The Mangle, the Child, and the Chicken

Home—a place, an idea, an institution that a decade before repulsed me now opens more each day, richer, more layered.

 
On a cool morning in May, I receive a call from the post office.

“You have a box here,” the postmaster says. “It’s peeping.”

I drive over and retrieve the cardboard box, little holes cut out on the sides. At home I open it and find 19 crouching fluffballs looking up at me, huddled together atop a layer of straw. A moment later, curiosity transforms them, and their necks elongate as they peer up trying to see over the edge of the box. They’ve been in darkness for about 24 hours, nearly their whole lives. These chicks were hatched the day before at a farm in Missouri, loaded into the box, and driven all the way to Massachusetts. They can survive up to three days after hatching without food and water. They’ve never known their mother, just the bright lights of the incubator and the technician who, upon their hatching, lifted them upside down one at a time to peer closely at their cloacae in order to sex them.

Whether by natural selection or years of domestication, these songbird-sized hens have evolved a kind of cuteness that makes me go soft and quiet. I scoop one up. Her peeps get loud, an alarm call, and the others rustle about in confusion. I feel a surge of love—or protection, or responsibility—at holding this tiny creature in the palm of my hand. Perhaps it is because I am four months pregnant, pregnant enough to not be able to hide it anymore, pregnant enough to accept that I am a swamp of emotions and will be for a long time. I already love these birds. My birds.

I place the alarmed chick into the large dog kennel that is ready and waiting, lined with paper towels, feeder filled with chick starter, water tinted brown with fortifying electrolytes. As each makes her way into the kennel, the sunlight begins to do its magic. It seeps through the birds’ almost paper-thin skulls. The light saturates their brains, making its way to the photoreceptive cells in their pineal glands, which produce hormones that jumpstart their circadian rhythms. Already, they are beginning to learn what it will take my own baby weeks to learn: to equate wakefulness with light, sleep with dark. After a few months of absorbing sunlight, their bodies will respond with new hormones that will trigger sexual maturation and, eventually, egg-making.

For the next few months this spring, this is my ritual. My husband Ben is deaf in one ear and sleeps like a stone, so mornings have always been mine. I slip out of bed alone, down to where the babies’ crate is perched upon two chairs beneath a window, where first hints of light rouse them. More often than not, I spend these mornings pondering the significant change my life is about to take on. I am, I admit, ambivalent about my impending motherhood. The child is wanted, planned for, something I distinctly desired a few days after turning 35, as though the theme I’d lived by for the first few decades of my life—maintain freedom at whatever cost!—had been beaten into submission by prevailing narratives about women, age, and missed opportunities. I honestly crave the messy, life-changing work that I know parenting will be, the chance to foster another human being into this world. Yet I am still fearful that no matter my awareness or my husband’s commitment to gender equality, I am about to be pinned down in a way that I can’t quite imagine. I am trapped between what Adrienne Rich, in Of Woman Born, calls the “two meanings of motherhood, one superimposed on the other, the potential relationship of any woman to her powers of reproduction and to children; and the institution, which aims at ensuring that that potential—and all women—shall remain under male control.” I may desperately want this baby growing inside of me, yet before me stands the truth that motherhood will “alienate” me from my body by “incarcerating” me in it.

Before I met Ben, before I became a professor, I lived another sort of life. I lived alone in a one-room cabin in the woods. I used to work 13-hour landscaping days in 90-degree weather, loving the feeling of my own physical strength. I once backpacked 18 miles in a day, alone, through the Wind River Mountains, through burning sun and a high-elevation sleet storm through a field of brilliant wildflowers. Once, I took a five-day trip up the eastern slope of the Andes Mountains in Peru atop a stack of lumber on a truck. I’d preferred a truck driven by strangers, passing through coca country, sleeping atop the rough-hewn boards, to taking a bus. It was one way to see the world. Or maybe just one way I could prove that I was tough. Often, those two things went hand in hand. And it’s not that I crave to be doing any of those particular things, but I worry over the loss of being able to do them—the things I used to do to prove a certain kind of independence.

