WEEDS: A FARM DAUGHTER'S LAMENT

 

Authors Note: I wrote this piece as part of my final paper for a graduate seminar on Western Memoir at Utah State University taught by the exceptional Dr. Melody Graulich.  I wanted to include a portion of it on my blog because it is this book, and Melody's sincere belief that I had stories to tell, that sparked my interest in the study of women and farming.





My farmer father made no secret about being disappointed that God didn’t give him sons.  After having five daughters in a row, he was convinced that he was a modern day Job.  Instead of accepting his fate, he decided to play the hand he was dealt by making his daughters into farmers. While he never tired of telling others about how the Davis girls were “top hands” and worked harder than most of the boys in the county, he never praised his daughters for their hard work and spent most of his time instructing them on how to do it better.  Somewhere in the back of my mind, I think I always knew that no amount of work, no level of perfection, would ever make up for me not being born a boy.  This idea influenced my identity and fueled my desire to succeed but what I didn’t understand until recently is it did the same thing for other farm daughters. I made this discovery when I read Weeds: A Farm Daughter’s Lament written by Evelyn Funda for an  graduate seminar on Western memoir. Her experiences as woman in a rural farming community were hauntingly familiar and I was instantly taken with her prose.

In her memoir, Funda writes about her life as the only daughter of an Idaho farmer.  She shows her reader how being born a girl on a farm shaped her personal identity and confronts the role gender bias played in her life.  Funda titles her chapters after types of weeds found on her family farm in Idaho and uses their characteristics to echo her life experiences and her identity as a farm daughter. The metaphor effectively sets her apart as a living organism rooted to a land that was never meant to embrace her existence.

This methodology is readily apparent in the first chapter of her book titled Dodder. It is here we learn how family convention kept Funda out of the field, confined to traditional female farming roles and influenced her early identity. Funda reinforces her use of weed as metaphor when she recounts emptying out her childhood home after the death of her parents. During this process, she comes across an information pamphlet written for farmers about the noxious weed dodder. “I was a grown woman before I discovered that the word for dodder, the brightly colored Medusa-headed weed my father righteously battled on our farm, was not spelled, as I had always assumed, d-a-u-g-h-t-e-r” (8). She goes on to provide a botanical explanation of dodder as an indestructible parasitic plant incapable of independent existence.  The survival of dodder is solely dependent on the nutrients it sucks from its host plant.

Funda’s passage about the physical characteristics of dodder further engrains the weed in the mind’s eye as part woman. “With its brilliant curling tendrils of gold and auburn and strawberry blond, dodder does have about it a fiendish, feminine beauty” (10).  It is easy to imagine the weed as a wild woman’s wayward locks. The complexity surrounding these images increases when you consider that the common names for dodder, such as maiden's hair, witches' shoelaces, lovevine and witches hair are also rooted in the feminine.

When I think of dodder in terms of imagery, I see my great-grandmother bent double over the galvanized steel tub we used to pluck the chickens in during the fall butchering season.  Her hands are moving so fast I forget she is 80 and struggle to keep pace. Her hair, once thick and deep auburn, is now thin and white and tendrils are escaping her bun.  I look at her and watch the wind unwind her curls as tiny pin feathers float around her.   This is my Grammy’s witches hair. I’ve often thought about this scene because I recall it with perfect clarity.

Grammy was a farmer’s daughter too. She married a farmer and gave him a daughter, my father’s mother.   Did she feel inadequate because she was a girl? Was she disappointed to have a daughter? Did she know, like I did, that her existence was a disappointment? It may be difficult for people born outside of rural communities to understand the complexities of the weed/woman metaphor but Funda explains it beautifully with the following line “Yet that essential misconception of equating dodder and daughter, however, unfounded it was, has long ago engrained in me an analogy I found hard to shake, one where the boundaries between two things, weed and woman, are permeable and fluid” (9).

What contributed to the formation of this analogy? We may get insight into this when Funda discusses the gender bias that exists between fathers and daughters on farms when she talks about her birth as told by her father.

Whenever my father spoke of my birth, he never failed to begin the story with the words of his own father.  With something strangely akin to pride, he used to say his father Frank has admonished my mother when she was pregnant with me, “If it’s a girl, you send it back!” My father would laugh then add, “But once you were here, he wouldn’t have traded you for the world. (12)

Men wanting sons to carry on their names and legacies isn’t new, but on family farms this need seems more urgent.  As Funda recounts the frankness in which her gender is discussed by the men in her family, the reader can’t help but sense that her birth as a female was somehow marked by disappointment.  The idea that being born a girl to a farmer somehow makes a daughter “less” is woven into her personal narrative before she even draws breath and plays a key role in shaping her personal identity. The place of women in the daily operation of farm life also influenced my personal identity.  Farming communities embrace the roles of men as bread winners and women as bread makers as essential aspects of American family values.