The period covered here was one of enormous instability and change for American farming: rural and farm families declined by a third as the population shifted from primarily rural to urban/suburban. Lauters examines such changes as increasing industrialization and the rise of consumer culture and also tells how farm women responded to such events as economic depression, world war, and suffrage. And she explores the deepening divide between city and farm women, so that by the end of this period, urban and rural women had virtually no common ground for understanding each other.