ABSTRACT
Writing in 1995, a Japanese economist reported that ‘60 per cent of all agricultural labor is now performed by women’ (Imamura 1995: 3). He was correct, but his apparent surprise at this finding was misplaced. As shown in Table 3.1, the proportion of women among those primarily employed in farming has remained at approximately 60 percent since the 1960s. It is clear, therefore, that rural women have played an important role in family farming for many years, but it seems equally clear that most scholars – and, it might be added, agricultural policy makers – have tended to overlook this fact.
