Agrarian Women: Wives and Mothers in Rural Nebraska, 1880-1940

Agrarian Women challenges the widely held assumption that frontier farm life in the United States made it easier for women to achieve rough equality with men. Using as her example the family farm in rural Nebraska from the 1880s until the eve of World War II, Deborah Fink contends instead that agrarianism reinforced the belief that a woman’s place was in the home, her predestined role that of wife and mother.

Drawing on court records, wills, deeds, and census data as well as memoirs and inte...