Rural Women and Gendered Fields

I received that heavily forwarded email message warning me about Barack Obama. It was racist. It was full of lies and innuendo. It told me to forward it to everyone I knew. You know the one.

You know how those forwarded messages usually contain lists of all of the other people it has been forwarded from and to? And normally we don’t know them.

This time, I knew most of them. Actually, my first impression was that it must be the roster from the local Lutheran Church. These are people I know and some of them I work with. One of them is a Christian therapist.

Normally I just hit “discard” with forwarded messages and do not read them. I never forward them. This time I not only hit “reply all,” but I copied and pasted some of the email addresses from earlier forwarded messages into the TO: header so everybody that I could tell had received and or forwarded this bit of nastiness was going to get my response. I wrote:

This is not only incorrect. It is racist. It is the “swiftboating” of Barack Obama.

And I signed my name — both first and last names. And I sent it to all those people most of whom will know who I am. Because this is rural America and we all know each other.

After I sent the message, I googled “swiftboating barack obama” and found some links on it, among them:

The swiftboating of Barack Obama on Daily Kos

Anybody who will deny there is a pattern to the racially charged comments that have been interjected into the presidential race is either naive or a liar. It cannot be denied and it’s become quite obvious it is a calculated effort to turn what is Barack Obama’s greatest strength against him.

Barack Obama’s greatest strength is the fact that he transcends race, and this generates majority appeal.

This article blames the Clintons. I don’t want to believe that. I’m not going to believe that.

Whatever the source, the point I make is this: from now on don’t take for granted because this is a rural area that this will play here without comment. “Good” Lutherans, and other “good” Christian people in rural America - you participate in racist nastiness when you read and believe and forward this message.

We get called ingnorant rednecks for a reason some times. It is time to stop that behavior. No matter who you’re voting for - - to remain true to your faith, it is time to reject this kind of prejudice and racism.

From Rural Womyn Zone Central to friends in Towanda:

Searching for new book titles this morning, I got lost in an online bookstore reading lists of favorite books from 2007. I like reading staff picks for best of the year. I had so much fun that I decided to send you a list of feminist bookstores instead of books. I hope you have as much fun as I did.

I can sit at home out here in my jammies on the frosty plains where the nearest bookstore is 60 miles away and explore bookstores from California to Chicago, and find out what women who love books are reading. Life is good. (Although it’s so cold here in the upstairs of this old farm house that my fingers are getting stiff - I’m going to have to get a hot cup of coffee to keep them warm!)

Antigone Books
Tucson, AZ
http://www.antigonebooks.com/
This one didn’t have their 2007 picks online yet but has a large staff with their earlier picks - so lots to look at. They also have an email newsletter. A “zany” fun bookstore.

Toronto Women’s Bookstore
http://www.womensbookstore.com/new.html
Includes new books and staff picks and has an online store. More serious than Antigone, this bookstore is “promoting anti-oppression politics and feminist politics. Our mission: To provide books by women writers, especially marginalized women, including women of colour, First Nations women, lesbians, other queer women, working class women, disabled women, Jewish women, and other groups of women.”

Wild Iris Books
Gainsville, FL
Mission: Our mission is to honor the sacred feminine and its unique diversity of expression through art, music and the written word.
http://wildirisbooks.com/
Also has a mailing list. Art, books, gifts, green products. We’moon 2008 date book.

Charis Books
http://charis.booksense.com/NASApp/store/IndexJsp
Staff picks lists. I checked out Debbie’s list and found great titles like, That’s funny, you don’t look Buddhist, The Time Travelers Wife, and Hunting and Gathering. I definitely will go back and read more of these books to get a new list to either buy or order from my library.

Women and Children First
Chicago
http://www.womenandchildrenfirst.com/NASApp/store/IndexJsp
” . . .shop as independently as you think . . . ” You can order any book in print from them, and they have a list of new books that you can pre-order and staff recommendations.

