I started working on this article as a reflection on my own assumptions as a feminist researcher
studying women in farming. To focus on the question of why farm women have rejected feminism,
has been for me a way of interrogating debates within feminism. In the question, I have recognized
assumptions about progress and emancipation of women, about women as a universal category,
about the significance of the gendered subject of research, about the difficulties for feminism’s
relationship to the researched when being insiders in the scientific community. There may be more.
In rejecting the claims of universal and objective knowledge, the importance of locality/context,
termed “situated knowledge,” has been advocated. This may be an improvement for studies of the
agricultural sector, which in many ways differs from contexts that have functioned as standard
frames of reference in social theorizing. What, then, is special about the context of agriculture?: That
business relations on the family farm are not separate from family relations, unpaid work is not
separate from paid work, intimate relations are not separate from instrumental relations? Also, the
necessary co-operation between husband and wife in making the farm survive and the small rural
communities in which agricultural production takes place are important aspects of the context. These
contextual aspects are not just characteristics of the traditional/pre-modern period. They may be seen
as having a lot in common with the post-modern blurring of boundaries, and they also become
interesting against the backdrop of the new attempts at reuniting what modernity has split apart and
the renewed interest in collectivities in identity construction. As I have pointed out, it is feasible to
study agriculture as contemporary without assuming things will change in a modernist