"The modern countrywoman”: farm women, domesticity and social change in interwar Britain

This article analyses the home pages of the two dominant weekly agricultural periodicals of interwar Britain – Farmer and Stockbreeder and Farmers Weekly – in order to examine the roles and representations of British farmwomen in the 1920s and ’30s. It shows that although these home pages replicated the content of contemporary women's magazines, focusing largely on domesticity and motherhood, they did so within the framework of a rural agenda which recognized the distinct environment of farm women's lives. This could lead to contestation, in that the traditional and the modern, the city and the countryside, produced competing images of rural women's social and economic roles. Ultimately, however, the agricultural press offers an optimistic vision of the farmwoman – or the modern countrywoman as they often labelled her – portraying her as an integral part of household, farm and community.