These thoughts rise up like frothy whitecaps in my morning peace, and then recede to a gentle lapping. The more pregnant I become, the more the fears recede, but I know they’re there, like the shadows of clouds drifting overhead and dimpling the landscape with fleeting dark patches. By the time my semester of teaching ends in May, I have seen my daughter turning somersaults inside of me, a grainy blob upon the ultrasound screen. I’ve glimpsed her knees curled up to her chest, her feet extending behind her head, watched her fist stretch out and blossom into a little hand. The technician has pointed out her organs, her blood vessels, how everything appears to be in its place. By the time Ben has built our chicken coop on the edge of the woods, I have started to detect her there, moving about, her gentle kicks and bumps.

As the summer sun grows stronger, we begin to dig holes for the nine posts of the pen. I work at our terribly rocky soil, rotating with a post-hole digger, shovel, and rock bar, my belly bumped out. I think I’m going to add putting up a fence while five months pregnant to my list of go-to baddasseries. But I have nothing on this rock-pit of a yard in my Massachusetts neighborhood. After digging one hole, I relinquish the rock bar to the slender, unburdened body of my partner and let him do the rest. I feel the tinge of disappointment in myself lurking like a dark shape in the corner of my eye. Who have I become? But I blink it away.

Historically speaking, tending to poultry was women’s work. This is true in the Western world up until the industrial revolution, as well as in many non-Western cultures. The flock, kept mostly for the family, was a bridge between domicile and farm. Farmwomen would often conduct a side business of their own selling eggs, which gave them an economic independence that history has overlooked. Poultry-tending was a chore that could be done while seeing to a thousand other chores, all with children tagging along. When the time came, women slaughtered, plucked, gutted, and cooked. The birds could mostly take care of themselves, scratching out a living in the farmyard and surrounding forest. Turkeys perched in trees; chickens always returned to the coop. Compared to the tasks of raising and tending to children, birds must have been uncomplicated charges.

Chickens, like farmwomen themselves, were “liminal,” not entirely integrated into the farm, not solely of the home, to use the word of scholar Susan Merrill Squier. “[B]oth women and chickens,” she writes, “have come to be viewed by the dominant culture as marginal parts of the farm economy.” Marginal, at best, I think. Even now, the word farmer conjures the image of a man, face weathered by wind and sun, happily tucked up in the cab of a newfangled John Deere, rolling through an endless sea of soy somewhere in the Heartland. Chickens are always minor characters, never the star. And the woman has always been adjacent: the farmer’s wife, yoked to a hot stove in a cramped kitchen like a hillbilly caricature: Barefoot and pregnant. Burdened and miserable. Powerless. We think that women were assumed to live in a completely separate sphere, cut off from the economic happenings of the farm and of outside society, but such separate spheres didn’t really exist until after widespread industrial agriculture, when women’s roles in animal husbandry and gardening and their economic control of the farm business were displaced.

Squier demonstrates this evolution by comparing two illustrated versions of the popular story, The Little Red Hen: in a 1928 version, our industrious hen is outdoors, in the dirt of the farm searching for insects. She is “resourceful and self-directed, a hunter and meat-eater,” the bread her “private pleasure” she enjoys by herself. Our 1950s Little Red Hen, however, although just as hard-working, is never glimpsed outside her kitchen. She is “cheerful and above all self-sacrificing”: she toils not for her own pleasure, but in order to provide for her chicks. I always loved this story as a child, the way it revealed the magic of breadmaking from seed to supper. The illustrations of foamy bread dough evoked enchanting aromas, although I’d never witnessed the baking of bread from scratch: our pantry was stocked with the soft, pliable loaves of pre-sliced sandwich bread in plastic bags, a different species altogether from the round, enigmatic loaves the Red Hen pulled from her oven. In my memory of the story, the Red Hen enjoys the bread herself, as she should. That was the whole point—a nose-thumbing at the slackers. Did the Little Red Hen of my childhood even have hungry chicks waiting beneath her wing? I can’t recall. But I have to agree with Squier that the more unfortunate figure is found in the mid-20th century housewife, shuttered inside her polished suburban home, whose personal pleasures have been replaced with the needs of her children. A woman helping to run a family farm on the other hand—our earthy self-directed hen—while certainly subject to patriarchal rule, could at least move between realms and procure her own money, which allowed her some economic autonomy.

