Life in the Country

In the 1950s Denmark was still an agricultural society.

Meta, Ruth, Anna and Inge were country wives in Northern Jutland; Ella was a housekeeper, a seamstress and independent.

They were sisters, born between 1897 and 1910, had grown up on a small farm and attended school in Nøvling. At the age of fourteen, after their confirmations, they had all started service not far from their home.

As an adult Meta took over the childhood home along with her husband. Anna and Inge and their husbands bought farms quite nearby, Ruth lived 25 km away. The sisters kept close everyday contact all their lives and celebrated birthdays, Christmas, Midsummer etc. together.

Meta and Inge had children; the others were childless.

Nature was their world - as a place of work with the animals in the field and the flowers in the garden - and as motive for their creative interests: embroidery, drawing and photography.

Together Meta and Ella bought a camera, which they used frequently from their youth up to the 1950s. Then it was replaced by a colour camera, which they brought on their first bus tours south as tourists in Germany and the Netherlands.

In the 1950s changes came with new machines and methods of cultivation in the country. The peat cutter, remembered from the girls' childhood, had a renaissance during the Occupation but was put aside again along with the scythe and the rake, which were only used for cutting a little grass for the chickens in order to make the egg yolks yellow and tasty.

Teams of horses in front of harvest wagons and machines became a rare sight in the fields.

The cows were still put out to pasture every day during the summer. The milking machine was introduced into the herds, which until then had been milked by hand. Now it was rarely necessary to strain impurities from the milk: only when milking the last drops into a bucket or when breaking in a young cow.
The sisters continued working on their own land, in the field and stable as well as in the garden and kitchen.

As the sisters got older and moved away from their farms, the land was sold and added to larger farms and the small farmhouses with their outhouses and gardens were bought by young couples living in Aalborg and environs, who with a car could work in the city and enjoy the peace and quiet of the countryside.

In later generations country wives with a full time job as assisting spouses became rare. Today most farmers' wives have paid jobs.