Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK 350 Main Street, Malden, MA02148, USA Sociologia Ruralis, Vol 44, Number 2, April 2004 ©European Society for Rural Sociology ISSN 0038−0199 A Time for Change? Patriarchy, the Former Coalields and Family Farming Katy Bennett T his paper addresses why many women, especially those who have entered into waged work, are neither revelling in their new roles nor experiencing the erosion of patriarchal structures that affect gender relations. It uses two case studies, focusing on women in households within former coalield and farming communities. These are two different UK rural contexts but both have been affected by economic restructuring with the decline in the signiicance of agricultural income to farming households and rural economies, the near eradication of the mining industry, and the rise in the number of women in the workforce. In households where men were once the main wage earner, many women now make signiicant contributions to household income but whilst their roles have changed over the last two decades, patriarchal structures persist, seemingly unchallenged. Whilst attention has shifted away from confronting the resilience of patriarchal structures, plenty of academic work (often indirectly) demonstrates their endurance. They clearly shine through, for example, research dealing with gender identity in rural studies (Brandth 2002a). Brandth’s (2002a) paper is a review of how women in agriculture have been identiied in “textually mediated representations of farming life” (2002a, p. 281), especially focusing on the ways in which women have been portrayed in different academic discourses. Brandth shows how women in agriculture have been portrayed, for example, as farmers’ wives and marginal to the production process by researchers who focus on patriarchal family farming and the structures and processes that peripheralise their voices and activities. She also demonstrates how women have been identiied in an altogether different way in a body of work that deals with the masculinisation of agriculture. Part of this work deals with crises of masculinities troubling men who continue to identify themselves through the patriarchal structures that shape family farming whilst women are pictured as actively adjusting themselves to late modern life. The repercussions of this are poignantly illustrated in Ni Laoire’s (2001) work on the rising rate of male suicides in rural Ireland with agriculture’s declining contribution to rural economies. On the one hand women are powerless, on the other they are much less troubled, are empowered even, by their (apparent) lack of association with agriculture and family farming (although see Shortall 2002). In