Abstract
When milking machines were introduced on Swedish farms during the first half of the twentieth century, milking and taking care of cows had long been women's responsibility, and adult men seldom entered the cowshed. As dairying became a commercial operation and the number and yield of cows increased, farm wives, daughters, maidservants, and hired milkmaids continued to perform this work. By the end of World War I, however, so many young women had left the countryside that farmers had difficulty hiring enough milkmaids. When milking machinery became available, it promised to save labor and do the job more effectively than milking by hand. At the same time, adult men entered the cowshed and milked alongside women. But how were these simultaneous changes connected? This study analyzes advertisements for milking machinery in Sweden's most popular farm weekly. Manufacturers deliberately associated machine milking with images of masculinity. In the 1920s and 1930s, ads emphasized that both men and women could milk by machine. By the 1940s and 1950s, the ads depicted milking in an ungendered way, as a depersonalized technical process that was neither manly nor womanly.
