Historical study of American farm women has had a relatively short life, reaching back approximately twenty years. Rural women rarely existed in earlier scholarship that reserved the categories of farmer and farming for males. Agricultural history thus manifested itself as a story of men and their tools, stretching back historiographically into the early days of the 20th century. Although in 1953 Jared van Wagenen described in careful detail many of the physical processes of farming in The Golden Age of Homespun, the women's work from which he derived his title occupied less than twenty pages at the end of his book. Women's work and women's tools fed, clothed, and provided income for farming families, but they were rarely cause for historical comment.