: Women on the Wisconsin Frontier, 1850–1925:

Putting the Barn Before the House is the very fruitful result of years of research and thought. It is an essential addition to our understanding of how the strands of gender, economy, and community intertwine in American history. Grey Osterud combines vivid oral histories with a thoughtful presentation of the transformation of one agricultural area, the Nanticoke Valley of New York. Osterud maintains a clear focus on the changes in gender relations that accompanied alternating eras of crisis and stability. This book illuminates women's interest in farms as business enterprises and how their work adapted accordingly, the changes in gender relations within the family that resulted, and the development of cooperative alternatives to capital-intensive agricultural production.