In Of Woman Born, Rich writes, “From earliest settled life until the growth of factories as centers of production, the home was not a refuge, a place of leisure and retreat from the cruelty of the ‘outside world’; it was part of the world, a center of work, a subsistence unit.” All family members carried out numerous tasks and “[a] woman was rarely if ever alone with nothing but the needs of a child or children to see to.” The ideal of the “mother and children immured together in the home” and “the separation of… the ‘domestic’ from the ‘public’ or ‘political’—all this is a late-arrived development in human history.” During the 19th century, men and women went to work in mills and factories. Women earning money, even though they were paid less, was seen as “threatening” to male workers. “[H]umanitarian concern for child welfare and the fear for patriarchal values” drove women back into the home, but by then the meaning of the home had changed; it was a “sacred precinct” to be defended, threatened by state-sponsored childcare or any opportunity that removed women from the “sanctity of the domestic hearth.”

This was the stereotype of domesticity, of motherhood, I recoiled against in early adulthood. Sure, women’s lib had happened and all. I wouldn’t have to dose my baby with laudanum just to get through the work day, like women in factories sometimes did. But the same structures were still in place and would be the ones greeting me and my baby once we split from one person into two: no paid family leave, no government sponsored childcare—at least for the first five years of her life—no social system that reassured me, as a new mother, that society had my back. It would be me and her, immured together in the home—for a while, anyway—and I didn’t know what my fate would be. It seemed unlikely that I’d be able to go on with my personal pleasures and ambitions as before. But would I be completely displaced? I had no clear vision of what my liminal existence might look like.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the United States was starting to see a rural exodus. In response, President Theodore Roosevelt conducted a Commission on Country Life in order to examine why people were leaving and what could be done to help them. In particular, Roosevelt was intent on preserving the “family farm,” and he recognized farmwives as central to maintaining these operations—“home keepers,” as he called them, whereas the men were the “home makers.” His all-male commission, some of whom had never had any direct contact with farm life, traveled around the country to better understand “the burdens and the narrow life of farmwomen.”

While the intention of the commission was to genuinely understand how to make life on the farm fulfilling, the men appointed treated the women as victims, not understanding that many farmwomen had varied roles and responsibilities. “The commission’s views were actually rather more narrow than the views of those who… knew that farm women were significant producers of agricultural and horticultural commodities,” writes Edith M. Ziegler in her close look at the commission’s gender assumptions. The commission’s focus was on relieving women of their burdens and responsibilities, when what many wanted was more control. “Why Are There No Women on the President’s Commission?” inquired Charlotte Perkins Gilman in a January 1909 Good Housekeeping article. Women were being treated like “livestock,” she argued, “as mere feminine connections of men,” rather than actual agriculturalists themselves. In February 1909, Ladies’ Home Journal released the results of a survey that had received replies from 956 women that revealed that “the life of rural women” was “hard and uncompromising, but made worse by male indifference.” In short, farm work wasn’t the problem—patriarchy was.

In an article about farmwomen in the Lower Wharfedale region of England, which suffered similar gendering in the face of labor changes, a photo captures the epitome of this gender divide: in the forefront, farmer William Waterhouse shows off a shorthorn heifer. He’s holding onto her halter, and the photo’s caption reads: “The background shows a woman’s traditional responsibilities, the mangle, the child, and the chicken.” Indeed, I can make out the sun-illuminated figure of a child, back turned to the camera, maybe three years old. Near the child is a hen. The child and chicken burn bright white against a murky setting. I can see the bricks of the farmhouse, but it’s hard to make out the woman, as though the liminality of her existence was caught on film, but I know from the description that she’s doing the wash or that we’re looking at the place where the wash is normally done, where she hauls the wet linens from a tub and feeds them into two rollers by cranking a wheel, mangling the wash before hanging it to dry. The word mangle feels an apt metaphor for the choking, strangled feeling often residing in the back of my mind when I previously considered the thought of becoming a wife, becoming a mother.  

