ABSTRACT
By the early 1930s, it was clear that most German farm wives were not the happy household managers depicted in rural rationalization campaigns. Instead, stories of their suffering had persisted throughout the “golden years” of the Weimar Republic between 1924 and 1927, and peaked during the economic crisis that devastated the countryside between 1928 and 1933. A variety of observers in Saxony and across Germany routinely described farm wives as “tormented,” “downtrodden,” and “bitter.”1 Furthermore, these observers increasingly linked the physical and psychological overburdening of farm wives to the broader agricultural crisis, and to the perceived betrayal of rural interests by the Weimar state. As one member of the Saxon Agricultural Chamber remarked acidly in 1927, “farm wives’ situation is irreconcilable with all that is said and written about women’s work and women’s protection.”2
