Agricultural History Review, Volume 68 Part 2 (2020), p. 323

A comparative history of women’s land rights is long overdue, and this book provides a thought-provoking comparison of the land reform movements in early modern England, and late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russia and Kenya seen through a gendered lens. The radical restructuring of land ownership rights in the name of ‘improvement’, ‘modernization’ or ‘development’ had particularly harsh consequences for women, and historians have paid little attention to the gendered nature of these movements. Kingston-Mann, an expert on the Russian peasantry, highlights the potential for comparative history to ‘generate better understanding of the issues’ as well as its inevitable tendency to ‘oversimplify and frustrate the specialist’ (p. 1). This is not a long book and each of the three substantial chapters hurries through a complicated history of each country that interweaves discussions of traditional land rights, the political roots of ideas of ownership, changes to property regimes, women’s agricultural work and legal rights, and protest movements against property reform. The book’s dual arguments are that the adaptability and productivity of peasant agriculture have been consistently underestimated by top-down reformers, and women’s contribution to agricultural production has been almost universally overlooked.

The chapter on Russia runs through a list of state-led policies imposed on the rural population. These stretch from the establishment of peasant communes after the abolition of serfdom, through the Stolypin reforms, War Communism, the NEP, Stalin’s forced collectivization and consequent famines, de-Stalinization, and Perestroika up to ‘shock therapy capitalism’ in the 1990s. Throughout all but the most disastrous phases, women retained control of garden plots on which they grew a significant proportion of their families’ food. In 1938, ‘45 percent of Soviet agriculture’s total farm output’ was produced in these gardens (p. 71), on which women carried out 80 per cent of the work (p. 72). In the economic instability of the 1990s garden plots accounted for 25 per cent of national agricultural output, and female garden cultivators outnumbered men 2:1 (p. 80). Yet women’s contribution to food provision was consistently overlooked by policy-makers and subsequently by historians.

In Kenya, as in most of sub-Saharan Africa, women dominated agricultural production in the pre-colonial era. Kingston-Mann concentrates on the Kikuyu of Kenya’s Central Highlands, tracing women’s agricultural labour and land rights through the brutal impositions and atrocities of the British twentieth-century colonial regime. While women’s agricultural labour was widely exploited, their rights to land were extinguished and their agricultural expertise never acknowledged. Instead women were blamed for environmental degradation and lectured on how to cultivate unsuitable north European crops. Forced relocation and ‘villagization’ were followed by the Swynnerton Plan that gave private land rights to African men but removed them from African women. Nonetheless, ‘Kikuyu women have retained their role as the primary food producers’ (p. 128), and rural women’s groups and agricultural initiatives have flourished since independence, despite hostility or indifference from the government.

The English case study examines the early modern enclosure movement. Kingston-Mann’s depiction of the seventeenth-century village as a place where ‘male run village councils (juries) acknowledged multiple, overlapping, long- and short-term land claims, universal land access for men and for women, and common lands open to all’ (p. 12) bears strong similarities to Russian peasant communities. English village councils ‘apportioned land to adult male household heads, established the size and location of women’s gardens, and regulated access to cultivated fields, pasture lands and common land’, but ‘all-male juries nevertheless guaranteed women exclusive rights to use kitchen gardens that ranged up to 10 acres in size’ (p. 13). It is also asserted that ‘Women were the household’s primary food producers’ (p. 13), that ‘few rural households regularly produced a surplus’, and that ‘peasants were in general unwilling to assume that they could survive independently of one another’ (p. 14). Unfortunately, few agrarian historians of England would agree with these statements. English villages did not redistribute land on a communal basis: tenants had specific rights that were bought and sold. Women did not have a separate right to garden plots: gardens were attached to houses and farms that were leased or owned. Women were not the primary food producers; the latest estimates suggest women carried out about one third of agricultural work. Rather than being communities of households of roughly equal wealth, English villagers ranged from wealthy gentry to impoverished landless labourers.

As such, this study does indeed show the benefits and pitfalls of comparative history, and of covering very broad sweeps of history in relatively few words. Inaccuracies creep in; it is not always easy to follow the narrative. But the book is brimming with ideas and suggestions for future research, and full of interesting observations and references. Its overall point, that women’s contribution to agricultural production and their rights to property in land have been woefully ignored in existing studies is undisputable. However, some of its other assertions are wide of the mark or fail to take into account existing studies. In particular, while the conclusion concentrates on the failures of top-down development policies, it fails to mention Barbara Roger’s The domestication of women: Discrimination in developing societies (1981), perhaps the most searing critique of developers’ unquestioned gendered assumptions.