The lady of the house in this period did not merely cook her family's food; she was instrumental in its production and processing. The family garden was generally her responsibility. It was she who planted the early radishes, herbs, flowers and all the multitude of summer vegetables in the cool, moist spring soil, weeded and nurtured them through the summer months, and finally gathered them in the lingering Indian summer days. If there were daughters in the family, they aided her in this as in her other activities. When the produce was finally all picked, peeled and cut, she combined them with vinegar, sugar, and spices to preserve the vegetables as pickles, jelly or canned goods. It was warm and tiring, but highly rewarding work. "Never will I forget the pungent fragrances that pervaded the air when it was catsup or pickle-making season," wrote Lottie Schneider.
When our mothers made apple butter in great kettles each child took a turn at stirring the delicious mixture. The wonderful fragrance made the task easier even though the thickening ingredients sometimes sputtered and caused burns as they popped out on the hands who used the stirring paddle.[54]
The pantry shelves filled with glass jars displaying their highly colored contents produced feelings of pride and plenty in the farm woman.
Poultry keeping also fell to the farmer's wife. There were a sizable number of commercial poultry farms in the county—it was in fact the area's second most important farm industry—but most dairy and general farms kept just enough for their own use.[55] Egg collecting, feeding and cleaning of the chicken house and yard, even killing, dressing and plucking the poultry were done by female members of the farm family. Thrifty women saved the feathers for pillows and coverlets and nearly all sold their excess eggs to the "hucksters" who travelled from farm to farm buying surplus goods. These peddlars also bought rabbits, turkeys, and other poultry, as well as home-churned butter from the farms. This was yet another area in which women utilized and processed the raw materials of the land. Twice a week the cream that had been skimmed and saved was churned (generally in round barrel churns with wooden paddles), salted, and packed in stone jars to be picked up and transported to the Alexandria and Washington markets. One of the early hucksters was Earl Robey who collected eggs and chickens once a week. "He travelled with 2 horses hitched to a covered wagon," wrote one farmer. "In later years he had a model T truck." The money made by the women was theirs to keep, for running the house and personal expenses, and the austerity or comparative comfort of a farmstead was often the direct result of the energy and efficiency of the farm woman.[56]
The rural woman's place was respected and secure on the farms of fifty years ago. The farmer might consider himself the overall manager but he recognized his spouse's vital contributions. "Mutually they both decided to make things go and they did go," wrote one 1930s farm boy of his parents. "Mother did not feel inferior to father and she never felt that he expected her to feel so."[57] If the woman's role and duties were firmly set in this rural society, then so was her status.
An additional responsibility was that of caring for children, but in the farm family this was more clearly a joint obligation of the father and mother than in families in which the male parent left home to work. Too, children were more closely tied to the family as a working unit; they felt both the necessity of aiding their parents with the running of the farm and the pride of contributing in a real sense to the family's well-being. Of course, farm children attended school, but they also shared the pattern of their parents' life. With father and mother they awoke in the early hours of the morning to help with barn or household chores: "It didn't make any difference how small they were, they got up at six o'clock."[58] Many learned to milk before the age of ten. On weekends, summer holidays and after school, they were also expected to help on the farm. Both boys and girls performed the unending job of gathering firewood for the kitchen stove. Carrying water was another constant chore which often fell to the family's children, for as late as 1940 nearly 40% of the county's homes still lacked running water.[59] Farm youngsters learned to drive a team and ride horseback at an early age, and this enabled them to take a horse to be shod, fetch a mower section from the general store, or run other unexpected errands. Margaret Lee stated that as a girl she used to hitch up a mule and buggy each Monday to take the family's laundry to be washed by a local Negro laundress, and pick it up again on Thursday.[60] Girls also helped with the dishes, fed chickens, and cooked while boys tackled plowing, threshing and animal husbandry. One woman recalled the special satisfaction she felt when, at the age of thirteen, she shocked an entire field of wheat.[61] By doing these chores and errands, farm children were not merely assisting in the farm operation. In the emulation of their parents' activity, they benefitted from a kind of on-the-job training which both sharpened their skills for a later farm career and furthered their identity with the family group and farm life in general.
The farm child's close connection to his parents' life and the necessity for performing a variety of chores also acted in some measure as a force for social control: the child who worked with his parents was expected to act in a manner acceptable to them. Furthermore, the close-knit nature of the community reinforced the parents' values when their offspring were away from home. "A farmer was always busy, and his kids didn't run the streets," noted Joseph Beard.[62] Another native of northern Virginia explained the prevalent philosophy in more detail:
Papa was a firm believer that work was a therapy that kept young people out of mischief. It was unthought of for youngsters to get into serious trouble in those days other than smoking corn silk or grapevine, and that was a punishment in itself. All were assigned specific chores and the youngest started out picking up chips and other small pieces of wood from the 'woodpile' for kindling to start the fire in the kitchen range at daylight in the morning.... As we grew a little older bringing in the firewood was added to the list of chores and when you grew big enough to chop and split cordwood, usually around the age of 10-12 years, one found the chores around the home were endless.[63]
