Spotting Cows

During the 1880s there was a burgeoning interest in breeding Holstein Friesian cows. Several associations emerged to record pedigrees and maintain herd books. The Holstein Friesian Association of America was formed in 1885 as a merger of these separate associations. Farmers applied to certify their cow in Holstein-Friesian book, and they gained a permanent spot in the record of cattle. The Davis family owned a farm in Frederick County, Maryland for over one hundred years. One inheritor of the farm, R. Lee managed the farm for his father after 1895 and he transitioned the farm to specialize in dairy and incorporated many modern techniques. J.C. Thomas Williams in his History of Frederick County says that Lee was “one of the most successful young farmers in this section, intelligent and fully ‘up-to-date’ in his methods.” Lee bought and bred Holstein-Friesian cows, joined the Holstein-Friesian associations and certified his cows in a manner customary of large dairy operations. He sold his dairy products primarily to merchants and retailers in Baltimore. 

A collection of the Davis family papers contains surviving records of the farm’s operations. These documents include the farm’s finances, wills, records of investments and blueprints describing the construction of dairy barns in the 1930s. Some of the most striking documents in this collection are a series of cow registration forms. Not unlike modern vehicle registrations, these certificates of registry, showed that the cow was entered in the Holstein-Friesian book. The front of the certificates included sections to input the cow’s name, breeding facility, owner, birth date, parents’ names, and registration number. It also included a section for brief physical descriptions. The description of one cow, Stelaris, from 1893 reads: “stripe up right shldr over on left, patch on left hind qtr, spot on left side, spot on right hind qtr, left of brisket, belly flanks, legs except part of forearms, 2-3 tail, white.” The back of the certificate included two pre-outlined cows facing opposite directions. The owner was supposed to sketch the relative position of the cow’s spots on these diagrams. The features outlined both in the description and picture space of the certificates were the cow’s spots. During this time it was believed that a cow’s milking and breeding capacity corresponded with the placement of birth marks. Early on, we see how the features rendered most visible are those associated with productive capacities. These early breeding stages erected a mode of viewing the bodies of dairy cows.

Click, Clack, Moo: Cow Machines

In many ways Doreen Cronin’s Click, Clack, Moo is a culminating moment for illustrated cows. It situates them as active protagonists; They are laborers that manipulate writing tools to negotiate with a farm’s management system. The book functions as a primer for lessons about labor relations, socialism and economics, though it gains its symbolic currency through political references that are beyond the child’s scope. Kimbery Jack’s article “Trouble in the Farm Yard: Labor Relations and Politics in Doreen Cronin’s Duck Books” argues that the impressive panoply of historical and political references in Doreen Cronin’s books “ ‘exploit the ignorance’ of the implied child audience and function as covert jokes directed exclusively at the adult audience” (Jack 422). Various publications and organizations, including the Illinois Farm Bureau, The California Federal of Teachers, and Canada’s Labour Studies Bulletin recommend Cronin’s books as good introductions to farm life, agriculture, economics and labor relations (Jack 411). Jack acknowledges and privileges the “different register” with which the adult reader approaches Cronin’s text (Jack 421). For Jack, the fact that the adult reader understands the political references makes her reading more nuanced, rich, and controlled. It is the precise nature of childhood ignorance, however, that needs to be explored. Unlike the learned adult, the child reader (or listener) approaches these political references without their sedimented historical meaning and simultaneously approaches the animal symbols without referents.

In her essay, “The Animal Voice Behind the Animal Fable,” Naama Harel argues against reading the animals in such children’s books as “absent referents” or metaphors that do not point to any authentic behavior. While many aspects of the animal protagonist in a fable can be mapped onto human experience, Harel argues that there is a “differential gap” that prevents us from completely reducing the nonhuman condition to the human condition. This gap contains those surplus spaces that construct the animal beyond its mere function as a trope. The adult reader loses (or excludes) certain features in the transition of the animal protagonist to its interpretation as allegory. The insistence on an allegorical reading represses the more subtle ways in which animal subjects are displayed to children.

