While 47 percent of Iowa farmland is owned or co-owned by women, conventional agriculture remains largely a masculine enterprise. This dissertation focuses on the narratives of six women in Iowa who have become farmland owners through inheritance from spouses or other family members. Through ethnographic methods, I analyze the women's decisions and resulting shifts in their identity, which is related to their status as farmland owners in a hegemonic culture where women are often marginalized. Furthermore, I argue that analyzing identity is an important aspect of understanding a purposeful, embodied human rhetorical agency.