Agriculture Reference
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masculine or feminine. Stephanie quite consciously felt that a love of flowers had
been passed down a female family line, beginning with her grandmother, 'Grandma
always 'ad flowers in t' house and me mum 'as tended to go that way a bit, and
then I've always liked things like that, so it's kind of gone down in generations
with us.' Living with husband John, Stephanie lives out her preferences by being in
charge of the flowers in her own garden. David's garden consisted of both flowers
and vegetables; he told me that he had learned all his gardening skills from his
parents. David's father had had an allotment for growing vegetables and like other
working-class men in this study, his father had grown chrysanthemums. Like his
father, David grew both vegetables and chrysanthemums. But while he had benefited
from the knowledge of both parents, he only talked about the particular appreciation
he had for his father's knowledge, despite the fact that unlike Stephanie, David was
responsible for both the feminine and the masculine tasks in his garden:
Lisa T : She was more flowers than vegetables?
David : Yeah. I'm glad he was vegetables as well, because a lot of people would have all
flowers and trees and stuff wouldn't they? But I'm glad he was more vegetables…
These discursive strategies reveal that David felt more comfortable identifying with
his father's gardening role, even though he clearly also spent much of his gardening
life performing tasks that his mother had taught him.
It is certainly the case therefore that some gardeners did live out the historical
legacy of gendered gardening practices through the lineage provided by their parents'
activities. Indeed these instances seem to shore up the efficacy of Bourdieu's view
that performatives are tied to the institutional bodies which sanction them. Yet
while gender studies has long acknowledged the role of the family in perpetuating
gendered identities, more recent work has attempted to provide a more complex
way of theorising how people become particular kinds of men and women.
Heward's (1996) work on masculinity for example, argues that Parsonian sex-role
theory, where daughters identify with mothers and sons with fathers as an essential
component in the division of labour within the nuclear family, is simplistic and tends
to remove the construction of masculinity from its social and historical context.
Using personal biographies of a small sample of men who studied at the same minor
public school, Heward shows that a host of factors, encounters with feminism within
higher education, enhanced employment opportunities for mothers and girlfriends
and men's recognition that 'macho' masculinity is often problematic, mitigates
against straightforward same-sex parental identification. These new social trends
have meant that, 'patriarchal control is being weakened by decades of bargaining
and negotiation' (Heward 1996, 46). Men, she argues are taking a more fluid and
experimental approach to the construction of their masculinity in terms of their
families, intimate relationships, their leisure interests and within the world of work.
Turning to my sample, while it was the case that my respondents' parents took on
quite rigid gendered identities, the generation I interviewed alongside their children,
presented a more complex set of practices. The changing face of masculinity and
femininity perhaps explains why it was not always the case that men and women
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