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?
