During the Romantic period, the Franconian Jura in northern Bavaria, Germany, was discovered as an attractive landscape with aesthetic value. The diversified cultural landscape (rocks, forests, and farmland) and its seasonal variations in land cover are appreciated by tourists to this day, albeit in different form and use made of the scenic beauty. With the modernization and restructuring of agriculture in the 1970s, farming families increasingly seized the opportunity to play a role in rural tourism. In the last three decades, offering holidays on the farm as well as direct sales of their own valueadded farms' products have provided additional alternative incomes.The article draws on a longitudinal study (1977 -2007) which focused on the farming women's agency, coping strategies, visions and wishes against the dynamic changes of the agricultural sector. The rich data enabled the author to give an overview of tourism-related activities within the sample from the point of view of the farming women as well as to construct two case studies that looked at the role of agritourism within the pluri-activities for the women involved and the multifunctional orientation of their farms. While agritourism has become an important permanent livelihood strategy for some farming families, it remains an additional income for others. Either way, it has turned out to be a source of women's growing self-confidence as well as a sustainable ingredient of regional development.

he transformation of agriculture in western industrial societies during the last decades has forced farm women into new spheres of labour and responsibility in order to secure the farms' existence. They have had to develop alternatives such as direct marketing or offering other services to earn an additional income and, especially on part-time farms, to take over more and more jobs that are conventionally done by men. Which role a woman on a farm performs seems to be handled very flexibly. In cases of necessity, it seems that women are allowed to extend their expected role without neglecting their traditional duties (Inhetveen and Blasche 1983;Janshen et al. 1984;Wonneberger et al. 1991; Burg and Endeveld 1994; Whatmore et al. 1994).But if women do not respect the boundary of the traditional women's sphere on the farm and try to alter their roles in a more extreme way by refusing their traditional duties and establishing a new role for themselves through the professionalization of those jobs on the farm which are conventionally assumed by men, they experience that farming in one's own right still means something different for women than it does for men in our society. Until now, women farmers have had to justify their demands for non-stereotypical spheres of work and responsibility on the farm (Vonderach et al. 1993;Brandth 1994;Haugen 1994;Schmitt 1997). Looking for professional acceptance, women farmers tend to downplay their femininity and reconstruct it according to the male standards of the occupation (Brandth 1994). To a certain degree, their biographies are influenced by reactions from people in their immediate surroundings and by structural and social conditions (Schmitt 1997). From the very beginning of an apprenticeship in agriculture, women are confronted by general role expectations which require them to reproduce the official gender norms of agricultural institutions. Which expectations do women farm apprentices experience in their T

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