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.

Mary Daly, feminist theologian, dies

“There are and will be those who think I have gone overboard. Let them rest assured that this assessment is correct, probably beyond their wildest imagination, and that I will continue to do so.” – Mary Daly

Mary Daly died January 3, 2010, at the age of 81.

Full obituary in the National Catholic Reporter.

Femicide: Not enough outrage

Femicide: There’s not enough outrage
http://TheStar. com – The Toronto Star, August 12, 2009
Antonia Zerbisias

`There’s not enough outrage,” lamented one women’s rights activist at a candlelight vigil for the three women cut down last Tuesday night in a Pittsburgh-area aerobics class.

As the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette noted, only 75 people showed up to mourn Heidi Overmier, 46, Elizabeth Gannon, 49, and Jody Billingsley, 38, massacred by a man, who didn’t know them, simply because they were women. That’s unusual as the vast majority of femicide victims are killed by their intimate partners or male relatives.

But, as Toronto author Brian Vallee points out in his 2007 book The War on Women, nobody counts the dead, nobody connects the dots, nobody calls out the problem.

“Compare the raw numbers,” he writes of the period 2000-06. “In the same seven-year period when 4,588 U.S. soldiers and police officers were killed by hostiles or by accident, more than 8,000 women – nearly twice as many – were shot, stabbed, strangled, or beaten to death by the intimate males in their lives. In Canada, compared to the 101 Canadian soldiers and police officers killed, more than 500 women – nearly five times as many – met the same fate.”

There’s not enough outrage.

As we all know now, George Sodini, 48 – whose racist and misogynist online diary reads like a terrorist manifesto – couldn’t get a date, couldn’t get sex, couldn’t lure any women to his modest side-split furnished with, as he points out in a spooky video, “Couch and chair; they match. The women will really be impressed.”

Well, they weren’t.

And so Sodini’s “exit plan” was to go down in history in a blaze of gunfire, taking as many women with him as he could. Just like Marc Lépine, who hated “the feminists” so much he slaughtered 14 women at Montreal’s École Polytechnique in 1989, just like Charles Carl Roberts who executed Amish school girls three years ago, and, arguably, even like Virginia Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho, a reported stalker of female students who took up-the-skirt photos, yet another violent act of misogyny takes place.

No, no, we say. They were just loners, losers, crazies with guns.

There’s not enough outrage.

That only feminist bloggers and a very few mainstream pundits called last week’s fitness club massacre the hate crime it was should jolt us out of our sexist complacency. “We profess to being shocked at one or another of these outlandish crimes, but the shock wears off quickly in an environment in which the rape, murder and humiliation of females is not only a staple of the news, but an important cornerstone of the nation’s entertainment, ” The New York Times‘s Bob Herbert noted on Friday. “The mainstream culture is filled with the most gruesome forms of misogyny, and pornography is now a multi-billion- dollar industry – much of it controlled by mainstream U.S. corporations. “

When I blogged about the massacre last week, my “men’s rights activist” regulars – whose comments did not get past the goderators – expressed little or no sympathy.Instead, they complained that “feminists” demand special treatment for female victims of crime.Two blog readers even pointed to the recent Wisconsin episode of the philandering husband – who has since been charged with child and sexual abuse – whose penis was glued to his abdomen by a trio of vengeful women as somehow having equivalence to the Pittsburgh massacre.

Cruise the men’s rights forums and you’ll be shocked by the sickening posts calling for the legal and sexual subservience of women and praising Sodini as a “hero” and “for being asymbol for the consequences of denying men sex … But something like this has to happen, perhaps hundreds of times over again, before feminists get the message.”

There’s not enough outrage.

Antonia Zerbisias is a Living section columnist. azerbisias@thestar. ca. She blogs at thestar.blogs. com.

The wasteland?

By Jane Lane

A question I posed to the Feminist Advisory Board 4 Obama group.

Twitter has been a great place to visit where I can meet other feminists, but I wouldn’t want to have to communicate in 140 character messages all the time!

I need to talk about the importance of place. And practice. And sustenance for feminists no matter where we are located geographically.

I have a quiet farmhouse to live in where I can do the practice part MadamaAmbi mentioned. It happens to be in a very “red” part of what was a “red state.” We few Democrats and feminists were tolerated in
our sparesely populated part of the state during all of the terrible years of the Bush administration and our senator was Marilyn “get a gun and stop gay marriages” Musgrave.

Then, in the last election, our state turned Blue! Hurrah! And a woman Democrat ousted Musgrave.

