In 1860 farmers accounted for 60 percent of the American workforce; in 1910, 30.5 percent; by 1994, there were too few to warrant a separate census category. The changes wrought by the decline of family farming and the rise of industrial agribusiness typically have been viewed through historical, economic, and political lenses. But as William Conlogue demonstrates, some of the most vital and incisive debates on the subject have occurred in a site that is perhaps less obvious--literature.

Conlogue refutes the critical tendency to treat farm-centered texts as pastorals, arguing that...

Farm women of the twentieth-century South have been portrayed as oppressed, worn out, and isolated. Lu Ann Jones tells quite a different story in Mama Learned Us to Work. Building upon evocative oral histories, she encourages us to understand these women as consumers, producers, and agents of economic and cultural change.

As consumers, farm women bargained with peddlers at their backdoors. A key business for many farm women was the "butter and egg trade--small-scale dairying and raising chickens. Their earnings provided a crucial margin of economic safety for many families...

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 interviews, Fink develops a nuanced, persuasive picture of the hardships -- and the...