Rural Literacies and The Rural Womyn Zone

By Jane Lane

This Sustainable Rural Living section of  the Rural Womyn Zone website is in the process of being updated after a couple of years of neglect during what I call “my cancer year” and the year after it, while I regained my energy, my focus, and ability to do more than one thing at a time.

During that time, three women,  Kim Donehower B.A. Ph.D, Charlotte Hogg B.A. M.A. Ph.D., and Eileen E. Schell B.A. M.A. Ph.D., published a book called Rural Literacies which addresses one of the intersections that is most interesting to me —  place (rural), gender, and public memory. How do we see women in rural America? This is the reason for Rural Womyn Zone.

I first had a chance to get on the Internet at the office at the family farm. I could hardly wait to look for information about other rural women doing things that I was doing – working on a family farm, and working around women’s and social issues. What a disappointment it was for me to discover that there were organizations for rural women in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and Third World Countries, but none in the United States. There were local and regional organizations, and some of the big agricultural entities had created what looked like no more than auxiliaries for the women, who were relegated to separate forums where they discussed recipes and children, not the financial and agricultural management of the farms, for example.

If we thought the United States was so advanced that it didn’t need any movements or organizations that focused on rural women’s issues, then why were we still being treated as second class citizens?

Women were doing hard work on farms, but didn’t own the land. If they were married and their name was on the property, the United States didn’t count them as a farmer or owner of the farm, because it only counted one owner per farm, and it counted the husband, not the wife.

I contacted some of the larger “global” women’s organizations that were active in Third World Countries to see what they might offer in the United States, and was told that they did not work in the U.S. What was the assumption? That rural women in this country did not have any of the problems – access to land ownership, protection of water resources, ability to grow healthy food, involvement in planning rural communities, access to women’s reproductive health services, exposure to pesticides and other chemicals, chemical-based agriculture, lack of social capital, access to justice for victims of gender-based violence, access to credit, isolation from services, etc. — that rural women did elsewhere?

So when I was coming up with names for the web site that would become the Rural Womyn Zone, I first called it the Third-And-A-Half-World because it seemed that no one knew we even existed. Or that the problems existed.

At that time, I was reading about people who settled in North Dakota, and how it was understood that the sons would inherit the land, and the daughters would find husbands. How prevalent was this, outside of North Dakota? No woman had ever served as a county commissioner where I lived; so throughout the development of this area, no woman’s perspective was ever considered. The county commissioners appoint members to several boards and other commissions that essentially run the services in a multi-county rural area. Men were appointed to positions that impacted long-range planning and development and women were appointed to the bookmobile board. There was no woman on the city council, and when it became legally inaccessible, the comfortable old brick Carnegie-style library was abandoned, and there was discussion of building a metal building – similar to the implement dealership and the machine shed on the farm – to house the new library on an empty lot out at the outskirts of town where there were no sidewalks.

These are examples of what I believe happens when women’s vision, voices, and needs aren’t considered in community planning. Women aren’t making the news, they are quietly serving their communities, so their voices aren’t recorded, their stories are lost, and younger women who look for mentors and models are left with the prevailing masculinized versions of what it means to be a female in a rural setting – - the entrenched gender roles that complete the vicious circle.

The Rural Womyn Zone was created to build a safe online community where rural women could help each other fulfill their visions in the rural spaces where they lived, and to add their women’s voices to the public memory, as the book, Rural Literacies, describes The Rural Womyn Zone:

. . . The Rural Womyn Zone (RWZ) is a technological network that seeks to critically educate rural women. The RWZ describes itself as a “grass-roots international network of rural women which started using the Internet in 1997 to provide information, outreach, support and a networking base for rural women and their nonprofit organizations and grass roots activities” (“First Chance Project). The RWZ also seeks to “publish news and information for rural women and by rural women” and help rural women utilize technology, make connections with other rural women, and access news and other resources. Through providing access to resources that would take rural women hours to amass on their own, the RWZ demonstrates one way technology can endorse and support literacy and education can be a critical, public pedagogy of place. Despite the expense and unavailability of Internet technology, particularly high-speed access, for some rural citizens, the site explains its intention as an on-line space to gather:

One challenge faced by scholars involves how to avoid colonizing the voices of rural women, and how instead to seriously face and understand the different contexts of women’s lives. . . .Feminist theorists. . .remain caught in a bind. We call for marginalized groups of women to enable subjects to speak for themselves, but we realize that the academic and literary worlds are closed or alien to many of these women. (Carolyn Sachs, qtd. in “Why RWZ is Online”.)

