What I'm Reading Now: An Excerpt (by Stacey Harwood)

When I was about eleven, my job was to grade the eggs with my step-mother when I came home from school.  We worked in the basement, grading each egg separately on a small hand scale, brushing the dirty ones by hand with a sandpaper brush.  Hilda sat on a low box in front of an upturned crate which held the scale.  We both pushed a case of graded eggs away; periodically my father would appear and stack the crates one on top of another, labeling them with his co-op number so that they could be identified and he would get paid.  From sitting thus for years, bent over the hand egg scale, my stepmother's shoulders got so round that she appeared to have a hump.  One of the last modern machines to come onto our farm was an automatic egg-grader.  It was then possible to stand and put dozens of eggs on the scale at the same time. But it was too late for Hilda's back to straighten out. 

. . .

All the farm women and girls I knew packed eggs and did other chores on the farm.  Some of the women worked right alongside their husbands, cleaning out chicken coops, preparing the outdoor ranges for the chickens, doing the same heavy manual work as the men.  These were the women who peopled my world.  I looked at them, at their work-worn hands and faces, their rough clothing, indistinguishable from the men's and I resolved never to live on a farm or have anything to do with a farm when I grew up.

-- from The Land Was Theirs:  Jewish Farmers in the Garden State by Gertrude Wishnick Dubrovsky (University of Alabama Press, 1992)

Comments

[Jane Ross]

Awesome post.

[Helen Platero]

This resonated with me. For the record, may I register my votes in favor of James Cummins,Terence Winch, Jill Alexander Essbaum (who won an Any-A Award this year), Jennifer L. Knox and Nin Andrews.