This is a special issue on Women and Rural History — a subject which needs no editorial justification. It represents, especially for agricultural history, an enormous breadth of historical experience that has been sadly neglected over many decades. In commissioning and then reading the work produced for this issue, we became ever more convinced that there are huge areas of debate and research, into questions at the heart of rural history, that involve detailed consideration of the lives of women. Brief perusal of the contents list for this issue gives some sense of the potential for enlarged work. The history of rural life in any country could be dramatically rewritten with a greater focus on women, and the way such history could be written – the subjects that could be highlighted, and the approaches taken towards them – could be highly innovative in historiographical terms.