Grey Osterud is best known in the United States for Bonds of Community: The Lives of Farm Women in Nineteenth-Century New York (Cornell Press, 1991) and Putting the Barn Before the House: Women and Family Farming in Early Twentieth-Century New York (Cornell Press, 2012).

Then she turned her attention to Scandinavia, where the incorporation of rural society into the market economy did not transform gender and generational relationships as fundamentally as it did in the USA.

This site grew out of that research: a large and varied body of photographs of women performing physical labor on Swedish farms during the early twentieth century, available through digitaltmuseum.se. Reading these images closely — who is in the frame, who is behind the camera, what the work demanded of bodies — recovers the multidimensional and flexible character of gender at work in rural Sweden.