Female autonomy in the field

an updated profile of the south region based on 2017 agricultural census data

Abstract

This article aims to outline the profile of rural women in southern Brazil, from avaliable census characteristics of agricultural establishments. Data from the last Agricultural Census of 2017 were extracted with a gender cutout and adopting as a methodological criterion the outline of the Family Farming Law, in addition to the bibliographical research of related texts. Rural women suffer from specific discrimination, whether due to difficulty in accessing land, schooling, invisibility of their agricultural work, among others, which represent an obstacle to their autonomy. In this article, it was verified that family farming women in the southern region may have had positive impacts from government guidelines that aimed to provide greater access to land. It was also found that women dedicate a large part of the establishment's production to self-consumption and that most of them have schooling up to a maximum of elementary school. It is also possible that there was an evasion of women from agricultural occupations. The variables access to land, production for self-consumption and low education, if evaluated together, allow us to infer that rural women still seek to get out of the condition of gender subordination, even if they have had achievements that expose a horizon of autonomy in the rural environment.

Keywords: Women. Family farming. Feminist Economy.