Women of the Fields

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.