Center for New Words
Massachusettes
http://www.centerfornewwords.org/
Mission: To use the power and creativity of words and ideas to strengthen the voice of progressive and marginalized women in society.
Also has a blog about interesting women. These may be the kinds of blogs I can get hooked on instead of politics.
http://www.centerfornewwords.org/blog/

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The event calendars on some of these websites make me feel like moving to where there are bookstores and events! My biggest bi-monthly Saturday thing is to go to the local flea market where they have estate and moving sale items and occasionally the Saturday afternoon auction and chili supper.

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Of course, there is the Amazon Co-op Bookstore,
“the oldest independent feminist bookstore in America” in Minneapolis.http://www.amazonbookstorecoop.com/
One of their featured titles is Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy by Barbara Ehrenreich, “In the acclaimed Blood Rites, Barbara
Ehrenreich delved into the origins of our species’ attraction to war. Here, she explores the opposite impulse, one that has been so effectively suppressed that we lack even a term for it: the desire for collective joy, historically expressed in ecstatic revels of feasting, costuming, and dancing. Ehrenreich uncovers the origins of communal celebration in human biology and culture. Although sixteenth-century Europeans viewed mass festivities as foreign and ’savage,’ Ehrenreich shows that they were indigenous to the West, from the ancient Greeks’ worship of Dionysus to the medieval practice of Christianity as a ‘danced religion.’”

Book-woman, “the only feminist bookstore in Texas.”
http://ebookwoman.booksense.com/NASApp/store/IndexJsp
Website says they are a full service independent bookstore “serving the reading and resource needs of all women, their friends, families, and children. We stock unique merchandise celebrating the diversity of our lives with a great selection of classic and cutting edge women’s writing. ” Features book group picks for each year, including 2008

A Room of One’s Own in Madison, Wisconsin.
http://www.roomofonesown.com/NASApp/store/IndexJsp
They have recommendations and a Fight the Winter Blues list.

The only time I was in Madison was for a World Dairy Expo. We were at the hotel, the Expo building and grounds, and then got in busses and went on tours of dairy farms. Based on that limited perspective, it is hard for me to imagine that there is a feminist bookstore there. Love the name, though.

Well . . . .I know there are more bookstores to peruse, and I hate to stop, but I have to get some hot coffee or tea and warm myself up. Guess I’d better start wearing legwarmers and booties when I’m shopping online. Next week I hope to have my laptop back.

Have fun!

Week of Nov. 18, 2007 book list sent to the Ruralwomyn List by Arnica Montana. I was asked to put it online for the Towandans whose sticky notes are falling off their clothing! If you purchase any of these books, use this link http://astore.amazon.com/ruralwomynzone01 to benefit the Zone. Thank you for your support! Rural Womyn Zone Home

Now is the Time to Open Your Heart by Alice Walker

“Kate, a successful author fearful of aging and uncertain about continuing her relationship with Yolo, an artist, sets off on a journey of spiritual discovery. She has been profoundly unhappy for some time, dreaming of rivers, until she takes off for rivers–the Colorado and the Amazon. . . . . . ”

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The Thirteenth Tale: A Novel by Diane Setterfield

“There are two heroines here: Vida Winter, a famous author, whose life story is coming to an end, and Margaret Lea, a young, unworldly, bookish girl who is a bookseller in her father’s shop. Vida has been confounding her biographers and fans for years by giving everybody a different version of her life, each time swearing it’s the truth. . . . .Vida chooses Margaret to tell her story, all of it, for the first time. . . . .Margaret has a story of her own: she was one of conjoined twins and her sister died so that Margaret could live. She feels an otherworldly aura sometimes or a yearning for a part of her that is forever missing. . . . ”

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And while we’re talking about food. . . . .

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver, Camille Kingsolver, and Steven L. Hopp
“Novelist Kingsolver recounts a year spent eating home-grown food and, if not that, local. Accomplished gardeners, the Kingsolver clan grow a large garden in southern Appalachia and spend summers “putting food by,” as the classic kitchen title goes. They make pickles, chutney and mozzarella; they jar tomatoes, braid garlic and stuff turkey sausage. Nine-year-old Lily runs a heritage poultry business, selling eggs and meat. What they don’t raise (lamb, beef, apples) comes from local farms. Come winter, they feast on root crops and canned goods, menus slouching toward asparagus. ………….”

