This book presents a comparative history of how rural women claimed¿or were prevented from claiming¿land in the course of private and collectivist property rights revolutions in very different times and places. Using seventeenth-century England, twentieth-century Russia and the Soviet Union, and twentieth-century colonial Kenya as historical case studies¿despite their obvious and striking differences¿the book introduces women, and evidence of female agency, into the predominantly male-centered narratives of rural economic history.