by Laurie Winn Carlson

Women's involvement in cattle keeping is evident in Irish folklore and myth. The most famous Irish tale describes how warrior-queen Maeve sought only the best bull for mating her cows.⁶ The story involving Queen Maeve is called the Tain Bo Cuailnge, "The Cattle Raid of Cooley," and was probably first told about the time of Christ; the manuscript, written in the eighth century, dates from an earlier oral tradition.

Viking women were cattle keepers, too. They lived near the sea, but their lifestyle centered on keeping livestock, and cattle were their mainstay. They cultivated grains and vegetables, but the harsh northern climate made livestock more reliable. Norse stock raisers kept their cattle and horses in stables during the long winter and fed them from stores of fodder harvested during the summer. Vikings ate mostly beef, some mutton as well, and plenty of dairy products.

Between 800 and 1050 A.D., the Vikings expanded their domain, pushing out into the rest of Europe, going "a'viking" to return with plunder from abroad. They spread out in colonial settlements in North America and Greenland and traveled far into the heart of Europe and the Baltic. Their expansion was possible, because they kept livestock—and took many along with them. Viking cattle were small by today's breed standards, which made them easy keepers, particularly when they were crowded into the longboats along with the family.

The Norse settlements in North America around that time are fascinating, because they reveal so many interesting dichotomies. The Norse settlers were remarkably healthy; their remains show an absence of nutritional deficiencies and much better general health than groups on the Continent. They ate meat and dairy products almost exclusively. They based their lifestyle on livestock keeping, hunting, and fishing. The settlements were based on cattle; the people's lives were centered on their animals, which in the harsh climate had to be kept indoors most of the year.

They needed ample fodder in order to be able to continue milking through winter. Obtaining that all-important fodder structured the basic economy of the Viking settlements. The largest and richest farmsteads were located in grassy meadows that could be cut to provide stocks of hay for winter feeding.⁷ It probably took at least a decade for the number of cattle to grow so that newcomers did not have to keep bringing their stock with them. The Vikings, with their emphasis on cattle, were like other cattle cultures, in that women were much the equals of men, with much more standing and freedom than in crop-growing patriarchal societies.

American settlers are another example. Most Americans lived on small farms until the 20th century, and most women relied on a cow or two for economic stability. Making and selling butter had been a woman's route to financial freedom for centuries, beginning in ancient times when butter was sacred, and moving into the northern European countries where climate made dairying successful. In America, by the mid-19th century, making and selling butter had replaced the home spinning and weaving industry of colonial times. Women in rural areas continued the pattern they had learned from their mothers of producing butter for urban markets.

Butter, a tasty source of energy that traveled well, was in demand to supply sailing ships, the military (margarine was invented to provide a cheap substitute for Napoleon's army), and mining and logging camps. By 1860 Eastern farm families had already come to depend on butter for a cash income to supplement farming, and as the West was settled, making butter became the chief occupation of farm women and girls. In Spokane, Washington, cream sold for 32 cents per pound in 1907, and a woman could earn between $6.00 and $10.00 per month from one good cow. The butter money often surpassed any other cash crop.

Butter was ideal for women's entrepreneurial energies: It was a product that kept longer than fresh milk—before refrigeration—because it was salted, and it was easier to transport to market than milk, because it was compact and solid. Country stores took butter in trade, allowing women to barter for items they needed. Women sold garden produce, eggs, and poultry, too, but butter was the economic mainstay.⁸ Butter was a cultural commodity from northern Europe, Africa, and India, but Native American women adopted it, too. The Coeur d'Alene women at the Sacred Heart Mission shipped butter to Walla Walla—by boat across Lake Coeur d'Alene, then by wagon—to exchange for supplies, and the Osages in Oklahoma turned to it as a cash source, producing thousands of pounds of butter each year.⁹

Women in the United States no longer rely on butter for economic freedom. Nor could they, even if they wanted to: the market has been taken over by industrial giants and threatened by margarine. But throughout most of history, a milk cow represented economic freedom for a woman.

Women and cows share another, more recently discovered bond: hormones. Cows are nature's most protective mothers—they will not hesitate to attack anything that threatens their calf. Scientists have found that the cow's pituitary gland, located next to the brain, contains a powerful hormone that drives maternal behavior. The hormone has been extracted from cow brains at slaughter, then administered therapeutically to pregnant women as oxytocin. Given intravenously, it causes pregnant women to go into labor, saving the lives of both women and infants. By the 1970s oxytocin was commonly used to put women into labor who otherwise would have been forced to have cesarean surgery or not been able to give birth at all.

The thousands of women today who raise cattle, and find themselves anxiously waiting up nights during spring calving time, share a maternal bond with their animals. They nurse, and coax, and pull the calves from the mothers if needed to save the calf or the cow. Linda Hasselstrom, an environmental writer and Wyoming rancher, calls these cattlewomen "midnight heifer midwives."¹⁰ Nancy Curtis, editor and publisher of her own High Plains Press, writes and ranches in Wyoming. She tells about a call from a New York editor that caught her during calving season. She asked her mother to take the call, instructing her, "Don't say I'm out checking on my first-calf heifers. Say I'm meeting with my production staff." Her staff, she reported, turned out some nice calves that year.¹¹

6. Thomas Cahill, How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland’s Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe (New York: Doubleday, 1995), 77, 127.
7. William W. Fitzhugh and Elisabeth I. Ward, eds., Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga. (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000), 71.
8. Joan M. Jensen, With These Hands: Women Working on the Land (Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1981), 281.
9. Jensen, 112.
10. Linda Hasselstrom, Gaydell Collier, and Nancy Curtis, eds., Leaning into the Wind: Women Write from the Heart of the West (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1997), xvii.
11. Hasselstrom, et al, Leaning into the Wind, xv.

A doctoral candidate in the Department of History at Washington State University, Laurie Carlson is the author of Cattle: An Informal Social History (Ivan R. Dee, 2001), from which this article was excerpted; A Fever in Salem: A New Interpretation of the New England Witch Trials; On Sidesaddles to Heaven: The Women of the Rocky Mountain Mission; Seduced by the West: Jefferson’s America and the Lure of the Land Beyond the Mississippi; and the award-winning children’s book, Boss of the Plains: The Hat That Won the West.

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FSA (Farm Security Administration) client’s wife with cow, southeast Missouri, May 1938.

Historical photo by Russell Lee/Farm Security Administration-Office of War Information Photographic Collection (Library of Congress).