In the Zone
Women Farmers Find New Kitchen Table: the Net
By Dianne Lynch
Special to ABCNEWS.com

 "No matter where I live, the farmer in me comes out loud and clear," writes one visitor to Rural Womyn Zone. "I own a 1948 Ford tractor, which I bought at an auction where there wasn't another woman. That seems to sum up my life."

     Reading the Rural Womyn Zone feels a little like eavesdropping, or showing up at a party uninvited. It’s not that you’re not welcome, exactly. It’s just that its members don’t have time for city folks.

     In the Zone, as they call it, rural women talk to each other. They’re farmers, ranchers, writers, activists, mothers and grandmothers. They live in locales as far flung as Nova Scotia and Wales, Idaho and Ireland. And they have in common a life isolated by landscape and culture.

     “I have been a farm woman since I was young and plants are in my veins,” writes one site visitor. “No matter where I live, the farmer in me comes out loud and clear. I own a 1948 Ford tractor, which I bought at an auction where there wasn’t another woman. That seems to sum up my life.”

     [The site founder], who manages a 300-head dairy farm, says the Zone is flexible about what it means to be a rural woman. “We believe that it is not just about geography; it’s a state of mind and a choice.”

Strength in Numbers and Connections

In 1997, the last date for which statistics are available, the U.S. Census reported that 165,000 women were working on farms, up from 145,000 in 1992. Women operated about 7.5 percent of all U.S. farms in 1992.

     In 1996, the Canadian census reported that more than 96,000 of the nation’s working farmers were women, and women ran 5 percent of farms independently.

     But until the Internet brought immediacy and interactivity into their homes, it was all but impossible to keep in touch. [The site founder] had tried to establish a rural women’s network by more traditional means, but without much success. In 1996, she took her efforts to the Web, establishing a site for women working in rural domestic-violence projects.

     But participants found themselves talking about everything from families to crop rotation. “It turned into a virtual kitchen table where we get together to talk, make new friends, develop ideas for the Web site, and just generally discuss a wide range of issues,” [she] explained.

     Many of those issues show up in the essays and poetry women submit to the site. This month, an open letter to animal rights activists captures not only the writer’s passion for her subject but the intensity of life as a rural woman:

     “Anyone who does maternity watch night after weary night, or delivers a calf in the sleet and rain and then lifts the heavy newborn, wet, slick and bloody, against her jacket to carry the baby to a warm and dry place, or who gets up out of bed at two in the morning to go out into a storm to find animals that were scared by lightning and broke down a fence, and who then stands in the lightning storm and fixes the fence does not take lightly her responsibility to the animals.”

     Other site features include an imaginary “ideal” village called Towanda, a listserve, a message board, and a chat room, hosted every Saturday by a woman her Zone friends know as “Jo.”

A ‘Virtual Sisterhood’

An image of Jo is the first thing visitors see when they arrive at the Zone. She’s standing next to her pickup truck, quoting an apt definition of rural living: “You know you’re rural when the only time you lock the doors on your truck is when you go to church so the neighbors can’t leave bags of squash on the front seat.”

     Jo calls herself a “market gardener and writer.” She and her partner of 10 years live in Nova Scotia, where they’ve got 47 laying hens, a 16-year-old mongrel dog, and a life they’ve come to love. “I feel isolated from people who share my politics,” she says, “but the Rural Womyn Zone gives me that.”

     Jo facilitates the Zone’s EDUM (Editors Don’t Understand Me) list for women writers, and hosts its live chats every Saturday.

     Out of those chats has evolved a support group of women who laugh, cry and solve problems together, she says. When a group member was having a personal crisis, hordes of women showed up in the chat room to offer real-time comfort. Last year, when many of the women had more tomatoes than they could give away, the chat devoted itself to all-tomato food feasts.

     “It’s the virtual sisterhood I was looking for,” says Jo.

     [The site founder] says a little media attention will make it easier for rural women to find that sisterhood. “It means we’re no longer hollering out the back door into the night,” she says. Here’s hoping she’s right.

A teacher and a journalist, Dianne Lynch is the author of Virtual Ethics. Wired Women appears on alternate Wednesdays.

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