Women in Agriculture – Professionalizing Rural Life in North America and Europe, 1880–1965

Women have always been skilled at feeding their families, and historians have often studied the work of rural women on farms and in their homes. However, the stories of women who worked as agricultural researchers, producers, marketers, educators, and community organizers have not been told until now. Taking readers into the rural hinterlands of the rapidly urbanizing societies of the United States, Canada, Great Britain, and the Netherlands, the essays in Women in Agriculture tell the stories of a cadre of professional women who acted to bridge the growing rift between those who grew food and those who only consumed it. 

The contributors to Women in Agriculture examine how rural women’s expertise was disseminated and how it was received. Through these essays, readers meet subversively lunching ladies in Ontario and African American home demonstration agents in Arkansas. The rural sociologist Emily Hoag made a place for women at the US Department of Agriculture as well as in agricultural research. Canadian rural reformer Madge Watt, British radio broadcaster Mabel Webb, and US ethnobotanists Mary Warren English and Frances Densmore developed new ways to share and preserve rural women’s knowledge. These and the other women profiled here updated and expanded rural women’s roles in shaping their communities and the broader society. Their stories broaden and complicate the history of agriculture in North America and Western Europe.

Contributors:
Linda M. Ambrose, Maggie Andrews, Cherisse Branch-Jones, Joan M. Jensen, Amy McKinney, Anne Moore, Karen Sayer, Margreet van der Burg, Nicola Verdon

LINDA M. AMBROSE is a professor of history at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada. Her books include For Home and Country: The Centennial History of the Women’s Institutes in Ontario and A Great Rural Sisterhood: Madge Robertson Watt and the ACWW. She lives in Sudbury, Ontario. JOAN M. JENSEN is professor emerita at New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, New Mexico. Her books include With These Hands: Women Working on the Land, Promise to the Land: Essays on Rural Women, and the Pulitzer Prize–nominated Loosening the Bonds: Mid-Atlantic Farm Women, 1750–1850. She lives in Las Cruces, New Mexico.