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"You can yell and scream out here until you are purple in the face and no one will hear you, even if they are listening." - Judy Blunt June 2, 2002 Judy Blunt no longer hollering out the back door into the night In a review of Judy Blunt's book Breaking Clean, the New York Times reports that women died young on both sides of Blunt's family tree. ".... they wore out long before the boys they married. Childbirth, overwork and distant doctors were part of it. As important, they had no stake in the land, no power. Their fathers willed ranch land to their brothers. Their husbands and in-laws controlled the cash. Ranch wives were left to take pride in silent competence as their spirits slowly suffocated." And silence is the essence. Blunt shows us what her life was like by telling a series of stories. She doesn't spend much time summing it up for us. And for those of us who grew up in similar environments, she doesn't have to. But Blunt does explain the crux of it when she says, "(a) woman could do anything, so long as she did it quickly, quietly and efficiently. It never occurred to me then that silence looked passive from the outside, or that the two served the same purpose of not making waves, maintaining the status quo. It would take me ten years of doing it all to finally get it. The work we do isn't the issue. Work is the tool that wears us down, draws us in and keeps our eyes on the next two steps ahead. The issue is power. And it's the silence that kills us." By writing this book, Blunt has violated that most essential taboo to keep silent. She has told stories that involve her parents, her ex-husband and in-laws, and challenged an entire way of life. In public. A New York Times article (Judy Blunt Took Bleakness and Ran With It, May 28, 2002) reports that Blunt's book, published to national critical acclaim, is "stirring up trouble back home in the ranch land of northeast Montana." Blunt's ex-husband Butch hasn't read the book but is "shell-shocked" and says "a lot of people in this country are disturbed." Judy's parents "are reluctant to discuss the substance of the memoir." The Times has picked up on the rural penchant for understatement. Are folks in Malta, Montana upset in the same way the folks in Lemmon, South Dakota were when when Kathleen Norris wrote about that small town (Dakota: A Spiritual Geography)? No, I don't think so. People in Lemmon were just rubbed the wrong way by having a national spotlight turned on them when Norris hit the nail on the head about small town dynamics, which, by the way, hold true for lots of small communities on the plains, not just Lemmon. But Lemmonites were able to shrug it off eventually because Norris was not really one of "them." She lived among them for a while in the house that had belonged to her grandmother. But she had an outsider's insight into small towns on the plains. She was an academic. What she said was theoretical, so she could have been wrong. (Not.) And besides - she wore funny shoes. But Blunt names names and illustrates personal relationships in her book. And she is definitely one of "them." I'm one of those people who felt like an embarrassed Peeping Tom when Juanita Buschkoetter and her husband let a film crew into their home for months to tell the story of their struggle with their farm, which also became a story of their marriage and their relationships with parents and in-laws. I talked about the resulting film The Farmer's Wife for months. It made such an enormous impression on me because it was the very first time I saw a reality I knew intimately portrayed for the public. And it was a violation of all the rules to tell it out loud. And the penalty for violating the rules can be ostracization from a village that provides safety, security and self esteem. In the same way, when I read Blunt's book, I immediately understand things I deeply knew but couldn't express. The silencing affects us in many ways. Juanita Buschkoetter and Judy Blunt have a kind of enormous courage that may be beyond the capacity of urban women to comprehend. Of Blunt's origins, the Times says Phillips County, Montana is "notable for gumbo soil and aging ranchers, sour ground water and savage winters, doesn't have even one person per square mile. And after years of saying here that rural
women have been "hollering out the backdoor into the night," I immediately
took possession of this quote from Blunt and will hang it high on the Rural
Womyn Zone web site:
"I do forget how little one person matters out here. . .You can yell and scream out here until you are purple in the face and no one will hear you, even if they are listening."
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