If we extract the political undertones of Click, Clack, Moo the story reads as a tale of a troubled farmer dealing with animals that are too smart for the farm. The story opens with Farmer Brown’s face and he emerges as our protagonist that “has a problem. His cows like to type” (Cronin 1). We hear the sounds of the typing and clicking echoed in the phrase Farmer Brown overhears: “Click, clack, moo. / Click, clack, moo. / Clickety, clack, moo” (Cronin 2)

The repetition of the onomatopoetic phrase click, clack, moo combines the sounds of the cow with the sounds of the typewriter, blending the antiquated image of the cow with an antiquated writing device. The title and plot of the story rearticulate the mechanistic view of cows by linking the robotic responses of the typewriter with the sounds of the cow. Indeed, the story repeatedly formulates the cows as machines. The moment the cows go on strike, they leave a note to Farmer Brown saying, “Sorry. / We’re closed. / No milk / today” (Cronin 8). The phrasing suggests that the cows, and not the barn, are contained factories or stores that open and close. It is not that the cows provide labor to the farmer. They are the very machines that produce raw goods. When the farmer rejects the cows’ request for blankets, he leaves them a note: “There will be no electric blankets. / You are cows and hens. / I demand milk and eggs” (Cronin 17). This statement makes a dual argument about the absurdity of cows desiring the luxury of warm blankets and the inherent feature of cows and hens to produce milk and eggs. Although Cronin groups hens in the category with cows, she does not make the essentialist argument for birds and eggs as strong as the association between cows and milk. Cronin’s use of the feminine noun hens shows dissociation between the entire species and egg laying. Conversely, the cows are not separated by gender, showing that milk production is an essential feature of their species.

In her insistence on a symbolic reading of Click, Clack, Moo, the adult reader may collapse the figures of cows onto labor workers entirely. This reading would disregard the precise way the animal subjects are portrayed to children. Although the book may teach children about social reform processes and farm life, it makes more prominent and urgent arguments about animal behavior. To the early child readers who have not yet built strong associations with cow symbols, the book works to unquestioningly regard them as milk producers. Learning to read (that is, to read as Jack’s anticipated adult reader) is about learning to re-read these symbols without the first associations.

The Mechanistic View of Cows

Many critics have pointed to the Cartesian dichotomy between soul and body as the moment when our mechanistic view of animals emerged. Berger writes that Descartes “bequeathed the body to the laws of physics and mechanics, and since animals were soulless, the animal was reduced to the model of a machine” (Berger 11). While Berger effectively views the human and nonhuman relation as on a linear downward spiral, Peter Singer’s 1975 book Animal Liberation depicted a history of human and nonhuman relations that was more versatile. Like Berger, however, Singer isolates the Cartesian mechanistic view of animals as an indelible moment. Descartes’ study of physics led him to determine that everything consisted of matter and was governed by mechanistic principles, operating like a clock. The exception, he argued, were humans, who contained souls and consciousness—features that are not reducible to material nature. Without souls, Descartes argued, animals were automata, which, like clocks, respond stimuli of pleasure and pain mechanistically (Singer 24). Singer points to this moment as pivotal in the distance humans feel towards animal suffering. He describes the process in which Descartes nailed live dogs to boards and performed vivisection to examine their blood flow (Singer 27). Singer argues that this mechanistic view of animals was eventually overcome by the very systematic procedures it enabled. That is, through rigorous close examination of animal and human bodies, physiologists discovered how similar these bodies actually were.

Although the Cartesian view of animals has been dismissed by science, its ideological imprints leave indelible traces on many animal populations. In his article “Picture Book Animals: How Natural a History,” Leonard S. Marcus draws on Berger to attribute Descartes’ creation of the human-machine dualism as the moment when animals were pushed into the machine category and thereafter excluded from the human domain. This division from machines created nostalgia for the paradisal pre-industrial world (Marcus 129-130). Marcus writes, “As the innocence of childhood was asserted by Rousseau and others, childhood came to be sentimentalized. Adults, especially of the middle class, began to regard their own childhoods with nostalgic longing. Thus increasingly animals and children seemed natural companions for each other” (Marcus 129-130). Berger fittingly describes how both animals and children were used as machines in the first stages of the industrial revolution (Berger 13).

