Interwoven within mythologies surrounding the ’Pioneer Legend’ it has long been acceptable for women to garden domestically.  Following the 1892-3 depression, multiple re-negotiations regarding class, labour and gender challenged women’s work, previously safeguarded within the colonial project, where women led respectable lives as wives and mothers and supported men in their endeavour to reaffirm and rebuild manhood and the nation.  Suffrage activists began to agitate for employment outside the domestic sphere, promoting financial independence with ‘labours of love’ in ‘unwomanly’ fields.  The creation and growth of small or ‘light’ rural industries provided a mechanism for women who fell outside the heteronormative framework ‘to leave the cities, and get back-to-the-land’.  Unsettling both rural identities, and notions of womanhood as tied to traditional domestic roles, a ‘home’ on the land was re-imagined. 

Paving the way for successive generations of professional women gardeners like Edna Walling who looked to combine nature and home, this paper looks at how getting back-to-the-land in the 19^th century challenged notions of female labour, and functioned as political and social resistance at a time where women had limited opportunities to engage with autonomy, agricultural production, and the land itself.