Mother Machines and Mister Milk: Animal Motherhoods and the Patriarchal Nature Religion of American Dairy

This paper analyzes the United States government’s reliance on Christian patriarchy in restructuring twentieth-century dairy farming. It argues that the state positioned dairy cows as mothers through religious logics of cisheteropatriarchy and agribusiness, conceptualizing both the role of cattle and human motherhood as mechanically extracted resources on the family farm. Milk’s historical trajectory from a dangerous beverage to “nature’s perfect food” relied on religious productions of cows as suffering mothers who labored for and nourished their Christlike human husbands, masculinizing milk as extracted by men from women. Just as twentieth-century home economics sought to industrialize housewives’s unpaid domestic labor as the home’s spiritual core, cows similarly became mechanized and spiritual mothers. Analyzing state reports and propaganda pieces, this paper argues that American family farmers conceptualized cows as mothers only in relation to themselves as patriarchal fathers petitioned by God to violently, yet affectionately, oversee their multispecies family.