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 History, Penn State University The point of this book is Read more
There is no one rural woman’s story, but a multiplicity of stories.
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.”
What works would you add to our rural women’s studies canon?
International collaborations are very fruitful…offering new viewpoints on crucial questions about the present as well as the past.
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.
Wild Mares, chronicles my journey through six lesbian-feminist land projects during the 1970s and ‘80s.
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.
“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.”
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.