Struggles of Rural Women
Michelle Anastasia
After reading Tovi Fenster and Hanaa Hamdan-Saliba's article regarding the construction of spaces and the relationship women face with certain areas, it compelled me to think of contemporary spaces women encounter and the challenges they face due to the nature and strategies of power in those areas. I began looking at areas close to me in regards to Athens, Ohio. I found that women outside cities tend to marry earlier, have limited access to healthcare and experience higher rates of domestic violence.
Rural America is struggling as a whole and given the new supposed breed of 'contemporary women' who are highly educated, upper to middle class, and ambivalent about marriage or kids brings to light the challenges rural women face opposed to women in cities.
Rural women face a different et of challenges than urban women. It is less likely that rural women or their matriarchy received an education beyond high school. More often than not rural schools do not offer the same educational value as do schools in suburban areas. There are not many models of success and pathways to success are limited, and many of those pathways entail leaving the region.
So many women focus on where they can achieve, and often that only avenue of achievement open to them is in raising children and getting married. What makes life hard for rural women and young families in rural America is the stress of poverty.
"Overall, the women end up with lots of responsibility managing the family and have a stronger role in managing the money. Their children's needs come before their own education. they have to figure out how to manage households, keep their children fed, clothed, and educated with very limited resources. We help them develop those skills." - Bundy, and worker from CCCAP
Bundy is trying to encourage women to pursue some kind of long-term goal, educational or not, that will set a good example for their children. Often women Bundy meets want to pursue traditionally feminine jobs such as nursing or day care work but Bundy is trying to encourage women to train for work that provides a living wage, such as an electrician, who might make $17 to $18 an hour.
The traditional "small town" mentality has forged many rural women to limited success pathways in life, marrying young, and starting families young. This geographic space of rural areas have conditioned many young women to be stricken to these commonalities of the common struggles rural women and people face. Women are specifically an interesting demographic to regard because the stigmas of home being a space of independence in context manipulate cultural and social codes.
The lives of rural women and their trajectory of success in life is a clear result of the "gendered space" of home. The manipulation of the meaning of home and how it is a feminist space that reflects the forbidden versus permitted, public versus private manifestations of home shoe the gendered strategies of power and success regarding rural areas.
"The home in the women's narratives has multiple meanings. It is perceived of not only as a space of independence, comfort and belonging, but also as a space in which duties limit women's freedom to move around in public. For some women the home is the space that is under their direct responsibility and the space in which they can express their creativity. Within the gendered division of social roles in Palestinian society, women are responsible for the design of the home, in accordance with their needs and those of the rest of their families, while the man may only assist them in their domain" (Saliba 208).
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"Home can also be percieved of merely as a place for undertaking futile tasks, fulfilling obligations, performing unending work, and as limiting women's movent in the public space. This conclusion echoes part of the literature that emphasizes the binary division of the private space (the home) and the public space as "gendered spaces" (Birmingham, 2002; Grosz, 1995; Massey, 1994).
Works Cited
Hamdan-Saliba, Hanaa, and Tovi Fenster. 2012. “Tactics and Strategies of Power: The Construction of Spaces of Belonging for Palestinian Women in Jaffa-Tel Aviv." Women’s Studies International Forum 35: 203-213.
https://www.capco.org/
http://horizon.documentation.ird.fr/exl-doc/pleins_textes/pleins_textes_4/colloques/17975.pdf
https://ruralwomensstudies.wordpress.com/2016/01/20/rurality-feminism-and-appalachia-possibilities-and-prospects-for-appalachian-feminism-and-interorganizational-collaboration/
I find this “divide” between “rural women” and “contemporary women” to be an interesting observation. It seems that you are attributing the poverty and restriction of autonomy that rural women experience almost entirely to their cultural background and their geographic location. Indeed, these are important aspects to this phenomenon, but I would argue that a class analysis of the dynamic is crucial to understanding the disparities between these two different groups of women. I think that rather than asking, “how do the geographic spaces women encounter influence their class position and/or level of autonomy,” we might ask the question, “how is one’s class position reflected in their geographic space,” or “how does one’s class position determine their level of autonomy, and how is this manifested in the geographic space they occupy?” Ultimately, I would argue that our material reality, i.e. the geographic spaces we occupy, is a reflection of our position within the greater power structure of our society- or, our class position. To connect that back to the example of women in rural America, we should ask why it is that rural America is primarily made up of poor and working class individuals, and what historical developments in our society have allowed middle/upper-middle class individuals to primarily reside in urban areas. All in all, I think this is a great post that sheds light on the struggles of poor and working-class women in America.
ReplyDeleteI really appreciate your feedback, and I think youre right in regards to the divide between class and women rather than geographic location. Very interesting!
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