The RWZ stands out from other examples in that it begins from the assumption that dominant ideologies in mainstream rural culture and the United States more broadly are to be questioned and examined: it begins from a position of decolonization . . .

. .the RWZ remains inclusive to those who may not hold the same ideologies: “You do not have to identify with the women’s movement or with feminism in order to belong to this group. But the (Ruralwomyn Email List) assumes the validity of the women’s movement and explores the gap between feminism and rural women’s experience.”  Its decolonization goals are also clear on the home page in its emphasis on political action, featuring news articles . . .such as. . . .“It’s a Long, Long Way to Towanda, Kansas: The Price of Neglecting Rural America.”

The book goes on to describe the Rural Womyn Zone as “a rich and vibrant resource for rural women that facilitates discussion and analysis of a host of issues . . . In and of itself, it serves as a kind of critical, public pedagogy and scrutinizes various rural issues to highlight power and privilege.”

And, as a detractor to the idea that Wendell Berry is the final authority on agrarianism and The Great Plains, I was surprised and delighted to read, “What might it look like to read essays by RWZ contributors alongside memoirs from the Paxton women and also Wendell Berry, for example? How much richer could conversations about place become for students and researchers when the issues these women attend to conjoin those traditionally associated with agrarianist writing?”

My cup runneth over. When I started the Rural Womyn Zone web site, I said we rural women had been “hollering out the back door into the night.” It was like Judy Blunt said in her book Breaking Clean, “you can yell and scream out here until you’re purple in the face, and nobody will hear you, even if they are listening.” To know that feminists and academics are hearing the voices of the many women of substance that make up the Rural Womyn Zone over these years, is completely fulfilling to me.

I am so glad that when my focus and energy returned, I found this book. I only wish I could personally thank the authors for what they wrote.

What is Community Organizing Anyway? The Untold Story

By Vivian Gorham

Barack Obama learned community organizing first at his mother’s knee. Stanley Ann Dunham Obama Sotero was an anthropologist working in Asia on women and development projects during the time that the Grameen Bank came into being. In community organizing, community development, rural and urban development, and women and development circles – this is one of the most famous and most successful projects around. In fact, it was so successful that an attempt was made to utilize the model here in the United States during the days of welfare reform.

What community organizers learned during the days when Stanley Ann Dunham lived and worked in Indonesia is that without an understanding of the conditions on the ground, Westerners cannot go in country with their money and power and affect sustainable change. Designs imposed by outsiders will fall apart after they’ve gone. Or worse, large scale projects undertaken in ignorance of local conditions are likely to make conditions on the ground profoundly more dire.

Esther Boserup in her book Women’s Roles in Economic Development documented this phenomenon by demonstrating that Western agricultural projects in Africa centered around men and machines (tractors, center-pivot irrigation wells, loans) failed because men had never dominated in farming in Africa – unbeknownst to Westerners because it was unthinkable to us. In Africa, agriculture was a woman-dominated enterprise. Privileging the men in Western development schemes not only upset the eco-system, it also upset the social system. The result was not the elimination of poverty and hunger, but the increase of both as small agriculture was basically undermined and overthrown. The mechanized form of farming that was created was unsustainable and resulted in desertification of the land.

Respect for people at the community level is not only proper; it is the wisest course for intervention. And without speaking to the women, the untold, invisible side of the local story is not factored into development designs.

This one example illustrates that community organizing is infused with values – not ideology – but values.

Some of these community organizing values include:

o Listening to a broad range of people and stakeholders, beginning at the local level, including especially those who are typically not consulted.

o Needs and solutions are identified and designed by those who will live them out, rather than outsiders.

o Organizers function as facilitators and resources – providing locals with a larger picture of conditions, power alliances, networks, mentors, and financial opportunities – and then these resources are matched to local needs. All the choices, all the decisions, come out of dialogue at the local level. The organizers don’t have a say so.

o Relationship building is key. It is better to create or maintain a relationship than wage conflict and risk splitting the coalition of stakeholders or attracting a backlash from the powers that be before one is prepared for it. Therefore, the first projects are the most likely to succeed.

o The primary strategies for change include cooperation, campaign, and only as a last resort – conflict. Changes wrought as a result of conflict are the least likely to continue once the conflict is over. Change agents who win by waging conflict are likely to be quickly replaced – even if successful – by people who are less threatening to the majority of the community, and therefore the system will tend to return to the previous stasis or go backwards.

o Creating change requires a shift in the basic power structure, and therefore engenders opposition by existing power holders. One’s effectiveness is often measured in the strength of the firestorm that is created to oppose the change and maintain the status quo.

o Opportunities for change are like windows – they open up now and again when circumstances are transitioning, usually due to stress or emerging shifts in power. Community organizers need to be able to recognize and exploit these opportunities.

o Change happens. The smartest organizers will move with the tides of change; not against them.

