Women of the Fields: Representations of Rural Women in the Nineteenth Century - Tapa dura

This work compares and contrasts the relationship between women's farm work and the imagery that surrounded it. Historians usually assume that women's work in agriculture increased from the late-18th century, began to decline in the 1850s, and vanished at the end of the 19th century. In contrast, the same period saw the steady and widespread growth of the rural idyll and the myth of the ideal wife and mother who supposedly lived in a rose-covered cottage, beside a village green, surrounded by a bevy of children and chickens. Within this context, working-class women are not seen as passive victims of the middle class, but as active agents who frequently defended both their work and their rights as they saw them. "Women of the Fields" describes the work that women did in agriculture, as seen in the parliamentary reports of 1843, 1867 and the 1890s and the meanings given to that work in the local and national press, farming advice books, autobiographies, and the art and literature of the period. Karen Sayer places her analysis within the context of the changing nature of agriculture at this time, in particular in the counties of Norfolk, Northumberland and Somerset, and explores the complex issues in terms of both class and gender.