UNR conducts interdisciplinary research into the work of women agricultural producers in southern Santa Fe.

In our country, 50% of the rural population is represented by women who play a central role in the production and supply of food. They are dairy farmers, farmers, cattle breeders, horticulturists, wool workers, artisans, professional technicians and also wage earners who work day after day in the development of their communities and fight for greater access to land, housing and work.

La Universidad Nacional de Rosario has a tradition of research on women agricultural producers in southern Santa Fe through interdisciplinary studies conducted by historians, agricultural engineers, political scientists and anthropologists. Every October 15, Rural Women's Day, is an opportunity to make this work visible.

According to Laura Pasquali and Evangelina Tifni from the Institute for Regional Socio-Historical Research (Conicet-UNR), rural research has traditionally focused on the domestic production unit as if it were a set of undifferentiated individuals. But they began to study the topic from a gender perspective, putting women on the scene in the production and reproduction of rural domestic units.

“From the dominant patriarchal discourses, the contribution of work done by women is considered as help, a collaboration with what is done by men, making women's work invisible and devaluing it inside and outside the production unit,” they maintain. For this reason, “incorporating the gender perspective becomes central to understanding the different roles of the members of the farming family.”

These women have different relationships with land ownership, the type of production they carry out, the organization of work and the forms of commercialization, but what unites them is the option for agroecology, a model of technological organizational development and productive and cultural appropriation of the territory they inhabit.