Charting the changing role of women on the land

The role of women in farming now is unrecognisable from the days of the “farmer’s wife”. Historical author Simon Butler charts some of the defining moments for women working on the land.


I grew up on a small Cornish farm in the 1950s and 60s. Haymaking and harvest called upon every available pair of hands, and “crib” for the hungry workers was brought out to the fields by the farmer’s wife. I see now that I was witness to the last vestiges of the “old way”.


The role of the woman in farming has long been overlooked by history. Certainly in the earliest written records it is rare to find specific references to women in farming. While the place of the farmer is assured, the part played by the farmer’s wife, her daughters, and women working on the land is a story largely untold. Of the thousand personal names recorded in the Domesday Book, only a handful are female. Through the centuries following, it is the farmer and his sons who remain the potent figures, with wives and daughters often being merely footnotes.





FarmerSimon Butler is the author of The Farmer’s Wife: The Life and Work of Women on the Land published by Halsgrove at £19.99. 

Of course there is no single story to tell, for each “farming wife” will have a different tale. What, if anything, binds them collectively is the work that women on the land traditionally undertook. To them fell the daily chores of nursing babies, heating the home, preparing meals, churning butter, feeding the fowl, nurturing young and sick animals, salting meat, bottling fruit and so on.


Poverty and sickness would be a common factor in their lives; long days of labour in a world confined by how far one might walk in a day. Yet it is from this harsh existence that springs the defining characteristic of countrywomen through the centuries – resourcefulness.


Nowhere is the resourcefulness of these women better demonstrated than in those who were forced by poverty and the slump in agriculture during Victoria’s reign to emigrate to new lands, especially to America and Australia. It is here, against a background of a truly alien world, that all their patience, determination and wisdom is called upon in setting up a new home in a strange land.


But it was the First World War that formed the watershed for women in farming, just as it had for their emancipation in society as a whole. While many in farming were exempt from enlistment, tens of thousands chose to leave the land in order to fight and women were brought in to fill those vacancies in farms and factories.


On the land the first priority was to maintain food supplies for the fighting men and the home population, and in 1917 a single entity, the Women’s Land Army, was


established. By this date there were more than a quarter of a million women working as farm labourers.


These war years and the decade following also coincided with the greatest development in mechanical transport the world had seen. Tractors, many imported from America during the war years, were now being built in their thousands in British factories. By the time all the men had returned from war, thousands of women had proved themselves not only capable of working with these machines, but also of maintaining and servicing them.


Within months of the war’s end in 1918 the Representation of the People Act enfranchised women over the age of 30 and in 1928 women got the vote on the same terms as men. At the outbreak of the Second World War a new and confident generation of farming women were again called upon to help maintain the country’s food supplies, and farming was never the same again.




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