Abstract :
Using a case study of the South Australian farm crisis of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the article seeks to sympathetically engage with Whatmoreʹs [Whatmore, 1991a; Farming Women: Gender, Work and Family Enterprise, Macmillan, London; Whatmore, 1991b. Journal of Rural Studies, 7(1/2), 71–76] feminist reconstruction of simple commodity production (SCP). It explores the extent to which Whatmoreʹs reformulation of the SCP concept offers a scale- and agency-sensitive framework through which contemporary processes of agrarian change, including changing gender roles in many facets of rural and farming life, can be seen. Using Whatmoreʹs adaptation of Connellʹs (Connell, 1987, Gender and Power: Society, The Person and Sexual Politics, Allen and Unwin, Sydney) ‘gender order’ and ‘gender regime’ to examine the survival strategies of Kangaroo Island farm families from 1984 to 1993, the article reveals that while Island farm women have played fundamental and diverse roles in the defence of the family farm and the farm family through their on- and off-farm and household labour, farm menʹs roles have changed little. Nevertheless, the article does find that the established gender order is undergoing gradual and uneven change as a familial ideology - where the maintenance of family living standards is considered more important than the preservation of the familyʹs ties with the land - assumes importance in some young familiesʹ adjustment responses. In summary, the article finds that Whatmoreʹs ‘domestic political economy’ provides an important advance in understanding how farm families, and individual farm women and men, negotiate global, national, regional and local pressures for economic and social change.