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High school to adult level:

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan: A Novel by Lisa See
See’s engrossing novel set in remote 19th-century China details the deeply affecting story of lifelong, intimate friends (laotong, or “old sames”) Lily and Snow Flower, their imprisonment by rigid codes of conduct for women and their betrayal by pride and love. While granting immediacy to Lily’s voice, See (Flower Net) adroitly transmits historical background in graceful prose. . . .”

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I’ve been avoiding reading this, then saw that the vet who raises grass fed beef is reading it. . . ..

The Ominvore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan

“Pollan (The Botany of Desire) examines what he calls “our national eating disorder” (the Atkins craze, the precipitous rise in obesity) in this remarkably clearheaded book. It’s a fascinating journey up and down the food chain, one that might change the way you read the label on a frozen dinner, dig into a steak or decide whether to buy organic eggs. . . . .. . . . .
One of the many eye-openers in the book is the prevalence of corn in the American diet; of the 45,000 items in a supermarket, more than a quarter contain corn. Pollan meditates on the freakishly protean nature of the corn plant and looks at how the food industry has exploited it, to the detriment of everyone from farmers to fat-and-getting-fatter Americans.

Besides Stephen King, few other writers have made a corn field seem so sinister.”

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Mozart’s Sister by Rita Charbonnier

“Maria Anna Walburga Ignatia Mozart, affectionately called Nannerl by her family, could play the piano with an otherworldly skill from the time she was a child, when her tiny hands seemed too small to encompass a fifth. At the tender age of five, she gave her first public performance, amazing the assembled gentlemen and ladies with the beautiful music she created. But her moment of glory was cut short, for even as her father carried her around to receive their praise, her mother began laboring to bring a second child into the world. After hours of her mother’s pained cries and agonized shouts, which rang in Nannerl’s ears like a terrifying symphony, the child was born. They named him Wolfgang. . . . ”

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The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex by Incite! Women of Color Against Violence

“. . . . even as funding shrinks and government surveillance rises, many activists often find it difficult to imagine movement-building outside the nonprofit model. The Revolution Will Not Be Funded gathers original essays by radical activists from around the globe who are critically rethinking the long-term consequences of this investment. Together with educators and nonprofit staff they finally name the “nonprofit industrial complex” and ask hard questions: How did politics shape the birth of the nonprofit model?

How does 501(c)(3) status allow the state to co-opt political movements?

How do we fund the movement outside this complex? Urgent and visionary, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded is an unbeholden expos of the ‘nonprofit industrial complex’ and its quietly devastating role in managing dissent.”

Rural Womyn Zone Home Page

A Community-Based Workbook for Helping Rural Cancer Patients
Sierra Nevada Memorial Hospital Cancer Center

Final Report (1999)
When women are newly diagnosed with breast cancer, they are faced with extremely difficult decisions about their treatment while trying to cope with the fact that they have a life-threatening illness. They deserve to have as much support and information readily available to help them cope with having breast cancer as possible.

To help respond to this need, La Lobe, a grass roots breast cancer support group in Nevada County, teamed up with researchers from the Stanford University School of Medicine to form the Sierra-Stanford Partnership. This partnership’s main goal has been to create and evaluate the impact on rural women recently diagnosed with breast cancer of receiving a user-friendly workbook-journal that provides facts, figures and personal experiences of other women who have been diagnosed with breast cancer. The hope of the Sierra-Stanford Partnership is to help to reduce the human and economic costs of breast cancer by reaching rural women who do not have access to current forms of education or support, and help them to make the best possible breast cancer treatment choices.

