As Elizabeth B. Jones remarks in the introduction to this history of farm women in Germany from 1871 until 1933, most historians have not regarded the countryside as an “obvious place to explore changing definitions of gender and work identities, the interventions of reformers and bureaucrats, or how rural anxieties about change were manifested in provincial and national politics” (p. 11). Indeed, the rural world has too often appeared as the backdrop of tradition against which modern society and culture define themselves. Farm women seldom appear among the daring “new women” or progressive social reformers who populate the pages of works on women's and gender history. But, as Jones shows, this is a serious omission. Farm workers, among the most numerous groups of female workers, actually increased in number during the first part of the period covered here. Moreover, the farm woman did not live according to the stable and unchanging traditional culture so beloved of conservative commentators. On the contrary, both their work patterns and their sense of their own possibilities and options changed considerably during this period.

Jones, who teaches at Colorado State University, starts by looking at the modernization of agriculture and its impact on women's farm labor. Concentrating on Saxony, from which most of her archival and published sources are taken, she finds that small farms were under pressure to diversify and expand their output. Farm women, whose tasks commonly involved animal care and housework as well as cultivation, often faced a crushing increase in their workload. Like many other categories of female workers during this era, these women did not benefit from technological innovation, which affected male rather than female work.

In her account of two categories of workers—hired girls, or Mägde, and farm wives—Jones faces the same problem as many other historians of working-class women. As these women left few written records, their personal lives and thoughts are difficult, sometimes impossible to reconstruct. Jones makes creative use of the available documentation—for example, a collection of reports on the grievance cases brought by hired girls against their employers during the 1870s. These documents provide an intriguing glimpse into the experience and the mentalities of these young women. As Jones remarks, they hardly fit the stereotype of the ignorant and traditional rural woman—on the contrary, they were determined to use the limited opportunities available to them to improve their lives. The fact that these ambitions often motivated them to leave their jobs for seemingly more promising opportunities in the cities was a cause of growing anxiety to farmers and government policy makers, who deplored the depopulation of the countryside and sometimes commented that a good hired girl was more difficult to find than a qualified chancellor.

Farm wives as a group seem to have left behind no similar body of personal documentation, and Jones presents them chiefly as they figured in the work of social scientists and other experts who commented anxiously on the problems of the countryside. Adding a much-needed dimension to the history of rural life, which often focuses chiefly on male landowners such as the Prussian Junkers, she shows that the farm wife played a central role in the agrarian economy. And many commentators viewed her overburdened state—caused partly by the migration of potential Mägde to the cities—as part of a more general crisis affecting not only farmers themselves, but the German society of which they were a mainstay. Noting the popularity in the countryside of the German Rural Housewives' League and other right-wing women's organizations during the Weimar Republic, Jones concludes by speculating that farm women may have agreed with this analysis, and that their discontent led many to support National Socialism.

This is a groundbreaking work that enlarges our understanding, both of this large and previously little-known group of women and of the history of modern Germany and Europe. The modernization of agriculture and the migration of countless women and men from countryside to city, though among the most important trends of the twentieth century, have received little attention from historians, and Jones recounts a chapter of this important story. But the story could have been richer if Jones had broadened her account of rural women to include not just occupational, but also familial and cultural patterns. For example, Jones tells us that the number of children born to most women was falling in the countryside as in the city during this era. But she does not speculate about the consequences of this important change for the women themselves, their health, their work patterns, or their ways of thinking. Similarly, she tells us nothing about the educational levels of rural women and how education may have shaped their expectations. For example, did rising rates of literacy and availability of print media motivate young women to escape the daily drudgery of the farm? Although personal testimony on these issues may be scarce, surely the many commentators cited by Jones must have remarked on the effect of modern ways of living and thinking on rural culture.