When I saw this essay, I immediately wanted to read it because I was sure that I would learn things. Despite the fact that Quebec farm products are everywhere in my fridge and in my fruit bowl, I know too little about them, like many of my fellow city dwellers I have the impression, about where all this come. And I was not wrong: stepping out of line is both a 101 course on the structure of Quebec farms and a militant feminist text advocating new management models for these businesses.
Her observation is powerful: the traditional family structure that puts the man at the top dominates the farm model in Quebec and makes women’s work invisible. It is reminiscent of the first pages of the dusty old book Policies, of Aristote, where, before thinking the social hierarchy, the most famous of the pupils of Plato thinks about the architecture of a family. We guessed it, for him, a family includes a master, the man, who would be naturally suited to command, while the others, in short, are naturally made to obey. Sure, it makes people cringe every time I talk about it, but still, it’s still a surprisingly popular thing. Even among young Quebecers, who love YouTube thinkers like Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate. Ask any philosophy teacher these days in CEGEPs, and a young man has surely already touted one of these unrepentant masculinists.
It so happens that here, I learned from the pen of Francœur, the existence of a single accredited agricultural union, the UPA, puts us face to face with a structure which has the collateral consequence of the family pyramid of all time. For example, in order not to pay for two union certifications, a farmer in Quebec will often register only one member of his family in the union. Guess which one is there most often. I learned that, and I understood things about Quebec. Of course, that’s not necessarily what happens, and there are other patterns. And it must also be said that if it happens, it may be wanted voluntarily, but let’s say that it blocks certain advances by women.
Complementarity
A key idea of Francœur is to criticize this concept of complementarity in a couple on a farm (the man in the field, the woman in the house), because it relegates women to roles where they are not masters of their fate. “Complementing” each other is so often another way of hierarchizing the family where one of the members of the couple fulfills himself and the other supports him in the shadows. These social microstructures are precisely what makes our world.
How many families do we know where everyone says they are for gender equality, but where clearly one person, the woman, works above all to put everything in place so that the man shines? In Quebec, in 2023, in the city as in the countryside, among the rich as among the poor.
Francoeur, as a good sociologist (and also a descendant of farmers, it is pertinent to add), told me that she would never blame individuals for the situation. The productivist model in agriculture, established politically before the Quiet Revolution and at the heart of which are the ideas of growth and exploitation of resources, is the other major target of the essay. Other modes of production, collaborative and more modest, in harmony with the ground, are rather often led by women, she says. The latter would be less inclined to the exploitation of nature (the famous ethics of care is mentioned two or three times). It gives hope to see change. Because otherwise, before the end of my own son’s life, the productivist model will lead to serious problems getting anything out of our depleted soils, she pointed out to me over the phone.
Of course, it crossed my mind while reading: is this a book for city dwellers looking at the countryside from afar? Is the desire to de-essentialize gender roles on a farm a realistic objective, or is this destined to remain the business of utopian micro-projects on the edges? In any case, by advocating the diversification of the agricultural union offer in Quebec, one can only think that those who are interested in this kind of new models would feel less in a fight to live in accordance with their values. And I’m sure the good Aristotle would agree with that, if he ever passed by a farm here to dip his donut in a glass of fresh milk. The organic baskets in the park next to my home in Montreal follow the harvests, and restore the natural cycle of things to its rightful place. The nature of a farm is found in the land, not in the respective roles of those who cultivate it.
This is the first book by Julie Francœur, who sought to make accessible to the general public the results of her research on the agricultural world at her master’s and doctoral level. To write it, she left her usual job as an editor. Having myself recently taken the opposite path, from writing to publishing, we agreed on this beautiful word in the face of our new, “formative” experiences, which is also the one that leaves me in mind reading this essay.
stepping out of line
Hustle Editions
112 pages