Soupçon III In Memoriam Series IV.ii International Year of the Woman Farmer
Historically, it has been surmised that the nomadic cave man became a settler, once farming was introduced. In the ancient times, it was women who took care of farming. Somehow, it seemed to jell in with the reproductive associations of womanhood,too.
No wonder, in the ancient texts as well as in the the folk tradition, we have female deities galore who are inextricably related to the agrarian production cyclicity.
Women have been working in the fields since time immemorial, in brief. Even today, they continue to do all the back-breaking work such weeding, for instance. Often there are newspaper stories of how the farmer's wife even pulled the plough as the family could not afford a bullock.
Women continued to be the fulcrum of the field work till the feudal era. It was the onset of the Industrial Revolution, which took away men's jobs, that pushed them within the household, reducing them to 'the angel by the hearth' not allowed to cross the threshold. Even then women continue to be central to the farming sector. Hence our Soupçon inputs would look at their unique output.
Pratima Agnihotri
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