Representing Rural Women

Representing Rural Women highlights the complexity and diversity of representations of rural women in the U.S. and Canada from the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries. The 15 chapters in this collection offer fresh perspectives on representations of rural women in literature, popular culture, and print, digital, and social media. They explore a wide range of time periods, geographic spaces, and rural women’s experiences, including Mormon pioneer women, rural lesbians in the 1970s, Canadian rural women’s organizations, and rural trans youth. In their stories, these women and girls navigate the complex realities of rural life, create spaces for self-expression, develop networks to communicate their experiences, and challenge misconceptions and stereotypes of rural womanhood. The chapters in this collection consider the ways that rural geography allows freedoms as well as imposes constraints on women’s lives, and explore how cultural representations of rural womanhood both reflect and shape women’s experiences.

Table of Contents:
Contents Introduction: Representing Rural Women Margaret Thomas-Evans and Whitney Womack Smith Part I: Representations of Rural Women in Literature and Film Chapter 1. “Gone Country”: Literary Depictions of the New Woman in Rurality Adam Nemmers Chapter 2. Reassessing the American Migration Experience: The Dollmaker’s Gertie Nevels as an American Working-Class Heroine Laurie Cella Chapter 3. A Quiet, Debilitating Ailment: Racial Isolation and Rural America in Willa Cather’s and Zora Neale Hurston’s Experimental Fiction Jericho Williams Chapter 4. Ginseng-Gathering Women: The Underground Economy in Five Appalachian Novels Jimmy Dean Smith Chapter 5. The Potential to Reform Rural Fingerbone: Sylvie’s New Western Revolution in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping Amanda Zastrow Chapter 6. Rural Spaces and (In)Disposable Bodies in Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones Jim Coby Chapter 7. Codes of Kinship: Rural Poverty and Female Resilience in Winter’s Bone H. Louise Davis and Whitney Womack Smith Chapter 8. Rural Trans Girlhoods in Young Adult Fiction Barbara Pini and Wendy Keys Part II: Rural Women's Self-Representations Chapter 9. Poetic Representations of Mormon Women in Late Nineteenth-Century Frontier America Amy Easton-Flake Chapter 10. Lightning Strikes, Burned Bread & Chipmunks: Women Lookouts in the American West Nancy Cook Chapter 11. A Life in the Country: Lesbians and Feminists Living on the Land Agatha Beins and Julie Enszer Chapter 12. On Rural Transgender Visibility Eli Erlick Chapter 13. Visual and Digital Representations of Canadian Rural Women’s Organizations Margaret Thomas-Evans Chapter 14. “Pining for High Fashion?”: Rural Women Writing on Fashion Online Holly Kent Chapter 15. Fantasies and Phobias: De-Mythologizing Contemporary and Historical Depictions of Rural Women Elizabeth Thompson Index About the Editors About the Contributors

About the Author :
Margaret Thomas-Evans is associate professor and chair of the Department of English at Indiana University East. Whitney Womack Smith is professor of English and chair of the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Writing at Miami University Regionals, Ohio.

Review :
This collection addresses how rural women, long overlooked by literary scholars, have been represented by others and themselves in various mediums from literature to social media. Anyone interested in rural women, past and present, the spaces they inhabit and symbolic imaginaries, will find it fascinating as it challenges preconceived notions about women and rurality. I found this work engrossing, fascinating, and insightful. Encompassing themes of race, class, and sexuality, it shows that cultural representations of being female and rural are myriad, complex, and multi-faceted. It offers new ways for seeing and understanding rural women’s experiences. The perceptive analyses here of how diverse rural female figures have alternatively found comfort, belonging, isolation, violence, and power offers a potent corrective to notions of rural worlds as monolithic, irrelevant, or passé. This is a wonderful and incredibly moving book. Spanning over a century in the US and Canada, Representing Rural Women challenges our ideas of who rural women are and what they do. Through various media, representations of rural women and by rural women—such as Hurricane Katrina survivors, lesbians in the 1970s, fashion bloggers, trans girls, those who migrated, and more—complicate what it means to be a rural woman. Authors from a range of disciplines remind us at every turn of the multiplicity of rural experiences that counteract the way rural lives are narrowly depicted in public discourse.