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.

Increasing attention has recently been given by historians to the many informal ways in which women made economic contributions to rural labouring households in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Both Jane Humphries and Peter King have shown how important the exploitation of common rights, by gleaning for example, could be to the family economy. This is not to overlook the fact that certain types of women's and children's employment, such as lace-making and straw-plaiting were formally established in some rural communities. The research which has been carried out into straw-plaiting the hand twisting of straw for use in hat making – in certain agricultural counties of southern England, has shown that the plait work of wives and children could provide a substantial financial boost to the household income of poorly paid agricultural labourers. Indeed there were times when their combined earnings could far outstrip those of the man. Single plaiters were also reputed to be able to collect something of a dowry to put towards their marriages out of their plait earnings. Industries such as straw-plaiting, which employed mainly women and children are, not before time, beginning to be considered as sources of the gain in productivity potential of Britain in the Industrial Revolution era. It seems likely that the income earned in these industries will, at last, be included in measurements of labouring family budgets and standards of living.

Among the global transformations that have involved rural women, few have been as historically significant as the removal of dairy processing from individual farms to central plants. In most cases, as butter and cheese manufacture left the farm, the workforce also changed: men replaced women. This ‘defeminization’ of dairying took place at varying paces and in different ways, but the ultimate result was the same throughout the West: women's participation in dairying was dramatically reduced.

The extent of the handmade lace industry in the nineteenth century is difficult to estimate. Most lacemakers were not given an occupation in the census. For instance, Belleek (in county Fermanagh) was one of the centres of handmade lace in Ireland. Of the fifty-one women active in the Belleek lace and sprigging class in January 1911, fifty-six per cent were given no occupation in the 1911 census manuscripts and four per cent were given occupations other than lacemaker. In Ireland, it is clear that the census statistics do not include the tens of thousands of women making lace for the home industries societies examined in this article. The statistics for lacemaking in England, Wales and Scotland (given in table one) are confused by the fact that no distinction is made between hand and machine-made lace.

The surge in writing by and about women in recent decades in Ireland is contributing to a good understanding of the place of women in Irish society. It is research which shows that women often had to be exceptionally good at their chosen or allotted role in life in order to be recognised and noted, or had to be capable and highly efficient at tasks ordinarily and traditionally done by men. This is especially true of the women who were the wives, sisters and mothers of the labourers and small farmers of nineteenth-century Ireland, with which this article is concerned. It is freely noted at this point that writing about the lives of so-called ordinary people – both men and women – in all centuries is difficult because of a lack of source material. Writing about women, without reference to male siblings, spouses and fathers is extremely problematic and one must seek out information by a very close examination of available facts and by a full understanding and awareness of the usefulness of the collected folk tradition.

There has in recent years been a considerable focus on migration by historians. We now know far more about rural/urban migration patterns within Britain, both short term and long term. This is particularly so for the period since the mid nineteenth-century censuses. But evidence suggests that mobility, notably among the young and single, was very high from the seventeenth century. Long before the first censuses a steady flow of population from rural areas to towns and cities had begun. ‘Rural depopulation’, we are told, ‘is common to most mature industrial societies of the twentieth century’. In fact, experience of the last half century in the Third World, as well as in pre-industrial England, suggests such movement precedes the development of a ‘mature industrial society’. In parts of England, it was the ‘major urban phenomenon in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries’. Many areas of the Third World have experienced very rapid urbanisation particularly since 1950 when the vast majority of the population still lived in rural areas.

My very first encounter with Sohos, a small market and agricultural town in the mountains northeast of Thessaloniki, a few days before the start of Lent in 1976, is recorded in a set of black-and-white photographs. Their harsh contrasts evoke the chill bleakness of late winter while the images tell a story of social marginality. To my eye, as a young female American university student exploring the central marketplace, men and youths were visible everywhere – in the streets, the shops and restaurants – yet women and girls were difficult to find. My camera captured them hovering at the margins: leaning out of windows or standing in doorways.

My introduction to women's oral history in rural Lincolnshire came about as a result of my joining a local Workers’ Education Association class, entitled ‘Women's role’ My interests finally resulted in the book We Didn't Know Aught: a Study of Sexuality, Superstition and Death in Women's Lives in Lincolnshire During the 1930s, '40s and '50s. My background and approach were in some ways unlike the normal ‘academic’ ones, and so it may be worth initially recounting to readers how this study developed, before discussing some of the difficulties in considering a range of topics that often raised many sensitive and moral issues.

A great deal has been written in recent years concerning the role and changing status of women in the context of rural development, and especially in the countries of the so-called Third World. Attention has been paid to the impact of cash-cropping and labour migration upon rural women (cf. Boserup, 1970: ch.3 and passim; Murray, 1981), to the failure of development agencies properly to appreciate their role in agriculture (cf. Swantz, 1985; Nelson, 1979), to the special burden which they carry in situations of famine and times of stress (Sen, 1983; Vaughan, 1987; ch. 5 and passim), and, as in other contexts, to the differences between women in different sections and strata of society (Moore, 1988: 79–82 and passim).