This mechanistic view of animals still resonates most profoundly with regards to dairy cows. The cow operates as a machine. Unlike meat animals, dairy cows are not raised for slaughter and consumption. Dairy cows are raised to perpetually pump milk. Instead of functioning as products in themselves, dairy cows have the mechanisms necessary to manufacture products. Each dairy mother is a self-contained bodily factory. This mechanistic view of cows develops itself in the slow-moving, expressionless depiction of cows in children’s literature.

Metaphoric Substitutions and Transference

English art critic John Berger’s 1980 book About Looking includes a chapter, “Why Look at Animals,” that was influential in the field of animal studies. Berger’s historical analysis of the nineteenth-century changes in the relationship between humans and animals has been taken up by critics to show how scholars are surrounded by animals but do not actually see them.

Citing Rousseau, Berger makes a passing suggestion that the first metaphor was of an animal. He writes, “if the first metaphor was animal, it was because the essential relation between man and animal was metaphoric. Within that relation what the two terms—man and animal—shared in common revealed what differentiated them. And vice versa” (Berger 7). This tautological argument—Berger at once assumes and proves that the first metaphor was an animal—is weak, but it draws out an important feature of the psychological and social work of metaphors. Regardless of whether animals constituted the first known metaphors, the metaphoric transference of an animal into a situation that calls for a human sheds light on the usefulness of animals in understanding human characteristics. Metaphoric transference often works by including an object that is more familiar than the one intended. Perhaps his argument goes to the root of the language as inherently metaphoric. We can assume a distinction between those moments that position animals as metaphors in the structural or literary sense of “metaphor” and those other functionally metaphoric moments that more subtly codify animals. The notion of a metaphor needs to be complicated with the observation of how it’s impossible to escape the realms of metaphor within language. N. Katherine Hayles’ article “ ‘A Metaphor of God Knew How Many Parts’: The Engine that Drives The Crying of Lot 49,” describes the strict constructivist position as asserting that “whatever we can speak or know is always already a representation, not reality as such” (97). This idea of an original, authentic referent of metaphor is broken down when that loaded Marxist-Hegelian adverb “always already” positions any referent as necessarily conceived through the metaphoric symbol that is language.

Berger says that this capacity for symbolic thought is simultaneously what links and distances the human from the nonhuman. He writes,

“What distinguished man from animals was the human capacity for symbolic thought, the capacity which was inseparable from the development of language in which words were not mere signals, but signifiers of something other than themselves. Yet the first symbols were animals. What distinguished men from animals was born of their relationship with them” (Berger 9).

Within Berger’s liberal appropriation of Rousseau, learning animal symbols is a pivotal part of learning language itself. While we do not need to follow Berger or Rousseau’s assertion along historical lines to imagine a state of nature, we can follow this argument along the development of a child to see how animal symbols create the space in which children learn symbolic substitution.

Revising The Farm Book

In her 1982 introduction to a reprinted edition of The Farm Book, Barbara Bader remarks that Smith’s created “a mode of illustration calculated for reproduction and well suited to children,” which appeared at a time that had a demand for children’s libraries and lavish children’s books. She remarks that his pictures are “informatively detailed” icons, which “from corner to corner…are to pore over.” Her verb choice, pore, is suggestive of the possibilities opened up by Smith’s pictures. Not only are they images that one can examine closely with intense concentration, but they also function as a kind of porous opening into the world of dairying.

The milking scene provides many such porous openings. At this point in the book, Bob and Betty have shed their pristine urban clothing. No longer wearing gold-button jackets, Betty is down to her dress and Bob a simple white shirt and slacks. They have transitioned from passive urban spectators to active rural participants. Bob is at eye-level with the farmer on his low-wooden stool, his body hunched forward as though he’s ready to take the place of the farmer. Betty, on the other hand, stands beside her brother with her shoulders pulled back and her hands tied up in front of her. Betty’s frame is positioned at the latitudinal level of the cows, which subtly aligns her with their position. The relative stances of Bob and Betty correspond with the gendered divide between male and female duties on the farm. While milking was formerly a task delegated to women, the late 1800s shifted that role. Milking was done by men, while churning was done by women. The reprinted version of The Farm Book revises the gendered language of the 1910 edition. Instead of the original line “Betty, like a little woman, learned to churn,” the reprinted book simply says, “Betty learned to churn.” While the words of the text were susceptible to revision with subsequent publications, the images remain unchanged. The picture of the stanchions and milking reveals several aspects of milk production that offend our modern sentiments.

