Category Archives: New Books
Agrarian Women and the Welfare State
Agrarian Women and the Welfare State Sommestad, Lena, translator Grey Osterud. Agrarian Women, the Gender of Dairy Work, and the Two-Breadwinner Model in the Swedish Welfare State. New York and London: Routledge, 2019. Review by Sally McMurry, Professor Emerita of … Continue reading
New Book: Representing Rural Women
There is no one rural woman’s story, but a multiplicity of stories. Continue reading
Uncovering Poverty and Resilience in the Great Flyover
In Heartland, Smarsh eloquently unpacks the harsh realities of the working poor in places that are simultaneously celebrated as the nation’s “heartland” and mocked as being part of the “great flyover.” Continue reading
Grandmothers and Granddaughters of the RWSA: What Generation Gap?
What works would you add to our rural women’s studies canon? Continue reading
The Burn and the Glow: Writing the Honest Appalachia
I want to portray the Appalachian woman in all her complexity–her toughness, resilience, and intelligence–while also admitting that sometimes the Appalachian woman–like all women–makes bad choices, lives a hard life, sacrifices in ways both small and profound for her family. Continue reading
Rising Moon
Wild Mares, chronicles my journey through six lesbian-feminist land projects during the 1970s and ‘80s. Continue reading
Legal Codes & Talking Trees
Through their gendered articulations of justice and power, each of these women challenged the legal violence of settler-colonial place-making in an era of dispossession, and rural communities continue to grapple with the legacies of these challenges in their efforts to not only survive, but thrive in the twenty-first century. Continue reading
Farmers Helping Farmers
“My book examines … how farm people… negotiated these conflicts through their work with farm and home bureaus… These broad cultural and societal conflicts mirrored a tension that existed in my own family experience.” Continue reading
“This is all the home I now have”: Deserted and Widowed Homesteaders
Women homesteaders … pressed the bounds of imposed limitations with and sometimes without the help of their male counterparts. The women homesteaders in the Study Area also press the bounds of current homesteading scholarship. Continue reading
Gender and the Routledge History of Rural America: An Editor’s Point of View
When I proposed the Routledge History of Rural America, my desire was to edit a book that provided a state-of-the-art view of the topic. Continue reading