Another photo in the same article, however, captures a different image of Mrs. Waterhouse: she stands in a field, bucket in hand, tossing feed to her hens. She wears a simple dark dress that falls to her ankles, caught by the slightest breeze. Farm fields stretch all around her. There is no husband here. In this picture, I see a woman not cordoned off to do the wash and mind the children, but a farmer. This land is her land.

Our birds emerge from their gawky adolescence and grow glorious, vibrant feathers. The Wyandottes are a striking black and white; the Welsummers are rust-colored, with yellow-and-black neck ruffs; the Buff Orpingtons shimmer gold. Their names alone hold storied histories of how they came to be: references to places where they become popular breeds, from the harsh winters of New York state in the Wyandotte’s case—a bird named for, though not by, the Wyandot people of North America. The Welsummers and Orpingtons harken to the European villages—Dutch and English, respectively—where the breeds flourished, each variety’s eggs and flesh promising a kind of regional terroir as though they were French wines. Their appearances are exquisite. It’s hard to believe that each began as a handful of trembling down. In a matter of four months, they’ve grown ten times their size, and they are utterly mesmerizing to watch as they move through the unmown grass of our yard chasing down cabbage moths and crane flies.

Watching the chickens move through our land, I’m literally brought to my hands and knees. I make a game of running my hand across the top of a patch of curly dock and releasing one or two lazily fluttering brown moths that one bird will eventually see and run over to snap up. I scratch at the dead leaves alongside the birds, scrape through the dark rich worm castings, and find writhing grubs, bluish and transparent, looking fetal, the scant outlines of their nascent wings detectable through their soft bodies.

As I sit and watch the hens’ iridescent feathers catch the sun, I can see the aesthetic values of the farmwomen who shaped them into what they are, whose pleasure it was to watch over them day in, day out. They show me that sustenance, where possible, made room for beauty. I feel more connected to this small plot of land I call home; I am where I ought to be—not “in my place,” but on the land where I’ve chosen to live. I am in my final trimester, weathering back spasms, and every evening my baby roils inside me and I look down at the waves she makes of my skin.

As poultry tenders, women had intimate knowledge of natural history and could “integrat[e] their farms into the surrounding ecology,” explains historian Neil Prendergast. He recounts the methods that Martha Ballard, a farmwoman living in Maine at the turn of the 19th century, described in her diary. An easy way to grow their turkey flocks, for example, was to pilfer eggs from wild turkeys to pad out the nests of domestic birds; the mixed genes of the two breeds allowed for a heartier bird, one that could mostly roam the surrounding forest and fend for itself.  Farmwomen typically crossbred wild turkeys with a breed called Bronze. Such practice was common throughout the 19th century and into the early 20th century, until wild turkey populations were dramatically diminished, and domestic flocks were devastated by blackhead. By this point, industrial agriculture was already on the rise and turkey breeding soon became the domain of men—“agricultural scientists”—not the trade of their mothers and grandmothers. In fact, they were “trained to believe traditional ways hindered the promised abundance of large-scale production,” writes Prendergast. The goal became to render an “industrial ideal”—developed by selectively breeding for the largest, whitest birds forming a new breed, the Large White, which became the prominent breed of large-scale production in the 1950s and 60s. Each bird fit a particular look, a standard weight, and a capacity to gain maximum flesh in minimal time.

Similarly, in response to the die-off of wild populations, “[h]unters, conservationists, and wildlife biologists—a largely male group with no memory of farmwomen’s work in crossing turkey lines—would resuscitate the wild turkey,” writes Prendergast. They used domestic breeds to breed back the wild bird, seeking out an aesthetic ideal. The agriculturalists and the conservationists were in search of purity and uniformity and erased the messier history that blended the natural world with the farm. They imposed strict dividing lines atop the interdependent, chaotic reality, simplifying the symbiotic systems that farmwomen had slowly curated. However, the turkey’s full history, Prendergast claims, is “a past that weaves together the categories of wild and domestic.”

