ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how the centrality of gender relations can be incorporated into theoretical understandings of family farms, and reviews methodological and strategic lessons learned in conceptualizing gender divisions of labor on farms. It suggests that agrarian and domestic discourses have romanticized, subordinated, and misinterpreted women's lives on family farms. The chapter describes the resiliency of family farms in advanced capitalist societies and peasant production in developing countries with consideration of the importance of gender relations in these production systems. The inability of capitalism to completely penetrate agricultural social relations elicits a theoretical as well as a practical concern in developing countries in what has become known as the mode of production debate. The domestication of rural women in many areas of Asia is frequently linked with attempts to control their sexuality. Mechanization of agriculture processes of urbanization and proletarianization can occur in advanced economies as well as Third World nations.
