Gender and Rural Modernity: Farm Women and the Politics of Labor in Germany, 1871-1933 (review)

For contemporary observers in the 1920s, one of the most powerful and unnerving symbols of changing gender roles was the rise of the female white-collar worker. Indeed, the 1925 German occupational census revealed that there were nearly 1.5 million women employed in this sector, a three-fold increase on 1907. The female office worker in turn became closely associated with the image of the "New Woman," the economically independent, ideologically unattached, and upwardly mobile urban consumer who was the target both of the advertising industry and of varying levels of hostility from the political left and right. Female salaried employees, then, are an obvious subject for gender and labor historians, encompassing as they do all the issues of modern city life—declining family size, generational conflict, sexuality, birth control, changing career patterns, and new forms of housing, leisure, and mass entertainment.

By contrast far less has been written about rural women's contribution to the making of Weimar modernity, although they represented a significantly larger section of the female labor force than either white-collar or factory workers, numbering 4.56 million in 1907 and 4.90 million in 1925 (p. 24). In part, as Elizabeth B. Jones shows in her superb new study, this is because the German countryside, especially in the pre-1945 period, is often associated with economic backwardness and reactionary mindsets, especially when contrasted with the "newness" and "experimentalism" of the big cities. It also reflects the relative scarcity of contemporary records written by or about marginalized groups such as female farm hands, domestic servants, and farmers' wives. However, this book succeeds in challenging the conventional urban–rural construct by providing a persuasive account of "how farm women themselves shaped debates over their labor and the nation's future before, during and after the First World War" (p. 2).

Focusing chiefly but not exclusively on Saxony, Jones shows that many of the key ingredients of "rural modernity" were already present in German society in the late nineteenth century. In particular she highlights the growing tendency of female farm hands, or Mägde, to challenge poor working conditions by fleeing from their employers, and the (increasingly futile) attempts by the latter to enforce their rights under the Gesindeordnungen, the series of arcane laws designed to regulate the "master–servant relationship" in the countryside. When asked, young women (or their parents) "often describe[d] their move from farm to factory as a 'step up' to better-paid, cleaner employment" (p. 79), a stance branded as "irresponsible" and "antisocial" by many male agricultural experts, particularly in view of the increased "overburdening" of farmers' wives. Meanwhile, policy makers suggested various cures and remedies for the problem of "rural flight," from legislation to cut working hours, through greater mechanization and rationalization, to education in "modern" household management techniques. However, few believed that it was possible to overcome the draw of the cities simply by imposing further restrictions on young people's freedom of movement or by adopting less intensive methods of farming, not least because this went against prevailing liberal economic ideologies.

Dissension and uncertainty, then, were already in the air. However, Jones also sees 1914 as a crucial turning point on several different levels. First, the onset of hostilities led to increased state intervention in the rural economy, and, by extension, increased state concern for the welfare of the rural population. Second, the demands of "total war" revealed the centrality of women, both as farm hands and as farmers' wives/widows, to the agricultural production process. Military and civilian officials did not fail to notice this, eventually resorting to new coercive measures to inhibit wartime "rural flight." And third, food shortages in the cities heightened tensions between "urban consumers" and "rural producers," creating new domestic conflicts and political fault lines that continued even after 1918.

During the period of...