In celebration of the 150th anniversary of women’s suffrage, Northwest College’s Women in the West course has been hosting a series of talks.

In October, Shelly Neff and Beryl Churchill discussed women’s roles in agriculture.

Churchill, author of “Dams, Ditches and Water: A History of the Shoshone Reclamation Project,” discussed how, prior to tractors with hydraulic power, women’s roles in agriculture were primarily in support tasks.

“But they were the glue that held the family and the community together,” she said.

Churchill recounted how women arrived to their Wyoming homesteads to find a “bleak, barren land.” The first task was clearing the fields of scrub brush and cacti, which was a job the men did with horses.

Families lived in tents or tarpaper shacks until the first houses were built, which were quite small. Parents and several children sometimes lived together in one or two rooms.

While the men did most of the manual labor on the farm, the women cooked meals, raised the children, tended the gardens and fed chickens. They also cleaned, made cream and preserved food — some of which would be sold at the grocery store for credit.

During harvest, the threshers were giant, immobile machines, and the crops had to be gathered and hauled to the thresher.

During the harvest, which could last weeks, the women did the cooking for the men working in the fields, and there would be a dozen on a team.

It was in the late 1930s that tractors started to overtake horses, but these were iron machines without hydraulics. So it took a lot of physical strength to turn them.

After World War II, tractors implemented hydraulic steering, and Churchill said that’s when the area started to see a lot more women working in the fields along with the men.

All of this work was done without any modern conveniences. Irrigation was the first to be built, coming into the Garland Division by 1914, the Willwood by 1927, and Heart Mountain by 1946.

The communities in the area began to get electricity after the construction of the Buffalo Bill Dam in 1910, but it took some time to reach them all.

Speaking after the meeting, Churchill said phone service came to Powell in 1912, but the first company to provide it went bankrupt in 1916. The Project Telephone Company took over the defunct startup and provided service to the town for the next 36 years. She has a 1932 bill from the company in which there’s a charge for an 8 minute call to Billings for 85 cents. This would be about $16 today.

“How times have changed!” she said.

Neff’s talk centered on her great-great-grandmother Alberta Kellogg Charles Parker, who she described as “strong minded, very smart and beautiful.”

At a time when women were viewed without question as the weaker sex, Parker set out from Michigan to her own homestead in Kansas in the 1870s. Her son had inflammatory rheumatism, and a doctor recommended she move out to warmer climates.

Five years later, she moved on to Colorado and then New Mexico, where she started a newspaper and began ranching.

Finally, she moved to Wyoming in 1888, along with several children, and the family eventually settled in Thermopolis. There, Parker built a ranch and expanded it, all with her own money. Unusual for the time, she was involved, along with her husband, in all business transactions on the ranch. In all the contracts, her name is signed right next to his, Neff said.

Today, Neff’s family owns Heart Mountain Valley Ranch outside Cody, which raises organic beef, gluten free oats, and barley. She has her own horses, her own cows, and her own brand.

“I come from a long line of very independent, strong-willed, stubborn women. I have my own herd, my own brand, my own ideas. I work cattle, build fences, drive a stick, and bake a gorgeous pie,” Neff said.

She continues to pass these values of independence onto her own daughters today.

“I never want them to think there’s anything they can’t do as a woman in a man’s world,” she said.