President Obama recognized the window of opportunity that existed in this country in 2004 and articulated it at the Democratic Convention. Americans felt as though we had lost our democracy, as Republicans – controlled from the right wing of the party – imposed an ideologically driven agenda, which largely ignored the peoples’ pressing needs for health care reform and economic security.

Barack Obama continues as President to marry community organizing values and electoral politics, as he did in his campaign. He has the opposition raining vitriol on him daily. He is criticized by the right for being a socialist and from the social democrats and progressives on the left for not keeping his promises. We are so accustomed to the heavy-handed politics wielded by locked-in-step Republicans that we tend to view President Obama’s approach to power as soft, and Democrats efforts to legislate – not as evidence of dialogue among diverse constituencies – but as appeasement.

However, in spite of it all, look at what President Obama is doing. He is handling the mess left by the Wrecking Crew Gang – folks who appear not to believe in democracy any longer, but who have intentionally sought to impede the wheels of good governance by any means necessary.

Our President must figure out how to legally close Guantanamo and preserve public safety simultaneously. How we conduct ourselves with regard to international law going forward hangs in the balance, since the previous administration clearly violated international law and human rights.

Our President is allowing the legislative process on health care reform to take place in Congress – as, constitutionally, is meant to happen – stepping in now and then to tap things forward, reserving his involvement for the Conference Committee. Yet from the beginning he provided parameters for reform – the values piece that reflects the needs of the people, whom he listens to every day.

Our President is constantly gathering information and listening to a wide-range of stakeholders, including Republicans, on every issue. He refuses to shut them out, even as they refuse to support him.

President Obama’s actions may not make sense in the context of typical Washington politics, but they are certainly working and welcome abroad. His approach to the community of nations is the smartest, sanest and therefore, the safest approach – even as he prosecutes the wars he has inherited.

As evidence of the impact of this President’s values, two women sit at the table in the Situation Room with the generals – Secretary Hillary Clinton and Ambassador Susan Rice. A brilliant scholar, constitutional lawyer, and community organizer sits at the head of that table and will decide our course in two wars, while guiding economic recovery to the best of his ability. He holds the values of evolutionary peace and justice, of progress – not of the ideological left – but of the community organizer.

Ultimately, he is a practitioner intent on being the President of the people, by the people, and for all the people.

He went to Washington by mobilizing the people against the powers that be – the Republican Party, most of the Democratic Party, the main stream media and the corporations behind them. Once there, he is in the midst of those he ran against, and he cannot affect change without using the power of his office to forge relationships with those very power structures he seeks to change. Without their consent and cooperation at some level, change will not happen or will not endure. This includes banks, insurance companies, and the military.

It is completely naïve for the left to imagine that changing these systems can happen with a stroke of the pen by one man. Similarly, it is folly for those who operate by wielding hard power to assume this man won’t out think them, out organize them or out last them.

There is a new President and a new theory – not only of change – but of power in this country. Those of us who elected him need to stand by him now more than ever. Ultimately, he is on our side, and we are his base of power. We have his back. It is far too early to give up.

Suiting up, showing up

The Rural Woman Zone is responding to President Obama’s call to service by turning our web site into a blog where rural women are invited to participate directly to discuss the problems we confront as individuals and in our rural communities, what we are engaged in doing about it, how that is working, and how it intersects with national issues.

The diverse and talented group of rural women that has gathered behind the scenes at the Rural Woman Zone over the years is already involved in community organizing and service in their real time communities. They are confronting racism and sexism, working with victims of gender-based violence, learning to grow healthy food, sharing new ways of living more simply, advocating for reproductive and other health care, and writing, teaching, and training on these issues.

Now we make a move to bring the discussion about this work out from the safe places we created on line into the public discourse by changing our format from a web site to a blog and opening it up for discussion.  We are also challenging ourselves to use social media to reach more rural women and invite them to participate.