ABSTRACT
This complaint about female farm hands, or Mägde, speaks volumes about the importance of women’s agricultural labor in late Imperial Germany. Attributed to an anonymous rural politician, it appeared in a multi-volume study of women’s agricultural work completed just before the First World War by the Standing Committee on Improving the Interests of Women Workers.2 The project’s organizer, social scientist Gertrud Dyhrenfurth, agreed that the younger generation of German rural women seemed less willing than their mothers and grandmothers to remain on the farm. However, she blamed the long hours and intolerable working conditions for the shortage of Mägde, and urged farmers and state authorities to work together to remedy the problem. Dyhrenfurth condemned the plight of farm wives and daughters with equal vehemence, adding “all one has to do is look at the mother’s fate to see why the daughter rejects it.”3
