Sem Terra women: work and agroecology

An ecological transition can increase women’s income without reducing their working day. Cristiane Coradin and Sônia Fátima Schwendler investigate this tension in Histórias de vida de mulheres Sem Terra: divisão sexual do trabalho na agroecologia, published in 2023. Their Portuguese study follows women in agrarian-reform territories in Paraná, Brazil. Sem Terra names a political identity associated with the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement, MST; it should not be reduced to a claim that every participant currently lacks access to land.

The research uses topical oral history: 33 in-depth interviews conducted from March to September 2018. Seventeen concern women across agrarian-reform territories and organizing networks; sixteen develop the case of the Emiliano Zapata camp in Ponta Grossa. The researchers’ prior engagement and participants’ referrals help build access and varied accounts. These are situated histories interpreted through a research relationship, rather than a representative survey of Brazilian farmers or a controlled test of agroecology.

When a garden becomes an income

Vegetable gardens, orchards and small-animal husbandry already helped feed households, although their contribution was often undervalued. Agroecological production, local markets, consumer groups and the National School Feeding Programme, PNAE, open routes to monetary income. Changing where food goes changes the recognition of work long classified as women’s domestic contribution. Agroecology appears here as relations among production, markets and organization, rather than simply a different product on a supermarket shelf.

But commercial recognition does not automatically redistribute cooking, cleaning or childcare. The same woman can cultivate, deliver produce and sustain the household. Calling her contribution to fieldwork “help,” while treating a man’s occasional domestic work as “help” too, conceals an asymmetry: she remains accountable for one sphere even while working in both. The burden cannot be explained by counting visible market participation alone.

The article also resists an automatic story of male takeover. It compares other research in which profitable activities pass into men’s control with cases where men join expanding agroecological production without women necessarily losing productive space or financial management. Women’s prior organizing and capacity to negotiate matter. This does not prove profitability protects autonomy; it shows why neither income growth nor men’s entry tells us, on its own, who now makes decisions.

Machinery and the scale of earnings further shape the hierarchy of tasks. The authors identify masculine status attached to mechanized, commercially valued production, while continuous manual and domestic work remains less recognized. Celebrating women’s ecological knowledge can therefore coexist with exhausting the women who maintain it. Their expertise needs authority and shared responsibility if recognition is to alter the terms of work.

Economic gains and the time to defend them

Gender-focused political education helps participants name inequalities and challenge them. The authors associate more equal arrangements with its combination with schooling, generational differences or experience connecting rural and urban settings. They do not offer an experiment isolating any one factor. Younger age is not an automatic remedy, and urban contact is not evidence that city life is inherently egalitarian. Agency here means a capacity to contest relations, built through particular opportunities and collective learning.

The sharpest contradiction concerns participation itself. Production and sales can expand while the time available for meetings and organizing contracts. Accounts of exhaustion and withdrawal suggest a difficult feedback: new economic activity may consume the time needed to maintain the collective power that helped make autonomy possible. The researchers trace this movement toward production and commercialization without dismissing income as unimportant or blaming women for prioritizing immediate demands.

These oral histories support an account of mechanisms and negotiations, not a national percentage of overworked women, a measured average increase in hours or a causal estimate of political withdrawal. Nor do they assess comparative yields or emissions. Their feminist value is to keep income, decision-making, bodily rest and political voice distinct when judging whether an ecological change is emancipatory.

The paper explicitly draws on Hirata and Kergoat’s analysis of the sexual division of labor: separation and hierarchy help explain why productive and domestic boundaries can shift without equal responsibility. Alongside Soil Not Oil, these Brazilian histories give ecological politics a concrete labor question. Who has the time and authority to sustain a different food system, and to contest its internal inequalities?

The earlier organizer-authored article It is work, not help offers another knowledge-making route: women collectively interpreting experiences to ask how household consumption, everyday income and organizing acquire economic recognition. Its 56 individual and collective experiences from a 2008–2012 project are not additional cases in this study’s 33 interviews. Comparing the works helps distinguish making labor visible from redistributing time and responsibility.