Reading about Martha Ballard and farmwomen like her, understanding their liminal existences between farm and forest, between the home and the fields and the natural world beyond, I begin to find a place for myself. Not so much literally—I can hardly begin to call myself a farmwoman. But their forgotten history helps me define my own role. I’d spent my adulthood—and really, years before it—with the keen sense that I would reject the domestic. That the only way to be happy would be to reject parenthood and any kind of life that would bog me down, especially inside “the home.” Pride was always the fact that I could fit my life into the back of my Honda Civic and relocate at the drop of a hat, which I did often. I didn’t need all the extra baggage that comes with owning things. I’d whittled myself down to the lightest possible load so that I could flit in and out of existences. I thought this was so I wouldn’t need anybody. But, of course, having few things makes a person even more dependent on others—a fact I was blind to for years. I felt powerful in my independence, but I didn’t know how to stay, how to cultivate, how to create something lasting.

It wasn’t so much domesticity that I recoiled against; it was the fear of losing something else. Of course, in choosing pregnancy, I’d already given up some ways of being in the world. But I hadn’t completely let go of that past self, still held onto her by a tentative string as though I could return to being that person at any point. The chickens help me turn inward, to micro-explore this little plot of land; they help me to give myself permission to stop obsessing over that final string. On one ridiculously hot August day, I feel myself release it. In another lifetime, I would have called it submitting. But nine months pregnant, watching my flock peel back the layers to reveal all the life around me, I open up and let go of that thin gossamer thread, watch it float up over my head and disappear.

My daughter arrives in late September, a little after two in the morning, just before the balmy darkness gives way to a thick, heavy downpour. She is born on my bed, in my own home, in the light of a single lamp, not far from where the curtains billow into the room on the breeze that moves them, to the hypnotic singing and strumming of Tinariwen, to a general sense of calmness punctuated by my moans and the midwives’ gentle reminders, the only words spoken that evening and the only thing I need to hear: “Everything is going just as it is supposed to. You’re doing everything right.”

Jennifer and Kalei had shown up just as it was getting dark. They occasionally listen to the baby’s heart, ask me about my contractions, then go downstairs to where they’ve rolled out their sleeping bags on the living room floor. They think it’s going to be a long night. They figure they’ll get sleep now, that maybe by the time daylight is casting a grayness through the window things will get serious. There is no checking. No measuring of cervix dilation—that tell-tale marker that women always refer to in their birth stories. I’d also heard about excessive blood loss and babies blue in the face, the ever-fearsome “critically low” on the Apgar score. But none of that seems possible now in the rise and fall of my lower muscles doing their own thing. My body can’t seem to bend at all: what I want is to lay on my bed with my legs stick-straight as the contractions overcome my body—not a position I’d imagined at all during my months of preparation.

But the psychological training that my body can do this helps. It’s painful, as expected. Yet, judging by the midwives’ calm demeanor and the fact they’re not even in the room a lot of the time, I figure birth is a long way off still, and I let the contractions run through me as much as I can. It hurts, but I know I could do this until the next day is shining bright through the window if need be. I don’t know how I know that, but I do. I have a distinct measure of what I can tolerate and for how long.

It’s 1:30 in the morning when the feeling comes on strong. “I feel like I want to push,” I say to Ben. The only thing I’ve said in hours. Kalei listens for the heartbeat. Jennifer crouches down at the foot of the bed. “Are you going to measure to see if I should push?” I ask.

Jennifer calmly asks, “Do you want me to?”

Do I? I’m confused that I even have this choice. “I guess I do. I don’t want to push if I’m not close.” I hate that this experience has to be tainted by this one, uncertain exchange. One wavering moment.

“Okay,” she says. She looks.

“Am I dilated?” I ask.

When she’s facing me again she asks, “Do you want to feel the baby’s head?”

She guides my hand down, and I can feel it. The hair, the firmness of the head, my daughter at the threshold between her world and mine.

