ABSTRACT
In the mid-nineteenth century, rural reformers of white middle- and upper-class rural women and men sympathetic to farm women's harsh physical condition, women farm journalists and farm women themselves sought to alleviate the plight of women on the farm and the gender strain they faced by amending their heavy workload in farm life. Dissatisfied with their situation, rural women desired a better life than the tiresome work and discordant gender dynamics they experienced on farmsteads in ante-bellum New England. Within the cultural context of greater choices for farm daughters and the depopulation of the farm, farm women began to discern new options available to them, extending beyond the confines of their rural world in American society. Agricultural reformers offered farm women a picture of how their life might be improved through some mending of farm practices, in the hope of stemming women's and daughters' flight from the countryside. In the gendered viewpoints of rural reform, women exerted their sway to alter the conditions they linked to their poor health and to renovate their physical fitness on the farm.