The Sierra-Stanford Partnership has succeeded in meeting the three aims of our pilot study. First, we recruited and assessed the needs of 100 rural women recently diagnosed with primary breast cancer so that we would become better informed about their needs in order to refine the workbook–journal. Second, we developed the journal, entitled One in Eight,” which addresses such topics as how to relate to doctors and medical technicians, how to talk to family and friends, and how to cope with hair loss, energy loss, and other side-effects of chemotherapy.

The journal includes poignant stories and provides space for personal reflection, as well as information about local and regional resources to help direct women in their search for education about breast cancer and its treatment.

Third, we evaluated the effects of this workbook-journal on distress and coping among women with breast cancer. We found that women who were randomly selected to receive the journal compared with women who did not receive it, showed a significantly greater reduction in their traumatic stress symptoms related to having cancer. They also experienced significantly greater increases in fighting spirit toward having breast cancer as well as greater decreases in feeling fatalistic regarding their breast cancer. We want to refine the workbook-journal to better address the concerns of rural women as well as other potentially socially isolated women living with breast cancer, including those who are physically disabled, of ethnic minority background, of lesbian sexual orientation, and/or who are aged (over 65 years old). We hope to evaluate its impact using a Health Maintenance Organization (HMO) setting for distributing the intervention to these women.

Well, I have gone to the city and they have real doctors there. I am happy to report that I was wrong, and that my breast cancer team does care about more about me than just my left breast. They all listened, answered questions, reassured me, and brought on new team members to make sure I am healthy and ready for the surgery. They are, all but one, women, and I realized that these women have entirely different listening and responding skills than the man, and I prefer them to him. I now have a new primary care provider, and, even though I live 150 miles from her office, I feel for the first time in 5 (or more?) years that I am in good hands. The doctor at my last appointment in the city said, “well, are you about done with those doctors out there in (my town)?” And I am. I realize that a large amount of the resentment that I’ve had about doctors is due to the fragmented type of medical response I’ve had from the local clinic where doctors come and go, order lots of tests, but don’t follow through with patients to a diagnosis and treatment.

I have tried to hang on to a local doctor because I live alone in the country just one mile from the clinic and hospital. It has really been a long struggle, and I should have given it up sooner. Unfortunately, it took breast cancer to force me to let go and move on.

I wrote earlier that last month when I was hospitalized overnight with pneumonia, the local woman doctor refused to look at my recent medical results. I asked her to please, please look at tests I had within the last couple of weeks (that were only reviewed by a physician’s assistant who was just rotating in to help out and is not even on the staff). The doctor scolded me and said, “too many cooks in the kitchen!”

Last week when I was leaving the PT room at the hospital where I exercise in the mornings, this doctor came in dressed in jeans and a red felt cowboy hat. The hospital and clinic staff were having “Cowboy and Indian Dress-up Days.” I. Am. Not. Kidding. When I saw her, I had a huge urge to take off her hat and slap it around her face and yell, “there are NO COOKS in your fricking kitchen! I have breast cancer, and you are an idiot!”

I am really looking forward to getting past this. I have to. I need to. I will. (Whew.)

William is the grandson of one of Rural Womyn Zone’s long time members and it appears he is a “chip of the old block” in his choice to help make the world a better place. We have often marveled at the many selfless hours his grandmother has given to help domestic violence victims in her area and it truly warmed my heart to read William’s tribute to his grandmother which can be found here.

While I could go on forever singing praises to this woman’s dedication to domestic violence advocacy it is her latest project that I would like to bring to light. You see, along with her many other activities, she sits on the board of Pretty Bird Woman House, a women’s shelter in Standing Rock, South Dakota. The shelter is in danger of closing due to lack of funding. A fundraising effort is under way and can be found by clicking the links above. Please help if you can.

In closing, I would like to echo William’s words. She is our hero too and so is her grandson of whom I know she is truly proud.

“Dancing Healer” was the name of a book about a medical doctor that went to practice on an Indian reservation where he was introduced to the concept of healing, which included an individual’s ability to listen to and understand body processes and be in control of them, and participate with the “doctor” in healing. The doctor didn’t believe it until confronted with evidence, and after that he was able to describe the difference between a doctor and a healer.

