This thesis is about gender relations and identities among farming families in a community in the Aveyron region in southern France. More particularly, it is about the ways in which women and men in farming families locate themselves in terms of culturally constructed ideas of femininity and masculinity, and ideas of tradition and modernity. This study is carried out from a feminist perspective and draws on feminist and social and cultural geographies as well as other social science disciplines in order to explore the production and reproduction of patriarchal ideologies by which women are maintained in unequal positions to men in farming families, the farming community, and bureaucratic structures.