Grandmothers and Granddaughters of the RWSA: What Generation Gap?

Nearly a year after the conference,the conversations that began at the 13^th Triennial Rural Women’s Studies Association Conference are continuing to buzz. To aid in those conversations and new collaborations, we wanted to share a bibliography of work referenced in the plenary roundtable, “Grandmothers and Granddaughters of the RWSA: What Generation Gap?”.

The roundtable participants—Jenny Barker-Devine, Sara Egge, Kathryn Engle, Emily Prifogle, and Margaret Weber—offered insights into new directions in rural women studies. They highlighted a wide range of work challenging assumptions about the theory and history of gender, sexuality, race, environment, politics, family, economics, and community and offered exciting possibilities for interdisciplinary scholarship.

The speakers referenced the following scholarship on the growing rural women’s studies canon:

• Jane Adams, The Transformation of Rural Life 1994
• Jenny Barker-Devine On Behalf of the Family Farm: Iowa Farm Women’s Activism Since 1945
• Nancy Berlage Farmers Helping Farmers 2016
• Campbell, Mayerfeld & Finny Country Boys: Masculinity and Rural Life 2006
• Qwo-Li Driskill, Chris Finley, Brian Gilley & Scott Lauria Morgensen Queer Indigenous Studies 2011
• Sara Egge Woman Suffrage and Citizenship in the Midwest 2018
• Will Fellows Farm Boys: Lives of Gay Men from the Rural Midwest 1996
• Deborah Fink Agrarian Women: Wives and Mothers in Rural Nebraska, 1880-1940
• Deborah Fink Open Country Iowa: Rural Women, Tradition, and Change 1986
• Andrew Gorman-Murray, Barbara Pini, and Lia Bryant Sexuality, Rurality, and Geography 2012
• Mary Gray Out in the Country 2009
• Nancy Grey Osterud Bonds of Community: The Lives of Farm Women in Nineteenth-Century New York 1991
• Barbara Handy-Marchello Women of the Northern Great Plains: Gender and Settlement on the Homestead Frontier, 1870-1930 2005
• John Howard Men Like That: A Southern Queer History 1999
• Katherine Jellison Entitled to Power: Farm Women and Technology, 1913-1963 2000
• Joan Jensen With These Hands 1981
• Joan Jensen Loosening the Bonds: : Mid-Atlantic Farm Women, 1750-1850 1988
• Cherisse Jones-Branch Crossing the Line 2014
• Mary Neth Preserving the Family Farm: Women, Community, and the Foundations of Agribusiness in the Midwest, 1900-1940 1998
• Colin Johnson Just Queer Folks 2013
• Colin Johnson, Mary Gray and Brian Gilley Queering the Countryside 2016
• Cynthia Prescott, “The Past, Present and Future of Rural Women’s Studies,” 2018
• Debra Reid Reaping a Greater Harvest: African Americans, the Extension Service, and Rural Reform in Jim Crow Texas 2007
• Pamela Riney-Kehrberg Routledge History of Rural America 2016
• Gabriel Rosenberg The 4-H Harvest 2016
• Rebecca Scott Removing Mountains 2010
• Eileen Suárez Findlay We Are Left Without A Father Here 2014
• Melissa Walker All We Knew Was to Farm: Rural Women in the Upcountry South, 1919-1941 2000
• Margaret Weber “Going Cage Free: Using Rural History in the Classroom” 2017
• Rural Sociology Volume 65, Issue 4, 2000

What would you add to this list?