During this Women’s History Month, we’re engaging with how the dairy industry’s practices and power force consumers to participate in a system that perpetuates harm against not only female cows but also human women.
Exploitation of Cows’ Bodies on Dairy Farms
The dairy industry relies on controlling the reproductive organs of mother cows to produce milk for dairy products, calves for the veal industry, and cows’ bodies for low-grade beef products.
Many people may not know what it takes to maintain a herd of nearly 10 million cows used for milk production in the United States (1). Practices such as artificial insemination are nearly universally used to impregnate cows so dairy companies can produce milk according to optimized market timelines. Cows are milked during and after birthing their calves, and are impregnated again as soon as possible. After just four to seven years of this cycle, they are sent to slaughter. This means their lives are up to 15 years shorter than they would be if they lived outside of this system.
The double income from selling milk and selling the cows for low-grade beef produces more money for farmers than selling the male calves does, making female cows more valuable in this system of commodification. Thus, cows are celebrated for their contributions to the economy in terms of producing offspring, while their motherhood itself is disrespected in that same economy. Calves are taken from their mothers within a few days of life and sold as commodities. We can see a similar reverence for the idea of motherhood in humans, but a disregard for mothers’ actual needs. Human mothers are denied paid maternity leave and forced out of the workforce, provided subpar medical care, and widely undervalued (2,3). This discrepancy between needing mothers for society to function, but denying their interests as individuals, could be thought of as a product of the default to ignore the reality of motherhood.
Women and Cows as Commodities
We aren’t often asked to see the true reality of milk production, just like women are asked to hide the reality of motherhood, such as breastfeeding in public being taboo. Carol J. Adams’ influential 1990 book The Sexual Politics of Meat established the term of absent referent to name the process by which an animal is erased when products from their body are consumed. Milk companies depicting happy cows on cartons and using terms like “husbandry” to refer to the forced impregnation of cows are examples of this phenomenon (4). Consumers never have to see something they are eating (the meat or milk) as someone (the cow).
As explained by Tessa Cunningham in her article “You Are What You Drink: A Feminist Critique of Milk and its Consequences for the Female, “Milk’s image only remains sexy when the referent is absent; when society reminds humans of milk’s animal and gendered origins, the white liquid and those who produce it become taboo.” (5) The cognitive separation created between female bodies and their products allows cows and women not to be treated as people, but as commodities. We can see this happening to women in the same space as it happens to cows when we see the sexist treatment of female dairy workers.
Poor Treatment of Women Dairy Workers
Women who work on dairy farms are often exposed to sexual harassment in the workplace. The United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the federal agency charged with enforcing workplace discrimination laws, sued a major dairy farm in Wisconsin at the end of 2025 for sexual and national-origin discrimination (6). The suit alleges that a supervisor sexually harassed a female worker after she was falsely promised a managerial position and visa support. When the management explained why this worker and two others were being employed as laborers instead of managers, they provided reasoning based on stereotypes of Mexican and American workers.
This case highlights the stories of many dairy workers who endure unacceptable working conditions as women and as immigrants. Estimates of the proportion of dairy workers who are undocumented immigrants range from about 55% to 70%, meaning that a majority of workers may not have access to the legal pathways to report and end workplace sexual harassment (7,8). Therefore, these layers of oppression layer on top of one another, rendering certain people’s stories–in this case, an immigrant woman’s–invisible.
Conclusion
Accepting the narratives employed by dairy marketing that cows are informed, consenting parties to their exploitation, upholds the social structures that enable the objectification of human women. The exploitation of cows is not tied to the exploitation of women because we are the same, but because the stories told to maintain our lower-class status reinforce and rely on each other. Dairy farms contain overlapping and reinforcing systems that hold down female cows and humans while optimizing profits. Pushing for freedom from the dairy industry’s grasp on our policy and economy not only helps cows and women alike.
