The farming wife presents a reassessment of family farming at a time when family enterprise is gaining in significance and interest beyond the farming arena. The book offers a feminist critique and reconstruction of petty commodity production, the concept widely used to describe various forms of small-scale production for the market based on family, or household, labour and property. Through a detailed study of family farming in England, the political economy of family-based production is examined as a unity of household and enterprise, intimately structured by patriarchal gender relations.