Rural Women and Gendered Fields

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!

In the words of Kathleen Norris, “it is the aim of contemplative living. . . that you learn to recognize a blessing when you see one.” Sometimes I find it hard to live here, where my politics and perspective are so different from most of the people I’m around. The rest of the time, it’s a blessing to me to live in the country and be able to see the sun rise and set, to have a place to go away from the world at the end of the day.

It will be a good exercise for me to come here to this place in Towanda (our online town) to practice counting my blessings, to remember why I am where I am. I’ll start with words from Norris, who was writing about living in Lemmon, South Dakota, where one of our dearest Towanda friends also lives.

I must live here because of the quiet. On my dawn walk last Saturday the world was so still that I began to wonder if the nearly full moon, still high in the western sky, was about to speak.

And more from Norris:

I live here because, after being out in what is purported to be “the real world,” . . . . this is a good place to cool off. . . This is my real world, where life proceeds at its own healthy pace, where I can revel in the luxury of paying more attention to sunrise and sunset than to clock time.

A woman at work told me a member of her congregation died and she would be going to the funeral. “I’m not worried about him - he was a good Christian,” she said. So what does that mean? That anyone who doesn’t fit her (narrow) definition of Christianity is in peril?

Her church is a little non-denominational (denatured?) group in a town with a population of under 300. The day after a controversial execution in the state of California, we were all having lunch together at the bar and grill when one of us said he’d stayed up all night waiting to see what happened with the execution. “I don’t believe in the death penalty,” I said. The woman from the little town looked disapproving, shook her head, looked down into her lap, and said, “I do!”

She looks down on those of us who don’t share her views. She is pro-death penalty. She is pro-war. She supports the radical right wing politicians that are elected from our area, who not only are not pro-choice, but who do not even support a woman’s right to birth control. And when we die, she will worry about our souls?

I don’t recognize the Christianity in that.

Once I expressed something about forgiveness, and a woman asked me, with some excitement, “Oh, are you a Christian?” I knew she must have meant that undifferentiated fundamentalist mass that is not associated with any of the major Christian religious groups - Methodist, Presbyterian, Lutheran, etc. And I was really pretty darned sure she wasn’t talking about Catholics, as many of the fundamentalists I know are anti-Catholic. I don’t think I ever answered. Where does one even find a common ground for a dialog on these things?

What about feeding the hungry? Caring for the sick? Yes, I know the woman I work with and other like her probably care for individuals they know of who are in need. But what about the social and governmental policies? We know it isn’t because of a reluctance to combine religion and politics.

Look at the United States, a country that is always God-blessing itself and compulsively stuffing Bibles in hotel drawers. In this country, Christianity has been largely co-opted as ideological cover for a mean-spirited right wing that is zealously transferring wealth from the bottom to the top while exporting death in a string of senseless wars. Modern Caesars have nothing to fear from this crowd of “Christians.” If Jesus were like them, he could have died merrily in his bed at a ripe old age. Quote from the From the Co-opted Gospel.