Women Farmers

clip from Women's Power in Global Perspective

It was female gatherers who discovered that they could plant seeds for future harvests. This is why many oral histories credit women with inventing agriculture. So said the Omaha, the Shuar of Peru, and the Lunda of Angola. In Egypt it was Isis, while in Sumeria, the first farmer was “Ashnan the wise.”

The Pawnee said Mother Corn gave seed to women, and taught them farming. Over most of North America, women raised corn, squash, and beans. For millennia women have worked in the rice fields, in Thailand, Vietnam, China, Indonesia, the Philippines, and even today, they still produce much of the world’s food.

Clip from my 2008 dvd Women’s Power in Global Perspective. (Video on the dvd is much sharper, due to codec problems in outputting these clips.)
85 minutes, only $10 plus shipping. You can get the video here.

Contents:
Prelude: They skipped her when they wrote history
Monumental women: Ancestral Mothers
Founders, Chieftains, and Queens
Clan Mothers: Structural Social Power
Builders, Potters, Weavers:
Life-sustaining Arts and Technologies
Providers: Foragers, Farmers, Fishers and Traders
Women Elders
Seers, Shamans, Priestesses
Healers, Medicine Women, Physicians
Athletes, Warriors, Rebels
Educators and Scientists
Revolutionaries and Liberators
Activists for Justice and Peace

Plus two extras:
Restoring Women to Cultural Memory
and More Early Female M.D.s (I’ll post this one separately.)