Moments later, I’m on my hands and knees—I don’t know how as it hadn’t felt humanly possible before—moving along with my contractions, trying to push without pushing too much, more to guide than anything. But, of course, it isn’t that easy. So when I feel like the energy has built up to a tense point, I push with all my might. The baby slides down, so close to out, but as I release my tension I feel her slide up again. How can she handle this? I wait for the right moment to arrive again, letting it build, trying not to rush it. When I push with all my might, I feel the head pop. I’m ready to stop, but Jennifer coaxes me, “A little more,” and I push again. The shoulders are out. Then she, the baby, does the rest. She slides out, Jennifer guiding her down onto the bed. Trembling, I stand on my knees and look down at her. She’s completely coated in white, curled into an oval, eyes wide. She’s quiet except for a light moaning. This odd creature has come and landed below me. I almost feel like I don’t know how to pick her up. Jennifer doesn’t rush me, lets me figure it out. Finally, my hands make their way under her slippery body and I scoop her up close to me. She cries a little, but mostly moans, her eyes roving around to soak in this new experience in sight.

“Hi, little creature,” I say. She snuffles, crackles, her mouth making a round “o” shape that widens and narrows. “Welcome to our world.” I push her to my skin and gaze at her, her wrinkles, the tuft of deep black hair, her steel-colored eyes. We’re still attached by the cord, but she’s her own person now, however disgruntled and taken aback she is by this crude entrance. She snorts and gasps and creaks. I huddle her in closer. Outside, the rain starts, a hard and urgent release.

We name the baby Francine. And we name our goldenest chicken Asshole. The biggest one, the one whose comb has already turned blood-red and wobbly. She’s fast and gobbles food before the others can get to her. She’ll peck another bird if she gets too close. When I let them out through the gate, she’s first, forging ahead at a rate that seems unbelievable. It makes her seem like a bit of a jerk.

But six days after Francine is born, Asshole lays the first egg of our flock. Now it all makes sense. She had matured first. Of course she’s not an asshole; she’s just doing her job. We’ve been unfair. We just haven’t been around hens enough to really understand them, and soon, A-hole (we shorten it, but the name has, unfortunately, stuck) is teaching us what it means to survive as a backyard hen. I feel an affinity with her, a productive power; she rendered this bizarre egg, “nature’s perfect food,” from sunlight and hormones and her avidness. We take photos, then make a celebratory meal out of it. Our first egg, we sigh, noting our collective work: the pen, the coop, the daily tending to the fluffballs, this bird who put all that sunlight to work the quickest, her photoreceptive cells doing their part to churn out hormones, kicking her body into fertility motion. I eat the egg, and it goes into my body, into my milk, which then feeds my growing baby. It’s silly, it’s just one egg, one extraordinarily expensive and time-consuming egg. But this plot of land, I think, is feeding my baby. The earth and grass, those grubs and moths, the bitter dock—it becomes us.

We bury the placenta just outside the chicken pen and plant a flowering dogwood. It’s right there at the edge of the woods, on that line between field and forest, where our tamed yard gives way to unchecked growth. Over time, the branches will list out away from the shade, towards the sun, but it will live happily there on the edge between two realms, holding onto its snow-white sepals long after the flowers have fallen, a reminder of how I shared my body with another human.

I move cautiously, navigating this new looseness in my body. Now my baby goes around strapped to my chest, her head just below my chin so that I can turn and press my cheek to her hair. There’s part of me that cannot believe what my body has just done. And there is part of me that knew all along exactly what it would be like. My midwives’ silence had been unnerving at first, but later I see that they’d let me give birth. And that, I realize, is something not all women can say about their birthing experiences.

Martha Ballard’s success at raising turkeys, writes Prendergast in his article on the wildness of domestic turkeys, “was to let turkeys manage themselves.” Ballard, as her 27 years of diary entries attest, was a busy midwife in her community: she attended 814 human births throughout her career.

Those entries provide a rare, first-hand glimpse into the life of a rural farmwoman and of early 19th century midwifery. In historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s The Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812, Ulrich interprets the diary to paint a picture of both the dailiness of a farmwoman’s life and a historical moment in time, post-Revolutionary War, the nation on the brink of massive change. On any given day, Ballard might have harvested flax, done the wash, prepared medicines from plants in her garden, pilfered wild turkey eggs, and cooked for her family and any boarders; she attended to the sick, the dead, and the birthing in her community. Somehow, she still found time at the end of each day to sit and write. I picture her curled over a desk, writing by candlelight in her Maine farmhouse, scratching out the day’s tasks in her looping cursive.

