'The Modern Countrywoman': Farm Women, Domesticity and Social Change in Interwar Britain

Fig. 1.

Front cover of Farmer and Stockbreeder, 9 March 1937.

Reproduced by permission of the Museum of English Rural Life, University of Reading.

The common assumption that the countrywoman cares only about domesticity is not true. Moreover, it is most unfair. There are hundreds of countrywomen today who are working partners. Their husbands know and appreciate this – their wives have studied the techniques of farming and the success or failure of their efforts is jointly shared.¹

So began a letter penned by 'R. E. W.' from Oadby, Leicestershire, in response to the question 'What are the real interests of countrywomen today?', posed in the home pages of the popular farming publication Farmers Weekly in 1938. Her response was not exceptional. Others emphasized the varied and fulfilling lifestyles enjoyed by women, encompassing the arts, literature, handicrafts, gardening, food production, village organizations and politics, and, for those married to farmers, practical involvement in the farm business. Mrs Stone from Gloucestershire claimed that there had never been a 'better time than the present for countrywomen'. Women, she argued, had 'been quick to grasp changing conditions and to appreciate all new inventions' and welcomed 'change and recreation as much as our town cousins', although she conceded that 'domesticity will never really lose its charm, and her home will remain the centre from which she will view the world'.² These letters are interesting for a number of reasons. They suggest the prevailing interwar ideology of domesticity was not all-encompassing, with women contributing economically to farm households and benefiting widely from social and cultural change in the countryside. They point to the infiltration of elements of the modern and urban into what is often presumed to be a traditional, backward-looking rural society, and they reveal the parallels and distinctions drawn between town and country life. Finally they are representative of a rich and varied source – the printed farming press – which has yet to be fully exploited by historians.³ They thus supply a neglected rural perspective to historians' debates on domesticity, gender and social change in interwar Britain.

The interwar years in Britain have traditionally been seen as ones characterized by a backlash against women's wartime emancipation, the dominant rhetoric of domesticity and motherhood asserting itself in government legislation and popularized in the burgeoning market for women's magazines.⁴ New monthly periodicals aimed at a middle-class audience such as Good Housekeeping (1922) and Woman and Home (1926) were joined the following decade by mass-circulation weeklies, most notably Woman's Own (1932) and Woman (1937). Local and national newspapers also began to cater for their female readership through the provision of 'women's pages', their style, content and contributors often overlapping with the women's magazines.⁵ The media has been portrayed as a powerful forum for the dissemination of conservative and conventional ideologies about womanhood, domesticity and family life. Cynthia White argued for example that women's magazines 'were limited in recommending a purely domestic role for women'.⁶ More recently however, this image of the media, and the interwar period as a whole, has come under considerable scrutiny. Studies by social and cultural historians have revealed the changing expectations and aspirations of the period, with increasing access to work, leisure and birth control transforming women's lives.⁷ Adrian Bingham's examination of the interwar popular press has stressed that this was a contested arena where a range of opinions and images competed. He therefore urges historians to 'develop a more sophisticated model of the relationship between the media and gender identities which recognizes the diversity and complexity of cultural representations and acknowledges that the media cannot ''impose'' patriarchy on an unwilling audience'.⁸

The focus of the women's magazines and women's pages was overwhelmingly metropolitan, unsurprising given that interwar Britain was an urban, industrial country. Rural women had also caught the attention of editors by this period however, and conscious that the mainstream publications did not cater for what were seen as the specific interests...