Document 49: "Plank 22: Rural Women," from National Commission on the Observance of International Women's Year, The Spirit of Houston: The First National Women's Conference (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1978), pp. 87-88.
p. 87
PLANK 22
RURAL WOMEN
The President and Congress should establish a Federal rural education policy designed to meet the special problems of isolation, poverty, and underemployment that characterize much of rural America. Such a policy must be consciously planned to overcome the inequality of opportunities available to rural women and girls.
The Office of Management and Budget should set and enforce a policy that data collected on beneficiaries of all Federal programs shall be reported by sex, by minority status, and by urban/rural or metropolitan/nonmetropolitan areas, based on a standard definition.
Data on employment of women and public programs on behalf of working women should include in their definition farm wives and widows who perform the many tasks essential to the farm operation.
A farm wife should have the same ownership rights as her spouse under State inheritance and Federal estate laws. Tax law should recognize that the labor of a farm wife gives her an equitable interest in the property.
The President should appoint a joint committee from the Departments of Labor, Agriculture, and Justice to investigate the Louisiana plantations system's violations of human rights, especially of women. This commission should also investigate conditions of other seasonal and migratory workers in all States and Territories of the United States.
All programs developed on behalf of rural women should be certain to include migrant, black, Native American, Alaskan, Asian, and Hispanic women and all isolated minorities, and affirmative action programs should be extended to include all disenfranchised groups.
Background:
"Because they are isolated, and live in sparsely settled areas,
it is much more difficult…to provide services they desperately need."
Nearly a third of the people in this Nation live in what are considered rural areas; of these, 34 million are women and girls. While all of them are certainly not poor, rural residents account for 40 to 50 percent of the Americans in poverty. In general, rural residents have a higher incidence of social problems and receive a lower per capita share of the Federal dollars designed to meet those problems than the rest of the population.
The special needs of rural women have been ignored by the Federal Government, concluded the National Advisory Council on Women's Educational Programs, after a year-long study and consultations in Madison, Wisconsin: Stockton, California; Santa Fe, New Mexico; and Boone, North Carolina.
Efforts to improve the quality of rural life do not necessarily benefit men and women equally, nor can it be assumed that efforts to improve the status of women benefit rural as well as urban women.
Statistics on rural women Statistics that include specific categories for rural women are virtually non-existent. No breakdowns into urban/nonurban classifications were made in nearly 100 statistical tables that appeared in the "Statistical Portrait of Women in the United States" published by the Census Bureau in April 1976. Federally supported programs that operate in rural areas, such as Cooperative Extension Services, are not required to report the extent to which women are involved or benefit.
Farm women Those rural women who are farmers receive little economic or legal recognition for the extensive work they do. The 1976 Federal inheritance tax reform increased the exemption allowed to a surviving spouse, but otherwise the wife's labor on the farm does not legally earn her as much right as her husband to the capital they have accumulated together. The burden is particularly heavy for family farmers whose property evaluations are high, when the cash available to pay taxes is ordinarily low.
Women as well as men consider farm work their careers, and farm women at the Houston Conference specifically urged that references to women in business include them. Many women are farm managers, and 25 percent of all college majors currently in agriculture are women.
Services for rural women The needs of rural women—farm and non-farm, and migrant workers, Indians on reservations, and Alaskans are not substantively different from the needs of urban and suburban women. But because they are isolated and live in sparsely settled areas, it is much more difficult, and more costly to provide services they desperately need and for which many of these women are least able to pay.
Among the most critical needs, identified by rural women themselves, are education and training, job opportunities
p. 88
In some areas, service that once existed have disappeared in the name of progress. Local hospital and health services have consolidated to save money, leaving isolated communities completely unserved and many without doctors. Women suggest training rural women as paramedics to serve their own communities.
One-room schools have been absorbed by regional districts, and the old county "normal" schools that used to train teachers locally have become State colleges and universities. Teachers are less likely to come from—or return to—their own communities, and other functions formerly served by rural schools have disappeared completely. Many State education departments no longer have experts in rural education, and teacher training programs in human relations that are supposed to make teachers sensitive to race, class, and sex-stereotyping usually ignore or are inadequate for the needs of rural women.
Rural to urban New problems arise when rural people must quickly adopt "urban" lifestyles. This can happen when a rural area develops quickly, with destruction to the environment and to personal lives, caused by what may look to outsiders like progress—mechanization of mines, development of mills and factories, etc.
Suddenly, there may be a mix of people with very high incomes (and no experience in budgeting) living in close proximity to those who remain poor, In a "boom" town, there will be virtually no services—and a very high rate of personal and social problems.
Relocation of migrant workers is also becoming more prevalent, especially in the Midwest, on the West Coast, and along the Eastern seaboard. Many of these people are Spanish-speaking, and their needs in all areas must be met in ways that recognize language barriers and varying cultural patterns.
Migrant workers In calling for an investigation of violations of human rights of Louisiana sugar plantation workers, particularly women, delegate Lorna Bourg of Louisiana said that the workers' mail is opened, their pay poor, and their health needs neglected. She said 60 percent of all adults living on the plantations have serious medical problems, and only a small percentage of the children are in good health.
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