Inheriting, marrying, and founding farms: women's place on the land.

This article considers rural women's place on the land in south-central New York during the first half of the twentieth century. Based on a community history and ethnographic study conducted during the 1980s, the article draws on women's oral narratives to explore the connections between women's sense of agency and their relationship to the land through descent and inheritance, marriage into a landowning family, founding a farm in partnership, and the experience of dispossession.