Preliminary Programme

The paper deals with the relations between peasants’ wives (Bäuerinnen) and female rural servants (Mägde) in Austria during the late 19th and the first decades of the 20th century), drawing mainly on autobiographical records kept at a rich documentation of the University of Vienna. Much has been written on (urban) female servants and their relation to (mostly upper) middle class women they served, but very little on peasants’ wives and female rural servants, the latter working within a completely different context and for the most part together with the peasant’s wife.
The paper examines the dynamics between work, gender and social position. On austrian farms (especially in the Eastern Austrian Alps, where animal husbandry, demanding permanent labour force was crucial to the economy) rural servants usually constituted the main part of a farm’s labour force There functioned an work hierarchy formally and essentially structured along gender and age. Peasants’ wives functioned asco-workers but also heads of the groups of female rural servants. The latter were not necessarily strangers to the peasant couple. They could be children of agricultural labourers and/or cottagers “protected” by the peasants, they could be (usually illegitimate) foster children having grown up in the farm, distant relatives and even (in fact often) close relatives of either the peasant himself or his wife - they could be their aunts, sisters or daughters.
On their part peasants’ wives had usually worked as female rural servants before their marriage and had then similar experiences to the women who worked on their behalf.
Questions arise as to the ways various relations and living experiences interacted with work and relations within its context. Did daughters and sisters of peasants enjoy a privileged treatment? It seems that they were entrusted with important tasks and enjoyed higher positions in labour hierarchy. Relevant questions also arise in regard to male rural servants, who worked separately from but in certain cases together with their female counterparts and the paper makes comparisons in this respect. (Show less)

This paper contributes to the debate on the birth of capitalism initiated by Adam Smith, Karl Marx and Rosa Luxembourg. It addresses agrarian capitalism, specifically the formative years of commercial agriculture in the middle Rio Grande Valley of Southern New Mexico and West Texas between 1840 and 1930.

I will examine the complex process, starting with the local impact of the United States conquest of Mexico in the 1840s and the subsequent and uneven dispossession of native peoples and former Mexican citizens. I will then turn to role of government in establishing commercial agriculture, highlighted by creation of the New Mexico College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts in Las Cruces, and the formation of the Elephant Butte Irrigation District. Lastly I will address the creation of the capitalist social formation, particularly policies involving the distribution of lands and the recruitment of commercial farmers from elsewhere in the United States, and the early recruitment of wage earning workers from an expanding labor pool in Mexico. (Show less)