Doctors are not healers. If we had healers participating in our wellness, I would have paid more attention to the signals I have been getting: a sharp pain that started in my left breast last winter, like a signal to my brain. My certainty that there is a connection between what I eat and the pain in my side which I “see” as undigested fat gathering on my liver looking for a missing gall bladder to process it, until it has to go somewhere. The day I looked at the skin on the back of my hands and thought, “I have cancer” because it looked the way I clearly remembered the look of the skin on the face and hands of a man that I worked with in the 70s. The feeling that groups of people who have died were gathering around me.

If we had healers, they would encourage us to tell them about these signals and thoughts. To tell the stories and the intuitive signs. They would use these to help us heal. I would have told them these things.

Instead, I only talk to the doctors about the connection between my pains and what I eat, and I have begged for their attention and help with this for the last several years, until recently I informed the latest in a series of local clinic doctors that I was giving “you people” one last chance to help me figure out what was wrong with me, and the next place I was going if they didn’t was to the acupuncturist. Several thousand dollars worth of tests later, waylaid by breast cancer, I still have no answer to this question.

Now the breast cancer surgeon is scheduling me for appointments with “the team” which does not include anyone who is remotely interested in any of my other medical history or other symptoms or health issues I have been confronting. Nope – the breast cancer doctor said – we are looking at your breast. I had to argue and argue again the point of having someone look at me as a whole entire complex human being body and not just a left breast to get her to agree to add an internist to “the team.”

That is so far from encouraging us to listen to our bodies and describe what they are telling us, I am so offended by this type of medicine (and our lack of access to even this type of care) that I can barely be civil to doctors. That isn’t helpful, or useful, or healing. What is the alternative?

When I was in the hospital with pneumonia after having the last round of tests, I asked a doctor to please look at all my new test results in conjunction with this new event. “Oh! Too many cooks!” she said, as she was just treating me for pneumonia. No, I told her - the trouble is, there aren’t any cooks in the kitchen.

“Domestic terrorist are at it again, flying under the radar as they renew their campaign of intimidation at women’s clinics that offer abortions. While violence against such clinics has declined since the madness of the 1980s, this marks the first use of an explosive device, an IED no less, since the recent Supreme Court decision.” From Daily Kos

“An explosive device was found Wednesday in the parking lot of an Austin, Texas, women’s clinic that provides abortions. After inspecting the device, the Austin Police Department said in a statement: ‘It was determined that the package … would have caused serious bodily injury and/or death had it functioned.’ Luckily, the bomb didn’t function and was disarmed by a robot, reports the Associated Press.

“Some argue this is a sign that antiabortion forces have been bolstered by the Supreme Court’s recent decision to uphold a federal abortion ban. ‘The extremists in the anti-abortion movement have been emboldened by the latest Supreme Court decision,’ said Katherine Spillar, executive vice president of the Feminist Majority Foundation. ‘These domestic terrorists will continue to attack women’s health clinics across the country until their financial and support networks are closed down.’”
http://www.salon.com/mwt/broadsheet/?last_story=/mwt/broadsheet/2007/04/27/abortion_update/

Clara Barton said,

“I may be compelled to face danger, but never fear it, and while our soldiers can stand and fight, I can stand and feed and nurse them. ”

This is quite a challenging statement to reflect on today when some people think that “support the troops” means slapping a yellow ribbon magnet on the back of their cars and pickups and calling everyone a traitor who doesn’t support what Bush has done in Iraq.

The president himself has not called on us to stand beside these soldiers. He told us to keep shopping and to go about our business. Unlike during Viet Nam, the network news doesn’t show us the unloading of body bags or a daily body count at the end of the day. We don’t have to sacrifice gasoline, or flour, or tires, or sugar, and we don’t have to take time to roll bandages.

So the most we have to do is to be passive consumers and turn our attention to something else - the unburied Anna Nichole Smith, for instance. All Bush asks of us plain people in rural places is to just keep sending our children.