But the right wingnutty political perspective that is the majority in this area has no intention of settling in and accepting these changes — they’ve become completely unhinged. The state senator representing this area (with his “God-given, Bill of Rights protected right” — as he tweeted — to have guns) and a large
group of other anti-government, private property, protectors of the patriarchy are lining up already to see who is going to unseat our Senator in two years, and are up at the state capitol today engaged in a “tea party” and are talking about the 10th Amendment movement.

So instead of it being easier to live in this environment since the election, it is getting harder. I went to the cafe the other morning to have breakfast and there was a racist Obama cartoon on the bulletin board, so I tore it down and left. I’ve enountered anti-Obama remarks from the bank teller who was waiting on me, at the lumber yard, and at the hospital in a community meeting.

We thought we were moving into a more tolerant world, but are finding ourselves in the middle of the blowback.

So. How much of having a “quiet place to write” (or to have a spiritual life, or a sense of self and center from which to be an activist, or fill in the blank _______) is PLACE and how much is PRACTICE?

Is there a critical mass of wingnuttiness that gathers in a geographical area beyond which a hard core, solid feminist trying to live a quiet but activist life can no longer practice without having to move to a new place?

It is dry out here in rural feminist land. It is arid. It is a hostile environment. I have been online since 1995 building safe virtual places where we can try to nourish each other in our long distance relationships. But we are still not bridging that gap between rural women and feminists, or even rural feminists and feminists.

I’m turning to this new list with an unorthodox request for nourishment and new ideas about how to connect the marginalized rural feminists with the rest of the movement. And, for personal support.

Because one of the big differences that I see between feminism and the tough individualistic type of rural woman we have out here (or the self-promoting Sarah Palin, for example) is that we understand that the personal is political, we do not live in isolation, and we help pull each other up rather than leave each other to fend with our own bootstraps because we are part of a caring movement.

Can we live isolated in hostile places and still maintain our practice?

Is there a way to hold our banners up while keeping our heads down in what feels like permanent hunting season?

Can we build bridges between feminists and rural women that nourish them where they are?

Is there the perfect coffee shop bookstore feminist space somewhere just waiting for us to leave our windy spaces and move into the neighborhood?

“Jane Lane”

What family planning has to do with the economy

Katha Pollitt wrote an article in the Nation about the connection between family planning and the economy. She said,

The stimulus will pass, and Republicans will get no credit. Low-income women get the shaft, but they should be used to it by now.

Thank god someone is writing about why family planning belongs in an economic stimulus bill. It’s time we began looking at women as an integral part of our economy, not just some marginal human beings who are expected to have indirect access to the “shovel jobs” by making sure they are married to a man who has a shovel.

So the question: what does family planning and contraception have to do with an economic stimulus plan?

Is birth control tangential to the stimulus? Only if all health spending is, but no one (so far) is arguing that the massive sums for health care be removed from the bill. In fact, when it comes to keeping women hale and hearty contraception is right up there with childhood vaccines and antibiotics. So, given that the stimulus bill contains other health provisions, including 4 billion dollars for preventive care, why is contraception different? Because anti-choice Republicans say so? If health care belongs in the bill, and birth control is health care, then it is not “tangential.” QED.

I would go further: expanding access to contraception does indeed help the economy. The production, prescribing, buying and selling of birth control is an economic activity — funding more of it means more clinics, more clinic workers, more patients,more customers, more people making the products. Moreoever, the provision removed from the stimulus bill would spend money now– about 550 million, over ten years, a drop in the bucket — to save the government much more money later, as the Congressional Budget Office estimates would happen within a few years. (Actually, according to the Wall Street Journal blog, it would save an annual $100 billion, but I’m putting that in parenthesis because it such a huge amount I keep thinking it has to be a typo.)

More important, what about the economics of actually existing women and families? This is no time to be saddling people with babies they don’t want and can’t provide for, who will further reduce the resources available for the kids they already have and further limit parents’ ability to get an education or a job. In a Depression, birth rates go down for a reason. People.Have.No. Money. Furthermore, when people lose their jobs they lose their health insurance. A year’s supply of pills is around $600 retail. That’s a significant amount of money to low-income women.

It is refreshing to see someone present information about this. We’ve heard a lot of ridiculous things this week from the Republican men who couldn’t take the idea seriously enough to keep from winking and making jokes because the words “contraception” and “stimulation” appeared together in a concept. Removing this type of WM politician from contolling women’s lives and reproductive health was one of the major accomplishments of this election.

Pollit urges her readers to contact the House (too late – the vote was today) and the Senate, which may still be a good idea.

Either way, it’s way past time to have an intelligent conversation about this.

Read the article in The Nation

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.