Those Abjected Beings

My thesis is concerned with how bodily spaces of cows acquire their two-dimensional representation. What references do these depictions make to actual cows? How do the citations of cows in children’s literature present an ideology of both human and nonhuman bodies? Which features are included, excluded, exaggerated, understated, or misrepresented? How does the ease and willingness with which they are represented to children reveal a certain blankness? Are cows an unmarked space? Does the suturing process of reading cows require a simultaneous identification and disidentification with the image?

Although not concerned primarily with questions of the nonhuman, contemporary feminist theorists follow a line of inquiry that grasps at an answer to these questions. Judith Butler’s inaugural text, Gender Trouble, interrogated the alliance between sex, gender, and sexual orientation. When Butler uses sex she refers to the anatomical features that have come to define male and female subjects. Butler draws on political feminist discourse to show how sex is often mistakenly viewed as a prelinguistic structure containing ontological truth. She draws on Wittig, Irigaray, and Beauvoir to show how this prelinguistic state is an impossibility. Since sex is only visible through the linguistic signifier that nominates it, the body cannot be conceived of prediscursively. The prelinguistic possibility of the body is irreparably lost at its moment of enunciation.

Gender, then, is the unifying principle by which these bodily spaces are organized. When Butler describes gender as “culturally constituted” (Butler, GT, 17) she argues that gender is the means by which bodily spaces are organized. This organizing principle attributes sex as the cause of gender and sexuality, suggesting a seamless transition of body and identity. To explain this point, Butler misappropriates the term “metaphysics of substance” from Nietzsche. This idea conflates “Being” with “Substance” in a way that assumes an ontological truth to material spaces. A subject is rendered coherent through the heterosexual matrix that assumes a causal link between sex, gender, and sexuality. A female body produces a woman subject who desires a man.

This cultural interpretation depends on the repeated performance of gender, which makes this interpretation appear natural. The material spaces of the body are imbued with cultural truth through the sedimented effect of iterated gender performances. Butler writes, “Gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being” (Butler, GT, 33). Much has been written about the role children’s literature plays in the formation of subjectivity. The structuring process of the child is dependent on repetition—repetition of particular books, repetition of images, repetition of narrative associations. Countless contemporary children’s books, including Andy Cutbill’s The Cow That Laid an Egg, Doreen Cronin’s Click Clack Moo, and Phyllis Root’s Kiss The Cow, reiterate the bovine image as an illustrated subject. Butler’s theory of the performative is about internalizing a set of constraints such that the performance of gender, when done repeatedly, gives the subject a sense of its naturalness and makes it feel prediscursive. This notion of repetitive gender performance is critical for Butler, both in terms of how gender is constructed and how it can be subverted.

Gender is a necessary precondition to enter visibility within linguistic and social structures. Butler’s theory of the linguistic and social construction of gender is as concerned with the bodies that appear within the realm of possibility as she is with those that appear outside it—that is, those excluded spaces that constitute the necessary outside. In Bodies that Matter, often regarded as Butler’s revision and rearticulation of Gender Trouble, Butler argues that the “humanness” of “those abjected beings” who are not properly gendered comes into question (Butler, BTM, 9). She adds that it is “as important to think about how and to what end bodies are constructed” as it is to “think about how and to what end bodies are not constructed” (Butler, BTM, 16). The bodies that do not materialize “provide the necessary ‘outside,’ if not the necessary support, for the bodies which, in materializing the norm, qualify as bodies that matter” (Butler, BTM, 16). She says that this process of naming something “marks a boundary that includes and excludes, that decides, as it were, what will and will not be the stuff of the object to which we then refer” (Butler, BTM, 11). For Butler, this linguistic inscription has “some normative force, and indeed, some violence, for it can construct only through erasing” (Butler, BTM, 11). With the linguistic codification of animals, the body is erased as some symbolic ideal is extracted. The bodies of animals are specifically and deliberately not constructed. At the precise moment of enunciation, they are positioned as commodities—machines that emphasize the utility of their spaces. It is this principle of selectivity that produces their invisibility.

