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Mary Neth's 1995 book, "Preserving the Family Farm: Women, Community, and the Foundations of Agribusiness in the Midwest, 1900-1940," made a major contribution to the analysis of the connections between gender and the political economy that shaped farm women's lives and fueled farmers' resistance to the transformation of rural life wrought by agribusiness. Focusing on the processes of negotiation between women and men in farming families and rural communities, Neth illuminated the relationship between women's work and their power. Tracing the dense networks that connected farm families, she also showed how cooperation in work generated and sustained radical farm movements.

This article addresses the reticence of some farm women to share their experiences with historians and how that desire to keep secrets collides with the desire by scholars to tell the stories of these women. It argues that scholars must continue to struggle with the issue of which stories to tell publicly and which to keep private. The author discusses her own experience telling stories about rural women in the 1970s and the need to give voice to the heritage of rural women, especially of groups that have feared revealing their experiences. She offers examples of historians of rural women who have successfully worked with formerly silenced populations and urges historians to continue to tell stories about these lives, to reevaluate what has been already learned, to ask new questions, and to discuss which secrets need to be shared.

This article investigates the links between market-oriented activities and subsistence production among peasant farmers in the Thyolo and Mzimba districts in Malawi from the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s. The two districts were chosen because of their differences in terms of land-labor ratios, quality of soils, and structure of market engagement. Exploring the different paths of agrarian change in these two districts demonstrates that they were dependent on the structure of market engagement and its effects on the supply and flexibility of labor. African agricultural history is best understood when agricultural systems are viewed in connection to the overall economic activities of rural households. More simply put, the dynamics of agrarian change in rural Africa cannot be understood without linking such changes to the wider economy and their impact on local labor processes.