A 1922 issue of The Farmer's Wife Magazine posed this question to their readers: "If you had a daughter of marriageable age, would you, in light of your own experience, have her marry a farmer?" The magazine at the time had 750,000 subscribers, and received over 7,000 letters.
Laurie Aaron Hird's 2009 book The Farmer's Wife Sampler Quilt: Letters from 1920s Farm Wives and the 111 Blocks They Inspired contains the best answers to this question, along with the traditional quilt blocks they inspired. The Farmer.s Wife Sampler quilt has been made (or started) by thousands of quilters around the world in variety of colors and fabrics.
My version is called SHORT because I made only 39 blocks, not 111; and FAT because each of the blocks finishes at 9" square rather than 6". I did not buy the book, just identified some of the easier block designs and used the pattern as found in my BlockBase software. I did not buy any fabric for this quilt, but used fabric I already had, including a coordinated fabric group based on the old-fashioned soup can print used on the back.