The Ideal Woman is a Dairy Cow

During the early 1800s, dairying practices were sensitive and attuned to nature. William Townsend, author of The Dairyman’s Manual in 1839 argued that there was an established “dairy zone” that was ideally suited for dairy production based on its climate, air, water, and herbage (McMurry 13). Farmers believed that the health of the cow affected the production of milk and some even advised against frequent and premature calving (McMurry 14).

In her account of the rise of dairying, American History Professor Sally McMurry points to the early 1820s as that decade in which some of the most formative technological and ideological approaches to dairying emerged. Prior to this time, dairy production in the southern United States was the product of native free-roaming cows. As such, very little dairy was produced and little emphasis was placed on maximizing output. The “milk her for all she’s worth” idiom had not yet been added to the repertoire of metaphors that configure animals as machines. Soon a shift occurred wherein cattle were bought, sold, and bred with a new focus on productive capacities. As McMurry writes, “farmers employed a range of criteria for selecting milch cows. They judged according to elaborate, traditional notions about how a cow’s external features corresponded to her productive capabilities.” As the body of dairy cows became a site of economic concern, certain features were inscribed with excessive import. Among the features McMurry tracked that suggested a highly-productive cow were a large mouth, thick and strong lips, soft skin, temperament (docility and contentedness), wide-apart horns, thin heads, broad back, full breast, large udder, long teats, broach buttocks, and a long tail (McMurry 20-21). The cow’s body materialized with this conception of the features that mattered.

Soon, however, questions of productivity encouraged farmers to look for the way a cow’s physical characteristics affected milk output. During the tentative breeding period in which dairy farmers were trying to establish the precise physical characteristics that optimized breeding, several predominant ideologies seeped into the predictions. Many farmers imported contemporary notions of gender into their breeding taxonomies. As McMurry says, “The ideal milch cow, docile and contended, with her small head and large udder, reflected a larger pattern of thinking about female capability” and the Victorian-era theorists who posited an inverse relationship between the womb and the mind (McMurry 22).

Fittingly, dairy farms were sites that where labor was divided along gender lines. During the early 1800s, women were the primary milkers of cows. Many argued that women had soft, gentle hands that were better suited to milk than calloused male hands (McMurry 78). The practice of female milking drew upon the early British images of a sexualized milkmaid—“invariably robust, often physically large,” representing “fecundity and its accompaniment, lactation” (McMurry 77). This association between femininity and milking created an idyllic, romantic image in which milk extraction was associated with nature (McMurry 79).

Around 1860, the female habits of milking—unscheduled sessions on free-ranging cows—were replaced with more systemized processes. Correspondingly, milking entered the domain of man’s work and the metaphor surrounding the image of a cow shifted from a gendered to a mechanistic approach. McMurry writes,

By the 1860s the connections between female nurturance, lactation, and the milking of cows were replaced by suggestions on milking technique and procedure that increasingly showed a concern for discipline and system. This shift paralleled the rise of the notion of the cow as a machine: if cows were machines, then according to prevalent cultural canons they were properly men’s province. (McMurry 80)

The Farm Book simultaneously produces gender through the prism of its animals. The characteristics of a good dairy cow are aligned with the characteristics of a good milk churner. Femininity is produced as a structure that is as essential to the operations of a farm as the truck that transports the milk to the town. How is the early animality of the dairy cow a prism that established and fixed our current notions of gender identity? Further, how do our specific instantiations of anthropomorphism work to prop up gender roles? Does the insistence on gendered children and animals convey a sense of innate gender roles? Do both point to an ideal Roussean view of the state of nature with regard to gender?