ABSTRACT
This chapter offers insight into the world of the Victorian woman farmer through the analysis of one the few extant memoirs written and published by a woman farmer in the nineteenth century. She was Louise Cresswell, the self-titled Lady Farmer'. In an era where women were effectively barred from other professions on account of their gender, and feminist campaigners had to mount hard-fought and protracted battles to dismantle barriers to employment in areas such as the law and medicine, the number of women who were classified as farmers was relatively high. Women farmers were a feature of all the English counties. Many rural elites, including farmers who were afraid of losing access to a cheap source of local labour, were suspicious of this move. Existing studies construct an account of the marginalisation of women farmers in a society that was increasingly dominated by a rigid demarcation of male and female spheres.