Ballard demonstrates a certain level of power that has been excluded from most historical accounts. Her life is an example of how a domestic life and autonomy were not mutually exclusive for women. Her diary informs us that she was the head of her family, “a full partner in the management of a household,” Ulrich writes. Her homestead served as her base from which her other work spiraled out. The plants she tended in her garden became medicine to soothe the ill. From home she enriched her knowledge and skills and was able to serve her community. Whereas men controlled political life, women ran community life, and they began their careers as housework assistants in the homes of other women, relatives usually. From there, they might then serve as nurses, administering medicine and turning ailing bodies, and helping to sew children’s shrouds. Eventually, with the combination of housework, nursing, and child rearing, a woman might work her way up to the role of midwife, where she could actually earn decent money for her skills. “If women had a collective consciousness,” writes Ulrich, “it was surely developed in such work.” In this reversal of narratives, women’s independence began in the home as much as our servitude did.

Attending births, like poultry tending—like so much—was gradually wrested away from women. Ballard was already living through this: on several occasions the male doctors of her town are called to attend births instead of her, but it was still occasional. The gradual shift of male doctor-controlled birth, like industrial agriculture, was borne of the reinforcement of a patriarchal system that trusted men’s knowledge over women’s, institutions over the domicile. Domestic skills and methods came to be seen as “superstitious.” This is not to say the advent of medicine, the potential for women to reduce pain during birth, the readiness at which most doctors can perform a C-section if necessary, are not significant advances. They are, and have helped release women from bodily incarceration, from the potential life-altering—or ending—trauma childbirth can render. Scientific advancement is not the culprit—the patriarchal control of women’s bodies and women’s work is.

Over time, the processes of birth and animal husbandry had become methodological, favoring structure, order, speed, and production. By the mid-20th century, everything was meant to adhere to a certain way or look, a one-size-fits-all experience: the nuclear family, mass production, chemical fertilizers. It was an era haunted by the eugenics movement. Variations on the ideal were aberrant, needed correcting. The mottled beauty of a backyard flock was traded for the homogeneity of Leghorns and their abundant, perfectly-white eggs. Wildish turkeys were supplanted by the mass confinement of Large Whites. The idea of letting a flock “manage themselves” became absurd. And there became a “normal” for birth: woman on her back, feet in stirrups, giving the doctor a good view and ample space to insert forceps or suck the baby out or slice the perineum. Births were no longer attended, they were performed. Home became private, sacrosanct, and women were shuttered up inside with the children. The idea of letting women “manage themselves” became equally ludicrous.

My first winter as a mother passes in a sleep-deprived blur. My unpaid parental leave ends, and, though I’m not ready, I have no choice but to return to teaching. Spring arrives, and the hens start laying again after a winter hiatus. I come home in the early evenings to my child, my chickens. Home—a place, an idea, an institution that a decade before repulsed me now opens more each day, richer, more layered. It’s not a trap, but a place where I can wield power. I feel I have more power here than in the institution where I work, a place that professional ambition drove me to. I carry my child into the pen and we greet the chickens, turn over logs, watch them devour insects hidden within the decomposing pulp. Research has confirmed what I already know: that my birds are intelligent, have multiple vocalizations for communicating, that they experience anxiety and can empathize with their fellow birds. They anticipate and they dread. They desire. They feel satisfaction. They’ve taught me how they speak: the trill they use when a neighbor cat comes near; the standing stock-still when a raptor flies over; the corner-huddling when an unknown dog approaches versus the eager running and greeting at the gate when my dog lazily trots past them to go sniff out the woods. There’s the bird who prefers beetles and the one who prefers wood larvae and the one who prefers a fresh dandelion leaf. There are the ones who are calm, who hunker down for a petting when I draw close, and the ones who, with maturity, have grown wary of me. There’s the one who likes to stand in the corner looking lost and goofy. And there’s A-hole, charging ahead, the first to the food, the first to the gate, the first out of the coop in the morning. She can snap a mosquito out of the air, can scratch up the soil with vigor, can leap to rip maple leaves off the low saplings. She knows a thing or two, and does not question her place at the top of the pecking order.